Stellar v1.0 Beta 5 ​

When I tell you this beta is spicy, I imply it's steaming hot in features!

Highlights ​

• Rewrote the entire interface from scratch
• A handy create tab
• Easy to use touch controls
• Copy, cut, paste, duplicate, un-group, and more!

🌟 What's New ​

🖥 User Interface ​

• The user interface was re-written from scratch
• The interface uses the mauve color palette in combination with purple as the accent
• All parts of the interface were made consistent and now share mutual primitives
• All parts of the interface can be navigated with a keyboard
  • Focus outlines are also provided
• The interface is designed mobile-first to ensure it's not cluttered

👩‍💻 Why? Why a Re-write? ​

Ever since CSS was used to style the app, it was obvious what features it lacked; mainly speaking, CSS does not scale well. SASS did promise a brighter future (which prompted the first interface re-write) but failed to comply with Stellar's needs.

The solution was clear: CSS-in-JS. To be more specific, Stitches offered a superior development process and opened up opportunities for theming.

When Spaceflight Simulator added modding support for PC, Stellar was instantly rendered useless. However, Stellar now targets mobile devices which still lack such features. Moreover, Stellar will be able to offer superior editing tools than what's available in-game even with mods.

➕ Create Tab ​

❕ Some template blueprints offer parts that have not been implemented into Stellar yet; such parts will be excluded.

• Offers a starting place for new blueprints
• Templates
  • A list of templates is shown on the left side of the screen
  • A search bar can be used to filter through the items
    • This is redundant for now, but, will be useful in the future when there are tons of templates
• File options
  • Available on the rights side of the screen
  • Features options to start from scratch, open a Stellar blueprint file, or an in-game blueprint file
• Status bar
  • The status bar is populated by important information about that version of Stellar
  • It features:
    • Links to:
    • Discord
    • Twitter
    • GitHub
    • A link to my crappy website
    • Commits
    • License
    • Patch notes (these are bound to be unavailable for alpha builds
    • Docs

🚀 Layout tab ​

🔧 Toolbar ​

• A disabled Stellar logo (this will launch the command palette in the future)
• File options
  • New file
  • Open
  • Save
  • Save as
  • Import
  • Export
• Tool
  • Move
  • Pan (lets you move around the blueprint without accidentally changing anything)
• Insert part (read more down below)
• Clipboard (disabled when there's nothing selected)
  • Copy
  • Cut
  • Paste (disabled when there's nothing to paste)
  • Duplicate
  • Create snippet (snippets are coming soon, hence, it's disabled)
• Selection
  • Group
  • Ungroup
• Delete
• Show/hide
• Lock/unlock
• Undo
• Redo
• Help
  • About
  • Report an issue
  • Discord
  • GitHub
• Settings (disabled for now since that feature isn't developed yet)

👈 Left Sidebar ​

• Parts
  • Removed delete and hide icons (to stop redundancy)
  • Rename (only visible when there are parts selected)
    • Opens the rename popup (read more below)
• Snippets
  • On mobiles, this tab is swapped with properties
  • Snippets have not been added yet, so this tab remains empty

👉 Right Sidebar ​

• On mobiles, this is available as the second tab in the left sidebar
• Same properties as the last beta but with the new interface
• Added checkmark properties
• Added slider properties
• Added Engine Properties
• Inspect tab has not been implemented yet in the new interface

🔠 Rename ​

• Lets you rename multiple parts at once
• Has multiple options to control how each part is named
• Shortcut: Ctrl + R
  • Want to reload instead? Try Ctrl + Shift + R

🔠 Insert Part ​

• Lets you quickly insert a part
• Abstract means that that part will not be exported to the game; it only exists within the editor and the Stellar file format
• Search through via the search bar to quickly find what you need
• Shortcut: Ctrl + Shift + I
  • Want to inspect instead? Try F12

Error Screen ​

• Shows up each time Stellar runs into a critical error
• Toggle on debug mode for more nerd info
• It's also mapped for ya 😃
• Options
  • Refresh: soft restarts the app; unlikely to fix the error but preserves your unsaved changes to the blueprint
  • Restart: hard restarts the app; likely to fix the error but loses all unsaved data
  • Report: generates a GitHub issue with a click of a button

☯ Translations ​

❕ Help translate Stellar on Crowdin!

• The entire app is translatable
• Not all languages have been translated though...
• The ability to switch between languages will be added in the future in the settings screen

Performance ​

• The app now loads twice as fast thanks to react-router's useNavigator hook
• The part models are now loaded as the app launches to avoid suspense fallbacks when an engine is inserted

There's just so much more I cannot include here, but that's the main stuff. I'd say that Stellar's about 80% done!