Hotkeys System

[mammadori]

Hi,

I'm new and this is my first post, I was prodded by issue #1226 to start this discussion.

A bit of backround, anyone remembers 'HCCC' starts in Age of Empires? CTRL+W 'Give me all Archers' in TA:K ? or CTRL-. give me all idle workers?

I started hacking the #1226 patch because I need a full RTS experience, and to me hotkeys and macro orders are vital.

In my first approach I used Z,X,C,V to enque the first, second, 3rd, or the 4th unit in all the selected buildings, but probably an hotkey is needed to select ALL the town centres ('H' is alredy assigned :-( ... ) or maybe we need to play with modifiers too (ALT, CTRL...)

Everything should be easy to use and to tweak and the rule of the least surprising thing must be followed.

e.g.:

period (.) select an idle unit,

SHIFT period adds an idle unit to selection

CTRL period selects all idles

SHIFT CTRL adds all idles to selection

T select a town centre

SHIFT T add a town centre to selection

CTRL T select all town centres...

Ideally anything that could be clickable should be hotkeyable and should have hotkey tooltips.

Moreover hotkeys should be assigned also on aggregate actions or scripts but this could go on another topic about mixing some bot functionalities (aka 'macros') to obtain very powerful hotkeys (shall win who has better ideas or better clicking speed???).

historicbruno had some nice ideas on IRC: "with multistep hotkeys, Alt+G could open a graphical options menu, then G could toggle GUI, S for silhouettes,etc., so Alt+G,G would toggle the GUI"

Edited March 20, 2012 by mammadori

[historic_bruno]

Here's some hotkeys I could think of related to gameplay:

• Select building
  
  • Cycle through buildings by type (civil centre, fortress, market, dock, etc.)
    
  • Cycle through buildings by event? (last attacked / constructed)
    

  [*]Building commands

  • Train unit(s)
    
  • Research (not yet implemented)
    
  • Ungarrison unit(s)?
    
  • Destroy (Delete)
    

  [*]Select unit

  • Cycle through idle workers (.)
    
  • Cycle through idle warriors (,)
    
  • Group selection (0-9)
    
  • Other keys to cycle through heroes / champions?
    
  • Cycle through units by event? (last attacked / trained)
    

  [*]Unit commands

  • Attack move (not yet implemented)
    
  • Attack ground (not yet implemented)
    
  • Build
    
  • Garrison (Ctrl+Right-click)
    
  • Run (not yet implemented)
    
  • Charge (not yet implemented)
    
  • Select formation
    
  • Select stance
    
  • Kill (Delete)
    

  [*]Camera commands for entities:

  • Follow selected unit (F)
    
  • Focus on selected entity (not yet implemented)
    
  • Focus on rally point
    

See also http://trac.wildfiregames.com/wiki/HotKeys

[Mythos_Ruler]

If a building is selected, we should try to make the unit training keys as they appear in the GUI. Also, we need to keep in mind that WASDQE are off limits, at least for the default hotkey setup (players can change it if they want to later).

[mammadori]

If a building is selected, we should try to make the unit training keys as they appear in the GUI. Also, we need to keep in mind that WASDQE are off limits, at least for the default hotkey setup (players can change it if they want to later).

This could be unfortunate, since the 'grid hotkey' (4x3) mapped to keys in the 'square' of vertices ZVRQ, which became famous in latest Warcraft series is really easy to remember and to spatially map on a icon grid.

If the hotkey grid is not available, I suggest that the low row could be used instead to select icons in buildings, so 7 keys are available to positional train/research

Building types could be mapped to upper right row (e.g. from R to P), this leaves 7 kind of 'things' to be easely recalled, probably R should be skipped if is too easy to wrongly hit it while using WASDQE keys.

I plan to submit some code according to the consensus from this discussion, probably rebasing a github clone.

[Mythos_Ruler]

I don't see any problem with having a few hotkey presets, as long as there is a preset available for WASDQE camera movement (as it is now). WASD for camera movement is intuitive to many types of players, including FPS and Total War gamers.

[zsol]

• Camera commands for entities:
  • Follow selected unit (F)
  • Focus on selected entity (not yet implemented)
  • Focus on rally point

See also http://trac.wildfire...om/wiki/HotKeys

Another thing I missed when I first played the game is the ability to save camera locations and assign them to hotkeys. Like Ctrl+F1 to save an important bridge and F1 to quickly jump the camera to it.

[Pedro Falcão]

F1 - F5 were used in Warcraft 3 to select heroes. That should be included to find your heroes easier, imo.

[picobyte]

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?

[picobyte]

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

' => Stance

For 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 :-)

Edited June 12, 2012 by picobyte

[historic_bruno]

Just want to point out backslash is on a separate row on my keyboard (US), and so may not be the best for a default:

[picobyte]

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.

[picobyte]

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..

Edited June 23, 2012 by picobyte

[picobyte]

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

[feneur]

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

Nope. It's just that there's a limited time for coding/reviewing patches, so it might take a while (Also, bigger things are less likely to be reviewed quickly as they require the programmers to sit down and spend quite some time with the code As opposed to a couple of lines of code that fixes a clear problem and can be reviewed in a couple of minutes )

[feneur]

What are new Hotkeys that was implement recently?

See the last item in the "In Game" section here: http://trac.wildfiregames.com/wiki/HotKeys?version=27#InGame (About what they do: when you have a building active that can train units, press these hotkeys to be able to train the units quicker than having to press the mouse button )

[quantumstate]

Also, if you forget, the hotkeys are displayed in the tooltips.

[0miv]

I dont know if it fits here but it would be nice to get hotkeys for buildings too. Because it would get much easyer and faster to build. Maby you could implement a system like starcraft has t1 t2 t3 and you switch betwen these 3 groups. Sadly im not that talanted in coding so i cant help. 

An option to change hotkeys in game would also be a good idea.

Edited November 13, 2017 by 0miv