Suggested Improvement to the Line Build for Greater Control

Was watching some gameplay that involved lots of wall usage. Meta had built a wall and then had to manually place defensive structures incrementally along the wall line since the line command has everything so close.

So. What if we had a way to on the fly adjust how far apart buildings are placed?

How?

Something along the lines of what we have now. Where you click and drag to initiate the line build and can release so it behaves like it currently does. But then you use the scroll wheel to increase or decrease the space between the buildings.

Could potentially add this to the circle area build as well.

Why?

So players can use this to increase space between defensive structures, power plants if they so choose, or nukes, and stuff.

I'd love to have Advanced Power Plants spaced out farther. In fact, I don't use the line command for them anyways anymore so they're further away, can't get nuked, and less likely to get raided.

And as I previously mentioned, to easily spread out defensive structures along a line of walls.

Thoughts? Suggestions?

I like it. I like it alot. That's definitely the only reason I don't use the area commands when needed is the stuff would be too close together becoming liabilities.

Not only should you have control over the space between building placement, you should also be able to choose between line, circle and rectangle to build stuff. Rectangle would be nice for pgens, so you can easily make 2x2 areas or double lines. (or even triple?)

It would be really cool if the space between mines was randomized, making unpredictable minefields. (Especially with circle minefields.)

Though I fear using the scroll wheel to change spacing would not work so well. I rather have some keys to do that. Same for changing shapes.

You can rebind, though I'd consider scroll wheel easier myself.

Ideal implementation for me, which I think you're suggesting would be.

Left click-hold for line mode.
Scroll wheel to change density.
Right click to change mode from line to circle.

The scrollwheel is already used for camera movement and you may want to do this while dragging a line. By default Spring uses Z and X to adjust spacing and it seems to work fine.

This has been discussed a few times before here in this forum.

It isn't entirely a bad idea, but you just have to keep in mind that there is a tradeoff here. Overloading keyboard input isn't so bad, but it gets confusing when you start assigning multiple context-dependent functions to the mouse. You would lose the ability to zoom in or out while pressing down on the mouse button.

Thats what I was thinking too for structure placement at least. Some wouldn't like it, but as long as it were remappable.

Most common complaint is zooming while placing. Who does that? Is it just me who doesn't?

It's rare, but this does happen. Sometimes on an asteroid I will be zooming out while setting up an area build for mexes so that I can get the whole asteroid. I could usually get by without zooming during area builds, but zoom comes so naturally that I scroll without thinking.

Eh, I usually get the planet's edges within my screen edges. Then issue command. If I need to move it up and over I seldomly do that, but that sounds like the next best way.

We're in beta anyway, so I think they should just try it and see if we like it. It probably wouldn't take that much work to implement this and at least some people will still use it if it has to be made optional. None of us (probably especially me) have any idea how we would actually use this feature, since we're so used to scrolling without thinking. I can't even say for sure that I scroll while area building because I never notice.

Ad a key plus scroll wheel.......

If people don't like the scroll wheel portion that's no problem.

We could tap the plus and minus keys to increase and decrease the distance or something.

This is something personal, but to me, Rmb while placing a building is printed in my brain as 'cancel placement'.
But again, that's personal. Same thing with the scroll wheel, I'd prefer plus and minus or Z and X.

So far, pretty much any key in PA can be rebound, so why not have the spacing key/mouse in there.