A few GUI Suggestions!

[Xenesis]

Hi, I recently discovered this on Steam and it looked like a blast so I promptly bought it and wasted a few hours plonking down planets and other things.

I've got a few suggestions that I think would help make the interface a bit more slick.

Zooming:
The current lock zoom is functional, but it can be a bit clunky. If you've ever played Supreme Commander 2 (Or SupCom, or Forged Alliance) - you can point at any area and the mouse location is used as the central point of the scrolling. It's an amazingly slick way to move around your camera..and you could probably combine it with the current locked implementation. I think it's worth having a look at.

Saving - Autosaves:
It'd be great to be able to set an option for autosaves, say anything from every 10 minutes to any other value you want. I've lost a bit of progress so to speak to crashes so I've reverted to OCD saving every other time I place a celestial body, but it'd ease the consciousness a bit.

Saving - Naming:
It'd be nice if you could set a name for your universe, so that the default name is always prefixed with that name. Eg, if I called my Universe "Gerald" all saves would be something like "Gerald - 1203081012" or something.

Regardless, the game is good fun and I'm enjoying rolling celestial bodies around

[Ramierez]

For the zooming...that can be a bit tricky since we're talking about 3-dimensional space.  Where the mouse is pointed at is not a single point on the surface of a map, but a straight line from your eye, through the cursor on your screen, out into infinity within the simulation's space.  Which set of those points would it use to rotate the camera from?

The autosaves and naming are good ideas and I believe we've already got suggestions for something similar to auto in a request for periodic restore point options. 

I think the naming saves idea would probably be best implemented in a combination of the below...

If the simulation has already been saved to a file, then clicking the "Save" button, will overwrite the existing file with a new save.  Also the addition of a Save New button that would create a new file save based on the name of the previous with a numeric appended to it. IE: %name% - # with # being a standard count of 1, 2, 3, etc.

If the simulation has not already been saved to a file, then you can click Save (not Save New), and it will take the name of the largest mass object or binary in the system and create a new file with that name.  If the name already exists, it will do the same as the Save New and append a #, though the # will be the timestamp of the new simulation.  Choosing Save New in this instance would allow you to manually select the name of the save file instead.

[plastik2k11]

Autosaves would be great; if they were frequent enough, we could have an 'undo' button that reverts to the previous autosave. Countless times I've 'accidentally' placed Rigel too close to our solar system 

[Dan Dixon]

Could someone add these ideas here?
http://universesandbox.com/forum/index.php/topic,3094.0.html

Thanks!