Pie Menu

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ObvPDj9ZX4
With radial (pie) menu, you can quickly create/select/assign tasks. I would like to see this in game (because normal menu is too mainsteam) because i think, normal menu is sometimes taking 1/2 of screen (vanilla supcom 1). If this won't be in game, we still have modders.

Here's a direct link in the Video.

It's also worth noting that the large UI in Vanilla SupCom was patched out, and of course FA was a superb UI.

I radial menu would certainly have some uses, but not as a general replacement for the UI, I can see it working for thins like map pings for pre-scripted chat messages.

Mike

There was also a UI mod in Supcom that implemented a radial menu. In my experience, it tends to work better in theory than in practice. However, I'm sure someone will put together a UI mod for PA that will accomplish it.

Anyone here ever played this one neat (and weird) action/RTS hybrid called Sacrifice? It had a kind of gesture/radial menu system where you could hold down the right mouse button and after a moment four options for commands and formations would pop up around the cursor. (it also had Tim Curry voicing a main character, but that's slightly off-topic) If you moved the mouse to one of the four options, you could release the mouse to select that option, but at the same time some more options related to the option you moused over would appear. It's a bit hard to visualize, so I'll give an example:

If you hold down the right mouse button, one of the options that appeared was the icon for 'line' formation to the right of the mouse. If you moved the mouse over that icon and released, now your units would automatically assume line formation when they received their next order. However, if you didn't release the right mouse button then two more icons would pop up above and below the line formation icon. You could then move the mouse up for skirmish formation, or down for phalanx (I'm pretty sure it was phalanx) formation. The neat thing was that once the player got familiar enough with the system then they could give commands without waiting for the menu to pop up, turning the radial(ish) menu system into a gesture-based system. You could hold down the RMB, gesture right and up, and that would give the skirmish formation command.

Actually, instead of reading all of the above you can just watch this video instead:

http://youtu.be/xAY3Dai7jNM?t=2m22s

I've yet to see any other game use something like this, which is frankly shocking. It's a great system once you get the hang of it.

My concern is how often you'd need to do it, in that game it doesn't seem like the kind of thing you did often, but in a true RTS you give out orders quite often, I suppose it would also depend on what order(s) you'd be giving with such a menu.

Mike

(And Earthworm Jim as a god.)
Yeah, the interface in Sacrifice was novel, but it could definitely have been tweaked had there been a sequel.

Honestly, it depends on the number of units. I can see a radial menu being blazingly fast IF there are a reasonable number of units per factory/engineer to build (like say, no more than 8) then it's very simple to learn what gestures produce which commands, in a more visual/intuitive interface than key combos.

Mouse operations are very slow, and typically players want to use their pointer where only the pointer can do the job. This means identifying locations on the screen for selection and issuing commands. Wherever the keyboard can be used, it should.

Chalk me up for keyboard commands to select construction of buildings and units. I am not opposed to the idea of a menu arranged in a circle around the mouse pointer, but I think using mouse direction to make selections is very slow and inefficient when keys will suffice.

There is a radial buildmenu in Zero-K and you can use that to build all structures in the game with only 2 gestures when you have construction unit selected.
I use it. It is pretty fast.
I use the keyboard for selecting orders like attack, guard and patrol so the radial buildmenu is a good supplement to my keybindings. Arguably it is easier to memorize and easier to remember a radial buildmenu than hotkeys.

I agree with ledarsi. These menus work better with console controllers, due to the thumb sticks. Mice are slow, precise instruments. The Xbox version of SupCom 2 had radial menus, and it worked great. However, this is a PC game. Every single person who buys this game will have a mouse, or maybe a trackball.

In all honesty, a rehash of FA's menu would be great.

RADIAL MENNUS ARE DESIGNED FOR XBOX CONTROLLERS. if you own a mouse a normal menu is great

When you use normal menu it is much slower than using radial menu in my experience.

Steps to select a building in a menu:
Accelerate mouse towards the buildmenu at the far end of the screen. Decelerate mouse to gain precision and hit the right buildicon. Accelerate mouse towards the intended buildplacement which might be on the other side of the screen.

If you are also forced to switch through several pages of buildoptions it is even slower as you have to slow down to hit the button to change menu page or wait for the menu to scroll and then you have to accelerate the pointer and decelerate to click the correct buildicon.

With radial menu you just hold a mouse button or button on the keyboard and move the mouse in a general direction of the wished command.

