Hotkeys & More
Posted: 23 Mar 2009, 21:59
Hey guys, I played TASpring some time ago and decided to check it out again. I think overall this project is very cool, but there are many small things on the low level that hurt the success of this thing. Some of those things are not even necessarily "not in Spring", they're there but it's not very obvious for someone who just got Spring, and not everyone has time to search forums that are years old for random information they need (for example, there needs to be some big readme that explains what the L and ; keys do, and an option to auto-enable them every time a game starts, I bet lots of people will use it).
Now, what's bothering me at the moment is the hotkeys. There seem to be hotkeys for the basic commands, but what about hotkeys for buildings? Lets say I want to tell my commander to build a metal refinery in BA, do I really have to move my mouse all the way to the menu, left click it, and then move back to the field? Most mods really require better speed and it's ridicules trying to play without building hotkeys.
So, are there some hidden building hotkeys (ctrl+key or something?) or are there none? And if there are none, does the engine support it? (it probably should seeing as you have basic command hotkeys) and I assume it's mod dependent, so is it up to the people who work on mods to give their stuff hotkeys, and if so, why don't they do it?
===== Part 2 =====
I figured I'd write this here instead of making another thread - one more thing that has really been annoying me in Spring's interface is CTRL groups. If I Ctrl+9 a factory and tell it to produce stuff, then as soon as anything is produced not only the factory is selected when I click 9 but also everything it produced. This is a seriously flawed mechanic from an RTS perspective, and getting around it by resetting my ctrl groups every once in a while it totally impractical with 20 factories that produce a unit every 10 seconds each.
Something should be done to make ctrl groups work normally, so that basically this doesn't happen. If I set a group, it should remain static until I change it.
Now, what's bothering me at the moment is the hotkeys. There seem to be hotkeys for the basic commands, but what about hotkeys for buildings? Lets say I want to tell my commander to build a metal refinery in BA, do I really have to move my mouse all the way to the menu, left click it, and then move back to the field? Most mods really require better speed and it's ridicules trying to play without building hotkeys.
So, are there some hidden building hotkeys (ctrl+key or something?) or are there none? And if there are none, does the engine support it? (it probably should seeing as you have basic command hotkeys) and I assume it's mod dependent, so is it up to the people who work on mods to give their stuff hotkeys, and if so, why don't they do it?
===== Part 2 =====
I figured I'd write this here instead of making another thread - one more thing that has really been annoying me in Spring's interface is CTRL groups. If I Ctrl+9 a factory and tell it to produce stuff, then as soon as anything is produced not only the factory is selected when I click 9 but also everything it produced. This is a seriously flawed mechanic from an RTS perspective, and getting around it by resetting my ctrl groups every once in a while it totally impractical with 20 factories that produce a unit every 10 seconds each.
Something should be done to make ctrl groups work normally, so that basically this doesn't happen. If I set a group, it should remain static until I change it.
