Hey! When you click-drag to rotate a building before placing it, I think it should be rotated to face the mouse pointer. That way it would be extremely intuitive and also you'd know which way units produced in factories would exit by default. From a search I could see igncom1 at least had suggested the same, but as a post in another thread and no one seemed to notice that part of the post. Also some suggest that buildings by default would snap to the angle of nearby buildings. This would still work and can be easily snapped out of by click-dragging the mouse as usual. The first of these suggestions or even a combination would greatly simplify the placement of defense turrets. For placed turrets, it would be nice to be able to change their default targeting angle at any time by selecting it and right clicking the map, having the turret aim for that direction. They could still have limited turn capacity if that's what you want. Side note: When illegally trying to place a building, it becomes deselected. Meaning you have to choose the building from the menu again and then proceeding. A better solution would be that it just don't get placed, but that you still have that tool selected.
Moved the thread into the backers lounge as the alpha forums is not meant for suggestions. On topic: I'd really love to see something like this. Currently I don't really understand who rotation works. I've seen people in streams rotate buildings pretty fluently, but when I try it it just doesnt work very well for me and it is very hard to rotate a building towards a certain direction. Is there any trick to it?
click drag in a single direction, it will rotate according to how far you drag - so if you drag far enough it'll do a 360 degree spin. If you reverse the direction your rotation will reverse. i do agree with OP though, that is also how rotating troop formations should work
:lol: So simple yet so unintuitive. I was always trying to do what the OP suggests and thought it was buggy when it didnt work out as I wanted it to.
Where in the human brain does linear distance == angle? It simply doesn't work well. Direction and angle go hand in hand.
Ya, the way it is now is a bit unintuitive and when I have to place allot of stuff its really slow. But the question is, once your able to place more than one building at a time (place in groups), then how are you going to handle building rotation?
Probably not per building but per line. I'd guess you would rotate the first building and then make a row of lots of them with the same rotation.
Or, perhaps the reverse of this. You Make all of the buildings, and then rotate according to where the building in the middle, which would face your mouse. But honestly, I don't think that's going to work (group building rotation), because of bounding boxes. Unless they make the building bounding boxes a bounding circle (which would be awful) you'll get some nasty collisions when you try to rotate a group of structures. Imagine placing two squares side by side, and then rotating both 45 degrees. You'll end up with a big corner overlap. EDIT: nevermind, Cola is spot on. That would work perfectly.
I was thinking hold ctrl to change building direction and shift+drag would work just like supcom, shift+ctrl+drag however would change the direction of your (line of) buildings. you could even add + - functionality like spring to increase or decrease the default size of space between buildings in a line, which would be useful for power generators, mines and dragonsteeth.
My bad! I'm glad you all felt the same about rotation anyways! There's never a need to rotate a building more than 360 degrees. Regarding lines of buildings one could click-drag to choose rotation and then right click while still holding left mouse button, and drag the line (perhaps locked to the four directions of the building).
Good idea even tough i think it would be better if you needed to use ctrl + click to change a turret default angle of fire
Mmmmm Cheese. The current method isn't bad. It just may not work so well once we can place more than one building at a time.
