Hi guys, just thought I'd outline my fantasy about the perfect order queue system and see what everyone thought: First I select my commander and start building a land factory. While the factory is building, I select it and queue 5 engineers. Then I create a build queue including two land factories and an air factory, and I assign this queue as a waypoint from the first land factory, so that the engineers will start constructing the buildings when they are built. Then, somehow, I select the factory blueprints before they have even been started and queue some tanks and some air transports. Finally, I create a ferry route and assign all the factories to the ferry route. That would be awesome.
Stuff like this is extremely hard to organize from a logistical standpoint. The game engine can do it, easily, any amateur code monkey could do it, but makin it feel fluid and usable by humans would be somewhere between beating Battletoads and impossibke
That's not extremely hard to organize at all, SupCom already did half of that. In fact i also hope that order queuing will be expansive like that. It would be just one of many things that would make this game revolutionary.
you could make structure ghosts orderable but then how do you give orders to engineers that havent even started production? how do you get unit ghosts and give them orders, without it looking shitty? you'd probably need a C&C style building placement where idle engineers build structures nearby i.e. http://planetaryannihilation.wikia.com/wiki/Orders_as_First-Class_Entities_(OFCEs)
as he suggested, set the factory target to be a building construction, from there you could set further waypoints as needed.. This requires only two things: have building ghosts be selectable entities, allow factory targets to be a building construction order if there are engineers in the queue...
supcom only showed the owner of the queue the buildings that were in the queue. you could not select queued buildings and set their orders before construction started. i also think there are far more useful things to spend the time on.
Actually, this is trivial to implement from a UI perspective, but takes a little more effort code-wise. the crux of this idea is orders as first-class entities. Essentially, orders need to be able to exist outside the context of a unit. To implement in the UI, all that needs to happen is the construction wireframes (queued buildings) need to be selectable (and orders issued to them). Secondly, a build button is needed to queue up constructions without an engineer selected (an engineer can later be assigned to the construction queue). When engineers are told to build something, what they are actually doing is creating an independant build queue and assigning themselves to it automatically. In short, it's almost identical to the system used in Sup Com, different only in the fact that wireframes are selectable and buildings can be queued without an engineer selected. Edit: The separate build button would not even be needed if individual queued units could be selected prior to construction, something that is also trivial, UI wise, if the queue is shown like in Sup Com.
Thats a very good point. If this were combined with the ability to select wireframes then it would make everything in my idea possible without needing orders as first class entities, or any extra ui elements
Orders still need to exist independently to units, though. It's probably a better idea to start smaller, and develop a framework that will manage unit orders and tasks when they are bound to a player-recognised order. Should be a lot of fun, and opens up the door to some excellent automation options.
