How long till we are able to give orders via minimap?

[Warlord Zsinj]

For me, this is the most important thing for Spring.

The advantages of this are really pretty obvious. Giving commands on the map are very common in TA; and are practically essential. However, this is made significantly worse in spring, because your view on the map is often not nearly as helpful command wise as a map-wide top-down view.

However, the added advantage of this is multiplied several fold in spring, mainly because the minimap in Spring appears to be simply a top down view of the whole map, with units superimposed with radar blips. So everything is there, weapons, explosions, even smoke puffs.

The thing is that it is a very short step from getting the minimap responding to orders, and implementing supcomm like things, such as commanding much of the battle from the minimap. It is already possible in Spring to make the minimap full screen (a great feature which should be hooked to a hotkey in the future), I guess that it would be a small adjustment to allow zooming on the minimap especially.
Then, there are few minor steps and you have a fully functional battle maps.

They are:
1) Make not only orders available to be given on the minimap, but also selection orders, such as drag boxes, etc.
2) Make LOS'd radar blips (including your own units) appear with descriptive icons, the same size as blips (ie: a little tank icon for a tank, a little aircraft icon for an aircraft, etc, etc).
3) Allow group attack commands, where you can click an area, and have units attack a wide area rather than move commands and single attack orders. Hopefully a group given an area attack command would move at the same speed until they reach their target area (for group assaults), and picking a formation would be nice too ^_^

Anyway, first things first, when are we going to be able to give orders via the minimap? Is it a long way off? Is there a reason why it has yet to be included (seeing as you can already select units by clicking on their individual radar blips as it is).

[Min3mat]

spring will be almost supcom like! with slightly worse graphics and less unit choice! :D

[colorblind]

I agree that giving orders via the minimap is one of most important things still missing in Spring (if not the most important one). But I guess you're unaware that the new GUI (which still has a few bugs in it and hence hasn't been released) does have this functionality build in. Torrasque is working on it atm, see the relevant thread for more information.

So don't expect the SY to start working on something that probably will get replaced anyway. And if you're so anxious on getting a decent GUI (of which the minimap is just a small part), I suggest you give Torrasque a hand :).

But those small icons instead of radarblips are a good idea imho. I was thinking of something similiar for a tactical view (i.e. zoom far enough out and the units get replaced with icons). But I'm a bit too busy to get started on that ...

[Warlord Zsinj]

Ah, I am unfamiliar with new GUI work. It got a bit bickery earlier on, so I figured the thread had gone to the dogs.

What about some of the other features, such as selecting units on the map, zooming and setting area attack orders?

What is kept from the original minimap style? Is it still a direct top down view of the map? Can it still be made full screen?

And still unanswered from my original post, what is its likely ETA?

[IMSabbel]

I found some HUGE (ah just found those tags) problems witht he minimap commands in the New UI.

Well, because i often use the minimap to fast scroll, and with the new UI, left clicking on the minimap sets the posion, click and hold scrolls.... until you move over a unit, when it suddenly gets selected.

This results in accidently selecting different units when trying to give other units a destination in about 145% of all cases.

[mongus]

how long it takes for you to do so?. dm.
is easy to ask and ask and complain bout things, but doing something about it is different.

giving the ideas and wishing new features is always cool,
but asking how long till something is done...is a bit over confident if you are not helping on that.
wonder how long till you get the idea.

[Warlord Zsinj]

Uh, mongus, I was simply asking politely; there was no "hurry up" impetus behind it.

I think for someone who has been repeatedly asked to clear up their spelling and basic sentence structure, an admonition is the last thing I expect to hear (ironically having to be translated from your usual drawl). But I will put the vitriol away for now; I definitely don't want to derail this thread, and from IMSabbel's post, it is clear that not all has been worked out sufficiently.

[Agiel]

The problem with selecting via the minimap is that left-click would move your screen to that location. One way to solve it could be to only make it possible to give orders when in fullscreen minimap mode. Any other suggestions?

[Warlord Zsinj]

Its a good quick solution, Agiel, but not a good long run solution.

A player who drags the map open would be suprised to find that he cannot give orders to his units, even though his map appears to be full screen.

A player who wants to open his map up so that half of is is visible and half is left for gamescreen (likely a common configuration) wouldn't be able to do such.

I think that there should be some keyboard/mouse configuration that allows drag selection on the minimap. Perhaps switch the "move camera to this location" mouse click on the minimap.

[Doomweaver]

How about between the actual game and the minimap, we keep all the orders the same, with the exception that the 'change camera view' button move the screen to that position. So for most people this would be middle mouse or ctrl+j.

[zwzsg]

Suggestion: use the left click interface like in TA

[GrOuNd_ZeRo]

Radar orders and left click interface is most wanted on my list...

[Redfish]

I have this other idea. The minimap is already scalable. So when we get a fully working minimap it could possibly block the entire view. So why not create an overlay mode, where you get the mini map full size with a high level of transparancy and then have a button like CTRL temporarily bring up the minimap to max transparency. This way you have a full screen view of the map top down, with radar blips you can directly target easily because of its size, and because of the button trigger it doesn't block information processing during normal play.

[Doomweaver]

Redfish, that's like Diablo2. If you have ever played, you will probably have noticed that the minimap takes something (a lot actually) away from the game. If you can tab into a full screen version, that would be neat, but don't have it semi-transparent. It's really ugly!

[Redfish]

Never played diablo, just sharing my ideas. Of course experience with any new system will show if it's a good thing or not.

[Warlord Zsinj]

Personally, I like the minimap in the corner. I would like to have the following functions attached to it:

- Making it larger (as you can do now) by dragging w/ mouse
- Hitting 'tab' or some other first tier hotkey (ie: no ctrl or alt), which makes it full screen. Tab again to remove it, so that you don't have to hold a button to keep it on-screen.
- Zoom functions controlled using the same zooming functions for the gamescreen.