New Mod: Hot Select

[nine2]

This is just an idea, it doesn't exist. Idea is it makes it easier for you to get the units you want without having to assign and remember 1000 shortcut keys.

You drag-select some units then hit the key (lets say space) to popup the Hot Select menu. It is a grid summary of the selected units that appears wherever the mouse cursor is (for quicker clicking).



It shows all of the types of units you have selected in a magical grid.
You click a unit type to select them.
You shift click units to select multiple.
Right click to remove from selection.
It shows how many of each unit you have selected.
The unit colour is determined by faction not by your player colour (so if you have percies and bricks you can tell them apart / see separate counts / select them separately)
Once the grid is up the keyboard magically ignores all key bindings and
L = Land, A = Air, E = engineers etc.
1 = Tech1, 2 = Tech2 etc
The "I" key will limit selection to idle units
The "O" key limits to units that are on screen.
The "N" key will grab the nearest selected unit to the cursor. Shift-N will add the next nearest unit as well.
Space key will revert the window back to the original selection when you launched it, so you can make another selection.

If you didn't have any units selected when you launched the window then EVERYTHING will be selected.

Scenarios:

Select nearest idle engineer - Space E I N
(space launches Hot Select with everything select, E limits selection to engineers, I limits to idle units, N selects the nearest one).
Select all onscreen idle engineers - Space E O I
Select SCUs - Space C 3

bonus features
- When watching a replay this would make it easier to compare armies. Like who has air? Just observer player 1 hit space and read the intie count. Who has more t2 mexes? More t3 units?
- Show combined stats of selection. What is the Combined DPS of all units selected? Combined BP? etc.

Improvements I don't know how to make
- make special handling for air scouts, fighters, ranged land units
- make special handling for t1 engineers
- find a different way to do ION hotkeys (idle onscreen nearest) because they would be used so often. Maybe Ctrl=Idle, Alt=Onscreen, ???=Nearest
- show E/M use of each unit in the grid so when you are power stalling you can find the culprit

Does anyone else have any ideas?

[nine2]

Hotbuild already defines key for units, buildings, pause, disabled - so I should copy them. This also leaves QAZ free which I can use for Idle Nearest Onscreen. Don't know how to fit Land/Air/Etc into it.

[nine2]

I really like this idea but it takes too many key presses to get what you want. Selecting nearest idle t1 engie is stupid amount of key presses. Any ideas anyone?

[Frozen_byte]

As many players are very familiar with the Hotbuild mod - you should stick very close to its syntax and behavior.

If you release this mod I will start using Hotbuild
(Not using this mod, dunno why... maybe because I dislike vim and hotbuild feels like vim xD)

[speed2]

I would go with thought remembering keys for units.
Nice mod/improvement of hotbuild would be, if you select several units, by pressing key that is used to to build them you will deselect every other type of unit. And by some combination with shift ctrl or alt and that key you will deselect it from selection.
This way ppl would remember keys for units faster, and lets be honest, building units via keys is much faster.
And if you select land air navy units, pressing that key would cycle through them (tank/bomber/frigate) like when you build structures with hotbuild

[nine2]

I agree speed2 but don't you think a lot of those keys you actually want for other stuff?

Also, what happened to speed1?

[Resin_Smoker]

I really like this idea but it takes too many key presses to get what you want. Selecting nearest idle t1 engie is stupid amount of key presses. Any ideas anyone?

Try having a hot bar that's slides open / closed.

When open the hockey's become active and can be repeatable so long as the bar is open. This would reduce the number of key presses dramatically as well as potentially allow the player to create templates that can be assigned to other bind-keys or menus.

Resin

[JaggedAppliance]

I love speed's idea of extending hotbuild.

[Morax]

It's a nice idea. It seems like a lot of clutter on-screen, but I kind of like the combined stats idea. Experience usually tells you if an army is strong enough to overcome defenses and etc, though.

And this just reminded me as to why I don't use the spacebar for hotbuild: I have made so many mistakes in games by accidentally pressing it that it probably cost me nearly 100 rating points.