There is a certain habit in RTS game design that has come to bother me over the years, which is the mapping of hotkey commands by the first letter of each command name(M for move; A for attack; P for patrol; etc.). This is inefficient; the result is the spread of the most vital commands all over the keyboard, which translates to more movement required of the left hand than should really be needed. Another thing that bothers me is how hotkeys are bound to the commands themselves instead of their positions in the user interface. Now I can't claim to know whether or not Planetary Annihilation's user interface will accommodate an array of buttons, but assuming it will, I think what would be helpful is if it had the same layout of a keyboard; and all hotkey commands from basic movement orders to build options to talk were accessed from this same array(The menu would potentially change depending on the unit selected and on modifiers.). This cuts down on hotkey memorization; it's simple to make the visceral connection that a button in a similar position in relation to your keyboard is no doubt activated by pressing the corresponding key. Ideally, all the most common commands would be mapped towards one end of the keyboard. Now I tried sort of doing this in Forged Alliance Forever by mapping all the commands found in the bottom left 2x6 array to the first 6 keys of the home and lower row. I realised this wasn't possible due to either certain commands changing positions in the interface, only one command being allowed to be mapped per key, or some commands lacking hotkey mapping options. By this point I imagine there are thoughts that it's the job of the user to map the keys to their liking or for modders to implement this. However I do feel the game as a whole would benefit if more thought on the developers' part was put into optimising the stock hotkey layout to minimise the amount of setup time and hastle needed on the users' end, who just want to jump into the game.
They had this in Starcraft II and it actually works really well. Zero-K also uses it for building and it works pretty there also. Would definately be in favor of including this, preferably as the default.
Just make ability to assign hotkey to any command or command combination and make exportable/importable configuration profiles. Community will handle the rest.
So the argument that every minor gameplay improvement can be handled by a mod is a valid one. But we have to keep in mind that a lot of people are going to be playing this game on the default settings. How may times have you had to tell someone "TA (or SC) is a good game but you have to install this laundry list of mods first." Modding is nice, but lets try to make sure that the game that ships is the best version of the game we can make.
AMEN! Even on games that are very mod friendly mods are difficult for the computer-unsavvy. Especially for a game that will get updates since patches can screw up your mods.
The current plan is to have remappable keys but we'll certainly pay attention to placement and slots as you've pointed out.
Now this may inspire some hate on me, but a game i've been playing recently is Lord of the Rings Online, and they do hotkeying really well. Combat focuses mainly on skills, and you have a bar which has an option assigned to each number, which can be changed, from 1-0, including - and =. This allows 12 abilities to be mapped with no problem. It doesn't stop there though, it has 3 more task-bars, with exactly the same range of keys, merely by holding shift+, alt+ and ctrl+. Now on a Mac, that would have to be slightly different to make it comfortable to use (eg, shift+, fn+, cmmd+). This allows access to a total of 48 commands, reasonably easily available, but also clickable. Of course, we may not be able to use 1-0, or shift+1-0 because of groupings, but its still worth thinking about.
I definitely approve of this in principle. My favourite shortcut key in TA and SupCom is Ctrl-Z (select all units of currently selected type). That was clearly designed with the same idea as the OP in mind, and it does make me wonder if I would have made more use of the plethora of other shortcuts if only they were closer to my left hand. EDIT: something I loved in TA that I think was not in SupCom was assigning a factory a control group, e.g. Ctrl+4, and then every unit created by that factory ad infinitum could be selected by pressing 4 or Alt-4. I found this especially useful for separating bomber and fighter air factories, but I has plenty of other uses too, especially when used with waypoints. If this feature was in SupCom then I am an idiot for not using it, but either way i'd like to see it return in PA.
sorry eukanuba, you're an idiot for not using it (though i disagree that it was useful for a game with maps like supcom, problematic if you had units in the same grouping on opposite sides of the map). i loved that you could play supcom with only 2 keys for 90% of situations.
While we're at it, please think about the non-qwerty users. As generally functions aren't attached to the key position but to its value, non-qwerty users have to either switch to qwerty mode or remap the whole thing. It's generally not a problem with game with relatively few commands, but it can be a royal pain as soon as there are more than a few. Either you switch to qwerty (or the game use key position instead of value) and you can't look at your keyboard (or know by habit) which key is where ; or you have to remap it and fight with the conflicts without being able to see all the commands at once. So please, at least give us keyboard-specific defaults.
+1 to this. I use Dvorak, and its a bloody pain in the *** in most games to get it working right. Some games wont even let you just use the windows hotkey to switch back and forth - you actually have to go completely remove it from the list of keyboard layouts, or the game gets FUBAR'd I was even more frustrated to find out that if i switch the windows keyboard map, logitech "helpfully" rebinds all my keys to their new values based on standard keyboard position. This would be great, except that I was specifically trying to leave the qwerty setup on my G13 keys so i would still be able to type dvorak in chatboxes. #cantwin -Stretch
This is not about modding, this is about "exportable"/"importable" profiles. Community will define a number of most popular layouts in Alpha/Beta. Uber then will need to integrate them as default ones, that's all. As soon as interface is sophisticated enough to support keybinding for any possible chain of actions, than no modding needed at all. Good "default" hotkeys require a lot of playtest, because all people are different. So there is no actually good "default" hotkeys for everyone. You need a number of default presets, that's all.
As a mid-level player (not noob, not 2billion apm pro), I actually don't mind stuff being bound to letter-relevant keys like M for move and p for patrol, because I instinctively know where they are on the keyboard anyway That said, obviously having all the keys under one hand is clearly superior in terms of how quickly you can press them And keybinding fixes this anyway =) Maybe "pro" and "basic" starting keyboard layouts?
Bump ! Amazing ! One should be able to rebind stuff to his liking. How is it going in the current alpha ?
+1 to this +1. I use Leboutte's French Dvorak. Very few games actually do it right by using QWERTY scan codes for shortcuts and char codes for typing text. Portal 2 does it right. Starcraft II does not (and since I have to switch to qwerty before launching the game, that results in me never using the chat, which is lame).
