Yes, I understand the tooltips are rather in-depth, but I have seen all of them MULTIPLE TIMES. It's rather annoying when I know the entire game's mechanics and systems back to front and you still see 8 different tooltips whenever you start a new game. It's irritating and a slight bit unprofessional.
Uh... when starting a new game, you see that checkbox that says, "campaign help"?
Unchecking that shuts off the tooltips that I
think you're referring to- the newbie-nag-screen stuff that pops up when you buy your first ship, weapon or whatever. The other tooltips are all useful, changing data; suppressing them entirely probably wouldn't be useful, as then you'd have to uncheck that option to get those details. IDK, I guess I just don't see what the issue is there; most of the tooltips don't show up unless you're hovering your mouse over the Fleet UI in the lower-left, and you're not doing that unless you want that info... so I'm really not sure what other "tooltips" we are talking about here.
The reasons I would like an options menu is the fact that with an options menu, the game could and would work on a greater number of PC's.
With the lone exception of having a particle slider and maybe having a really drastic setting that shut off the ship / missile engine dynamics, no... and frankly, in Vanilla, neither of these things tend to matter all that much, as there are a bunch of things that are more of the load.
This game isn't even using shaders natively, for example; there's practically nothing that can be "optioned off" that would drastically change performance.
It's practically never ever the GPU that's the chokepoint anyhow, period, even on weak laptops and suchlike; it's almost always the CPU that slows stuff down, period. The only major exception I can think of there is the alpha-testing speed issues with the "whiteout" ship explosions, which are dragging down FPS quite a bit sometimes for some users, but that's due to rendering order issues there, I think, rather than something that can be dealt with via some magic checkbox toggle.
The fact that we have "tooltip delay" which is an entirely useless option
It's not useless; if you even want those minor tooltips to not show, you can set it to a really big number manually in the data/config/settings.json file.
...when we don't have AA or V-sync is completely unprofessional
Uh. The game is Vsynced by default, which, again, you can change in data/config/settings.json. Same with FPS limits, if you want to see it unsynced and with a really high FPS for some strange reason.
In terms of AA... this is not a 3D title, it's a 2D title that uses OpenGL in a very simple, straightforward way. AA is really only useful in 3D when there's a depth buffer available, to determine which texels need to be de-jaggied. It wouldn't help a lot with SS. Anisotropic filtering might help sharpen up ship sprites a little when really zoomed out, though.
I shouldn't have to mod my game to change the settings. It should be IN THE SETTINGS MENU.
I agree with this statement in principle, but it's Alpha for a reason, and if editing a couple of lines in a text file counts as "modding" to you, then you may need to wait until Beta.
In general, if it's a setting and it's new-ish, it's implemented via settings.json at first, and if people like it a lot, it gets to migrate. If Alex ever makes that UI extensible, however, expect that to change really rapidly, especially with mods; Alex is quite aware that we'd like to be able to turn all sorts of behaviors on / off and offer end-users a more customized experience.
