UI Feature General I'm sure many of us have an idea for a nice UI feature which is far too small to warrant a brand new thread, so I thought I would create a general thread for them. My Idea: Have a button / hotkey / whatever which will immediately pause all non economic production orders in your waypoints and queues. The streaming resource system is funtastic, but after you shift waypoint all your engineers for the next 10 minutes and some jackass destroys one of your powerplants, your entire system stalls. At this point you either need to tough it out or break some of your waypoints / queues to reprioritise building a new powerplant. It would be nice to simply press a button and have all non [mass extractor / powerplant] construction pause to be temporarily removed from all waypoints and queues, to be returned to their original waypoint / queue positions once the button is pressed again.
Idea: Let's say that you already have your queue of units that you want built. You realize that you missed a unit, or have decided that you want another one, except it's in the middle of the queue where you wanted it. So, how about a feature that allows you to click a production button for a unit, hold the mouse pointer, then drag that unit into the production queue wherever you want? I don't remember any of the SC games having this function. Also, standard production ones, like shift left clicking adds five of that unit, clicking a unit in queue adds another to the queue, right clicking removes a unit from queue, shift right clicking removes five of that unit from queue. You would be surprised how easy it is to forget little details like this. Also, being able to store a unit queue for future games into the production tab would be quite interesting.
How about something that shows a more categorized view of what you are spending your resources on, and details on where you are getting most of it from? I've always hated having something causing a huge resource drain, and having to take a long time finding out what that thing was. Plus, as I said in another thread, it would be awesome to be able to show a list (if you want) of what units/structures you lost. Again, if there are going to be a focus of having a lot of structures (which I REALLY hope there will be), and not just units, it would be a pain to find out what you lost.
TA had shortcut keys for selecting all units of a given type, like air/land/naval/construction, and while they might only be situationally useful, I can think of some times when you might want to use them. Also, a Pause button for units as well as factories. They suspend their order list and loiter at their current location until unpaused. This could be useful for setting up more complex, multipronged attacks, and then telling the units to all go at once.
I hope the UI will get as slim as in TA. Half the screen covered like in SupCom is bad, especially on 16:9 screens.
that only lasted a month or two, was patched pretty early on. i suspect (but have no evidence) that supcom was pushed out the door prematurely to beat CnC3 to shelves. indeed the patched vanilla supcom UI was the most minimalist UI i've ever seen in an rts. ... i played FA to a reasonably competent level, and i did so using only 2-3 keys on the KB. i'd love a UI that enabled something similar in PA as well.