Steps to select a building in a radial menu in Zero-K.
Select builder. Hold right mouse button and accelerate your pointer in 1 direction that correlates to the desired submenu. Now you have entered the submenu and can change direction to select the desired building in the submenu or just select the first building in the submenu that correlates to the same direction as the submenu.
Accelerate your mouse towards the desired build location which likely is close to where you selected your builder and place the building.
It can all be done in 1 sweeping motion between selecting the builder and placing the building.

Keybindings are offcourse faster as you can keep the pointer where you want to place the building while you select the desired building with hotkeys but assigning and remembering all the hotkeys is something that can be quite cumbersome and if you are forced to move your hand on the keyboard in order to reach the build hotkeys the flow is broken and you might hit the wrong key.

You shouldn't need to scroll through pages anyway, so that's below sensible consideration. Tabs and submenus aren't as much of an issue since they are typically organized by type, and accessible by hotkey. If the menu has grid-based keys, then it is both easy to associate the icon with the key (same position in menu) and to hit the hotkeys without moving one's hand too much.

The main issue with radial menus is that they block vision of the game world when being used, while a dedicated command menu keeps the game world in focus at all times. I suppose it is useful for someone only using a mouse, but that's really restricting yourself for speed.

Also, right-click to bring it up interferes with ordering workers and one's commander to move, especially in Spring games where holding right-click and dragging is used for line orders.

Good thing this isn't a Spring game, eh?

One thing I didn't like about SupCom was that there weren't really any options for formations. I think a menu system like the one in Sacrifice would be useful for setting group formations without having to deal with yet another menu.

The radial build menu is very small in Zero-K. It doesn't block much at all.
In Zero-K there are a few cases where you want to spread out your construction units in a line but it isn't that common so I just press M for move when I need to drag a line for my cons.

Anyway, seems like it comes down to this:
Menu:Slow, but easy to use without memorization.
Radial menu:Faster than menu but require abit of memorization to use.
Hotkeys on the keyboard:Fastest but require more memorization to use.

Seems like this would fit for modding. People that want to develop or use radial menus can customize their UI to do so.

This could be one use of radial menus.

I want to have a nice, clean menu at the bottom of my screen like it was in FA. Pie menus were a crutch to make menus with more than 4 options work on console controllers. I don't want the UI, especially not a menu, to clutter up the center of my screen!

The system I use in Zero-K is to use the radial menu, but turn off mouse gestures. I exclusively use the keyboard to issue build orders, and it is 100% the fastest and most efficient method. Constructing a mex is b-w-w (build->economy->mex), for example. Commands such as attack and patrol are also using these keys, but no 'b' (build) precedes the sequence.

Using the keyboard 'w' is very fast compared to moving the mouse up, and does not move the cursor, allowing me to specify a screen position before or during the key combination. Using keys is especially important for multi-directional gestures, where mouse movements may be ambiguous, and frequently produce incorrect selections and wasted actions to start over.

I think everything in PA should be accessible through a key combination using a well-organized system. A radial system using qwe-asd-zxc to specify eight directions or categories, for example. Other, more complex systems may give more degrees of organization and allow for greater build options.

The old system I used to use was invented by someone- GoogleFrog, I think, which used stacks of related constructions on the same key. For example, x for defenses, which could be pressed repeatedly to cycle through increasingly expensive and less-common options. This method would also work well for PA, and gives easier access to very common functions- like 'w' for mex. It also has a great deal more keyboard real estate, and allows for arbitrarily large stacks on any particular key, although it gets unwieldy with too many.

This system should be focused on the left hand side of the keyboard for ease of access, with more common actions being bound to more easily accessible keys.

Speak for yourself... Some of us FPS gamers use ridiculously fast and high-resolution laser mice (yes, actual laser, not just optical with the wrong name), and those things are incredibly quick when you need them to be.

I'd be willing to try a radial system (EVE Online uses one around different units etc), but that said, I'd probably default back to keyboard commands when I got bored of it...

If your mouse is slow, it's because you're using mouse acceleration. This option is enabled by default in windows, and it is the single most destructive force against PC gaming. I am surprised that no single game has been able to recognize just how much MA hurts players by by making the mouse increasingly awful at high speed. (Protip: hand-eye coordination is a 1:1 system. Changing the rules between motion/response breaks the human brain.) This should be warned against by every game's options, and perhaps be disabled by the installer itself.

Mouse acceleration will hurt you. Turn it off.

I myself do enjoy a few FPS's on my computer, and my mouse does have a 8200 DPI. I'm pretty sure it's laser but IDK. FPS's demand higher sensitivities, in my experience RTS's do not.

Looking back on that statement, I was very wrong about the slow part. I was not thinking to hard about that. I suppose the devs could put radial menus in, but I sure as hell won't use them.