So I have tried to come back to this game a few times since the designer changes. I still cant get into it. The old designer I could instantly jump into and start making cool stuff. This feels like I have to invest a bunch of time learning to 3d model which is hard to justify when I can spend that time having fun instantly in so many other games and simulators not to mention my free time is very limited so I have to 'spend it' to maximize my enjoyment. The designer still feels awkward and difficult, nothing works how I want it to and it feels like I am fighting the designer the entire time. Even making a simple extrusion is awkward and unintuitive to me. It ends up in the wrong direction, drawn on the wrong plane or any number of other things and never, ever ends up how I want it. Each time I try to pick the game up again I spend about an hour in the designer before giving up and deciding to just play other things until this is more user friendly and intuitive. None of this documentation helped me or made this any easier. Its still an incredibly bad and unintuitive user interface that is not easy to pick up at all. This is from someone who spend hours if not days in the old designer just making things and enjoying it very much.
TLDR the old system was so much better and easier to get people into. A hybrid system that uses shapes we can put together easily and intuitively would be so much better as it would be closer to what literally every other game uses so people would be instantly familiar with it. Being able to jump into the designer and have everything make sense very quickly to your average person trying the game out would make things 100000x more appealing. I have and still feel like the new designer was a knee jerk reaction to trying to make the creator side of things better, but in the process made it virtually impossible for people to get into without prior experience with modeling or a whole lot of time to spend learning how to use it. There has to be a way to compromise and make it a lot more approachable for your average person with zero modeling experience.
TLDR the old system was so much better and easier to get people into. A hybrid system that uses shapes we can put together easily and intuitively would be so much better as it would be closer to what literally every other game uses so people would be instantly familiar with it. Being able to jump into the designer and have everything make sense very quickly to your average person trying the game out would make things 100000x more appealing. I have and still feel like the new designer was a knee jerk reaction to trying to make the creator side of things better, but in the process made it virtually impossible for people to get into without prior experience with modeling or a whole lot of time to spend learning how to use it. There has to be a way to compromise and make it a lot more approachable for your average person with zero modeling experience.