How we designed the hotkey system

Actually the system from hotbuild2 is obviously a copy from hotbuild, which in turn I copied from SupCom:FA's hotbuild which was written by Zulan in ... 2007? Not sure if he copied the cycle concept from somewhere else or if it was his idea.

For my entertainment I hope the cycle continues

When in a building\unit is selected, WASD plain does not work (however, I have been too busy to check to see if there has been a recent update that fixes this), if a unit is selected, then the normal hot keys apply as well as WASD, same with factories.

I love this type of post meta, thanks. However I feel hotbuild2 is quite adequate for my needs. The new system seems overly complicated but may be essential when/if we get 10 or so additional items fabbers can build.

If you are using WASD (quite a lot of people), how are you suppoased to use the current system? The buttons can be rebound, but there's so many of them that you still have to move your hand completely off WASD to reach them.
The system has a 3x4 grid of hotkeys that corresponds with the layout in the build bar. Lets say you use Z, X and C to choose the tab and then have the grid starting at R, F and V going tight. That means you end up at U, J and M and you only have Q and E available for other things. Going to Y, H and N would be very long already, this is just too far.

How reliant do you want to be on mods?

IMO the best way to do it is to have a really simple(maybe a little slow) system of radial menus in the vanilla game. The reason being that they're really easy to start using and self explanatory while using very few keys. This would make them perfect for new players. Later, when the speed at which players can do stuff gets to the point when the radial menus aren't enough, they could choose a mod that does hotkeys the way they want them.

Is there comptability of the hotkey system with different keyboard layouts such as azerty, dvorak, ... ?

It doesn't even respect the fact that my german keyboard switches up Z and Y. So there are no default mappings for any layout but qwerty. You can however define any custom keys you want in the options.

As a dvorak user, I have asked for this to be fixed.

The collision with WASD is indeed annoying.

But to be honest: There is currently no real alternative to WASD.

• Border scrolling: Requires large movements with the mouse.
• Arrow keys: Yeah, maybe if I was a 3-handed alien....
• Middle mouse button: Nope. Forget about it. That button is very uncomfortable to press on many mouses.

I wish there was some "Hold to pan with mouse" button somewhere in the left area of the keyboard which acts the same as the middle mouse button.

It's all about preference with these things. As a 3-D CAD user I'm so used to manipulating things in 3-D with middle mouse I can't think of a better way to do it tbh. I've also never had a problem navigating around planets whereas when PA first started it confused allot of people- it's down to what you're used to I guess.

I disagree, I play middle mouse at rather high speed and it works fine. Might depend on the mouse indeed..

You could mod in such a "pan" button though, the handling of middle mouse down/up is in js.

I config my mouse long time ago so that one of the side buttons replaces middle button. I got Razer DeathAdder and middle mouse is too hard to press but side buttons are not.

Please make the build bar customisable. I want it on the left hand side if the screen and I want to be able to set up my own categories and arrange the units in an order that is intuitive to ME

I found a little bug in current hotkey build.

Default for camera anchor is shift+number. If you are build-queuinq with number hotkey (which is also shift+number), it resets anchor. I tried to switch to tab+number for camera anchor and it behaves a bit weird. Sometimes it saves anchor but after a while, it's lost. If I remember right, even when shift+numer is not camera anchor and you press that combination, anchor is lost.

Also I couldn't switch back to shift+number at settings.

Solution could be something like this: If unit which can build is selected, shift+number don't go to camera anchor but do build action.

I've been using middle mouse pan with no issues up till this build where occasionally the game will act like my middle mouse button is stuck down and the camera will go flipping nuts.

I'm pretty sure that when you have a builder / factory selected control groups also don't work which is driving me nutty.

I've had this too a few times and it has been pretty annoying as I don't use the keyboard to move at all, I prefer to keep the keyboard free for other things.

In those phases the keyboard lags as well. Evil UI lag. Does Uber know of that? They need to fix that. Fast. It only happens since gw after all, something has to be broken internally.

I've had this as well, I've noticed that it happens when my game lags (Around 15-20FPS)