Pie Menu

Believe me, well do I know about the evils of mouse acceleration. But even if you have blazing fast hand speed, no acceleration, and well-optimized sensitivity settings with a high tech laser mouse, mouse operations are still very slow compared to the keyboard. Always use hotkeys whenever possible.

FPS gamers ain't got nothing on RTS gamers for mouse speed, but they may have us beat on mouse precision skill. Well, they do use low sensitivity settings and large hard mats, so they are perhaps cheating on the precision metric, where most RTS configurations use the highest sensitivity settings the player can handle, and rely on small, accurate movements with less accuracy on each one, but spam actions. Even if the first move command is a miss, it will be in approximately the right spot and the next 5-10 will refine the command, replacing the missed one. This isn't a good technique in FPS games, where precise speed matters more than just speed with corrections possible later.

Hotkeys are the same speed regardless of pointer position, can be used independently of mouse movements, and have a wider variety of possible commands or more complicated commands for the same hand real estate. They can be performed precisely in sequence and in parallel, and keys are discrete and fundamentally more precise than mouse movement.

Always use hotkeys. No matter how fast your mouse hand is, your keyboard hand is faster at everything. However specifying a location on your screen with just your keyboard is extremely inefficient, so you use the mouse for that job. Design your interface to use keys for everything you possibly can, and if you can't do that then go ahead and resort to the mouse.

TL;DR always use hotkeys. No matter how fast you think your mouse hand is, use hotkeys. Mouse input is very slow by comparison.

I personally HATE pie/radial menus. I don't think they're that efficient, and I'd much rather have something in the lower left with a generic grid type selection. I don't like having my buttons MOVE. with a pie menu, it pops up wherever your mouse is, and then you have to move the mouse to select something. With regular buttons, they're already there, and you just have to select them.

Some of it is aesthetic too. I just like being able to see at a glance what units I can build, maybe the ones I can't build or don't have resources for are greyed out. You can't get that info with a radial menu until you actually open it. Pictures are pretty too, I want to see them whenever I have a construction building selected.

This comment has been addressed already, but I must add my own 2 cents.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZlqJlUqz-hA
That's pretty much how I play Warsow. (And I play on Linux, where I can permanently disable mouse acceleration with a single command.)

Some sort of "Smart-Ping" like in League of Legends would be pretty cool with pie menue for Teamgames[Expand, OMW, Back, Enemy, Scout, Attack]. Just pressing the ping button and hold down mouse to drag the menue. It would be also great to pass language barriers.
However, for "normal" commands, i want an "normal" RTS menue with hotkeys(grid hotkeys would be cool).

This. LoL's Smart Ping is very nice, and would make a great addition to crossing said language barrier.

I know for a fact that I don't play with mouse acceleration. I turned it on once in UT3 and it made the game unplayable. Section 8 also had something similar, and I turned that off as well.

Very true. I have multiple Xbox controllers for my computer, and was playing Magicka with some friends. I used the keyboard and they had the controllers. Casting anything was faster on the keyboard, and their inability to cast quickly made it a very... interesting experience.

If in doubt, just spam arcane and electricity. If your 'friends' get in the way it's their own damn fault, so you should probably take their equipment too because they're obviously not competent enough to use it And everyone knows that a real Mage has no friends, just portable 'Resurrect' spammers/meat shields.

I can see a Sacrifice-style menu being used for pings and formations, along with hotkeys. The more options you give the player for controlling their units the better.

Me too but Sauerbraten here

BTW radial menues ever heard of Crysis suit menue? Well it was beaten all the time by keyboard shortcuts.

I do like Pie menues for shooter, there you have to use your keyboard for movement etc.
But for RTS, you use your mouse for it and have the keyboard for hotkeys. Pie menue would be much slower to use, it would make the UI smaller tho.
My Idea would be to be able to toggle between normal menue and radial, but having hotkeys always availabele. New players and experience ones may use the radial menue due to the smaller UI.

It would be nice to see this with pings on the map and markers to show where people need attention.

Battlefield 2142 was my first experience with a radial menu and I loved it, flying a transport and telling the other to bail out was so nice and easy among everything else.

Mike

League of legends recently put in a radial ping menu to their game it works rather nice

I don't see how this improves on the tried and tested model.

DotA 2 Have radial menu with chat commands:

I think they had it in BF2 also and that too was my first experience of it. I believe that the Battle For Middle Earth RTS series was quite a revolution (forgive the pun) of the UI - where it was really minimal and concentrated on radial style pop up menus with the only permanent feature being the mini map and surrounding controls. As a result you get to see a great deal more of the actual game.

I personally believe that the radial style is an obvious improvement over linear menus. Simply put, anything that reduces the distance required to be traveled by the pointer to make selections will reduce the time taken to make them. The great advantage of radial menus is that all the options are in view at once, linear menus tend to require scrolling when a large number of options are required to be displayed in order to keep the icons legible.

Hot keys are great and undoubtedly the fastest way to issue commands. But most casual players won't be bothered/have time to learn them and therefore will be penalised if the mouse menu isn't slick and intuitive. In other words, I'm not saying radial menu is the answer, but I will say that it needs to be competitive to use the menus.

I personally feel a well styled radial pie menu could add a genuine feeling of 'Futuristic Command) And be a nice immersion generator.

I also think that a Radial pie offers a much faster than: "mouse to lower left and click" ability to issue commands. Actually so much so that it closes some of the gap between casual players that don't have the inclination to learn the build keystrokes.

The Radial pie could simply grow the slice you mouse over if there is a complex set of commands. For example you click on the commander, hold shift: Radial pie pops up. Mouse over "Build" then the pie slice triples in size instantly to give one view of all options.

Everyone's talking about Radial pie menus, but will someone please at least make some sort of comment about the Sacrifice gesture system?

You mean that system that is essentially a 2 tiered Radial Menu?

Mike

Mmmmmmmmmmm... Pie...

That is all





On a serious note, as I said before, I'd be up for trying it. It's worked very well in quite a few games (not so much RTS but other command hub type games), even for meta stuff (like factory options perhaps? Select a factory, and rather than then having to go to the corner of your screen to find the button, just pull up the pie menu where you are to choose your default stance, rally point etc etc?)

Despite my earlier statement about not liking radial menus, I have repeatedly tried to set up my Zero-K interface to use the gesture-based radial menu (and then use other UI to handle factories and orders), but since the interface for orders has unit construction and building construction integrated, and I still need to be able to control unit states, I'm not really saving any screen space.

This is part of my problem, I guess. Setting up a UI where space used is minimized is quite hard when there is a lot to manage doing.