Spring RTS Engine

Maybe the zero button, zwzsg suggestion should also be used, it is afterral a solution though not the same type of solution that gives total freedom.

no please not the numpad!
I can't then use the gui on my
shiny travelmate!

what about perpendicular to the dragging direction?

click: south

click and drag a bit: perpendicular
click and drag: line as for now, but
everything oriented perpendicular

click and box: ? maybe the biggest
square that could be build with the
drag line as the diagonal?

Alantai Firestar wrote:Maybe the zero button, zwzsg suggestion should also be used, it is afterral a solution though not the same type of solution that gives total freedom.

Actually, it was not a 0 but a O. I man, the letter, not the number. O like Orientiation. And then the mouse to select orientation. But the important point of my post was how orientation gets carried over.

Oh I was referring to people using the space bar and suggested instead using the zero on the numpad as it was closer and wasnt already taken/used.

I got an idea. How about you have a compass on the GUI. You make a needle on it point in which ever direction you want, and your builds are by default built at that angle. (Make it snap to 15 degree increments for best effect)

I'm sure the pathfinding engine likes the cardinal directions better than anything in between, and frankly, I think having them face N, S, E, and W would be more than enough for basically any situation.

How about, Instead of all the suggestions we've had here on how the UI should do rotation, why dont we add 4 small buttons on the edge of each build pic of each building that has a rotatable tag in their unit fbi. Each button will point in one of the cardinal directions. I believe this is how it worked in OTA so why change it.

The OTA ones were actually four seperate units with a bit of fancy GUI hacking, which is why you only saw them in mods like UH.

Well how I think it should be done:

For a Single Building
Click once and relese quickly, with no mouse movment : Building points towards camera
Click and drag the mouse (no shift or anything down), building points towards mouse.


For a Line
Make lines like usual, but the Buildings align pendipicular (at a right angle) to the direction of the line.

AWESOME idea.

I don't think it's possible to make building turn other than 90,180 deg etc...

Why not? Its possible for units. And buildings are basicly special units. And TA could do it, it was just random. I see no good reason why it is not possible. Of course not being a developer I have noidea what im talking about, but hey, who cares?

yeah, the randomly "shifted" buildings was a nice visual effect... so maybe that should be added in again maybe... especially bacause it doesn't make a difference to the function of the the things (collition detection is sperical or box based anyways, so spinning the model within the same bounding box would just be "pretty")... however for factories it's actually part of strategy to be able to spin them around or not... but I think they should be limited to the NSEW for things like pathing and contruction facing issues...)... but adding an extra click every time I build a building isn't a viable option... The whole free-sping you're talking about is going to mess stuff up... the maps are build out of grids, the functions that determine if a building is allowed to be built on a specific location is based on this grid... if we change that then we would have to change the floor plates and pathing calculations and colision detection to circles instead of gridded squares and that's more then a simple gui addition.

Building are usually a lot bigger than units, so I think sphere collision would give problems if you start using it on buildings. Anyway, SJ should comment on this because Im just guessing too

Are you suggesting that buildings _DONT_ use collision spheres?

Yes anything but even 90 degree rotations will be problematic since pathfinding/unti-unit collisions depends on the units having axis aligned bounding boxes. Sure you can do some small rotations but those wouldnt be able to affect collisions.

I dont see 90 degree rotations as that big a priority at the moment either but if someone else want to do it ....

i think adding a feature to the gui wuold work better... so that if you, say, hold done the mouse on a factory pic in the build menu a little dropdown box would appear with the available rotations...

well u could do it in generals and ZH so

In populous you pressed space to rotate the building, in generals you dragged. I say we have the OTA UH way as an on offable option, and allow the user/modder to define keybinds such as use space bar or drag.

As for the idea of dragging a line of buildings and they're facing direction being 90* to the line fo action, what if we want them facing the oppose way round? Or towards the line of action? Or away? Would be useful in conjunction with the populous space style or the OTA build icon style.

what about the ',' and '.' keys?