picobyte

No one seems to pick up my patches, am I doing something wrong?

This looks really nice. I googled and found some articles that may be of interest: particle explosion effects: http://www.gamedev.net/page/resources/_/creative/visual-arts/make-a-particle-explosion-effect-r2701 how to implement soft particles: http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/t/31387.aspx and maybe, unrelated, swirl: http://www.develop-online.net/features/1069/Intel-tricks-Scalable-3D-particle-systems

Some more changes added to the hotkeys patch series that in my opinion improves unit/game control. While building, or when shift is pressed, the A / W / D / S hotkeys steer the location of the build site or mouse pointer. Z and C act as left and right mouse buttons. Now it is possible to play the game without a mouse. The left hand controls the camera or mouse pointer and clicks, the right hand can both select units (U / I / O / P / . / , ) or buildings and the dictate the actions (G - ') for the current selection as described earlier in this thread..

Ok, I've changed it to hotkeys G to Singlequote. Note that the keys can be edited fairly easily in the config file. I've also changed it so that a default action list is chosen dependent on the selection. For villagers that is to build, for buildings to train. For non-default actions Stance, Formation, garrison, ungarrison hotkeys V, B, N and M are used. Unload all now follows and select unloaded units.

More information about the hotkeys: Keys H to backslash control the actions for currently selected buildings or units. H is th hotkey garrison for all units. For a villager the option to build is J. For buildings, K and L are train and ungarrison respectively. Military units can use semicolon and quote for formation and stance. H => Garrison J => Build K=> Train L=> Garrison ; => Formation ' => StanceFor example to build a house: select a villager (with mouse or with idle hot-key '.' my last patch allows shift . or , to select all idle villagers/warriors on screen) the press keys J H and select the location to place the house. During building you can switch buildings, not allowed buildings aren't built. pressing the idle button keeps the selected building, unless the unit cannot build it. In general the second press of the H to backslash button has a different meaning: It indicates how many' or which', in the same order as the buttons in the user interface. From H to backslash means 0 to 6, with shift, capital H to doublequote means 7-12. Except when garrisoning, then H to backslash means garrisoning 1 to 7 units and so on, as garrisoning zero units doesn't make sense :-)

My patch at ticket #1492 enables several hotkeys including changing stances. It's currently implemented as follows select your unit: Idle hotkey . , or mouse (one of my patches actually allows shift . or , to select all your idle villagers/warriors on screen) Now make a selection for an action, in this example we choose the last one, to modify the stance: H => Garrison J => Build K => Train (not applicable for units) L => Ungarrison(not applicable for units) ; => Formation ' => Stance Then choose the stance with the same keys: H => "violent" J => "aggressive" K => "passive" L => "defensive" ; => "standground" You can switch between stances for the selected units before doing something else. Forward slash unsets the first choice, so we can do something else A similar scheme applies to Garrisoning, Building, Training, Ungarrisoning and Formations H to backslash for choices 0 to 6, capital H to double quotation for choices 7 to 12. so e.g. to set stance and formation: select unit ' H / ; L And now your stance is violent and you have the fourth formation (not sure, box? - only if it was actually possible ;-) The patches apply a lot more features for the input, but that's off topic here. If you're willing to try I'm interested if you can find any bugs or unexpected behavior.

I've created several hotkeys patches in http://trac.wildfiregames.com/ticket/1492 I had not yet read this thread at that time. What do you think of them?