Man, those goddamn mice! Who needs them? With just two buttons and some lame-o scroll wheel and relative movement and their pseudo-circular shape. They don’t even look like real mice at all!
With that in mind, what would you like to have keyboard shortcuts for? And I don’t mean just “oh I really like the F1 key!” (they’ll be customizable), what actions would you like shortcuts for? What do you need to really hardcore your experience with minimum effort and maximum speed?
Battlescape GUI->shortcuts
Everything that is clickable by mouse should be used by a shortcut as well.
UFO:AI had the numberkeys or F-keys to directly choose a soldier in your squad, that was a good idea.
CTRL + W for “Winning!”
More seriously, I’d LOVE scrolling keys (directionals scroll in that direction)
Before you go hating on the mouse too much, using the wheel to change vertical levels is incredibly useful and makes exiting the craft a far quicker process.
Otherwise, I’d go all Starcraft on the appropriate user interfaces and hotkey Geoscape tabs and base structures to the letter they correspond with. In the context of X-Com that would make sense… Right?
In the battlescape I’d like to be able to do things like press C to crouch, and hopefully that wouldn’t interfere with anything or create too big of an opportunity to press the wrong key and accidentally make really bad choices.
I’d love to be able to ignore the mouse altogether. I’ve always found that it’s incredibly difficult to use effectively in a window with as low a resolution as X-Com has.
With that in mind I think it should be possible to play the entire game with just the keyboard. Use shortcut keys for every button on the GUI, and then have the arrow keys scroll the battlescape. Finally, I think holding Ctrl, or some other modifier, should allow you to change the currently selected tile. You could then press ‘enter’ or whatever to move your troops once you have their destination selected.
Thanks for a working so hard on a great project!
Lots of ideas, not all good:
BattleScape:
Keys to rotate soldiers one tic in each direction.
Key to return the view to the XCom craft.
Key to cycle the view to each visible civilian.
Key to cycle the view to each visible aliens.
Key to cycle through last seen alien locations from this and/or previous turn.
Key to cycle through first sightings of enemy fire from this and/or previous turn.
Key to cycle through live XCom explosives.
Key to toggle or briefly show XCom solder sightlines.
Key to open door in front of soldier without moving into the space.
Key to toggle or briefly show soldier stats in an overlay.
GeoScape:
Key to select nearest fully prepped attack craft and then open intercept mode.
Key to cycle view to each base.
Key to cycle view to last known locations of lost UFOs in the last 24 hours.
Key to toggle or briefly show max radar range.
Base:
Key to toggle or briefly show an overlay of the hallway layout of the base.
Thanks for working on this great but buggy game!
Don’t forget an AAARRGGHHH!!! key
This is very important for those times when After an hour long battle, an alien blaster-bombs your best guy in the face or some cannon fodder soldier “looses it” and fires 26 random shots with almost laser-like precision towards his teammates 😉
Battle:
Quicksave and Load.
(for endless retries :))
Here is the keyboard shortcut of Seb76 UFO extender. This is just for your reference:
**Default key mapping in geoscape
UpArrow: Rotate Up
DownArrow: Rotate Down
LeftArrow: Rotate Left
RighArrow: Rotate Right
MouseWheelUp: Zoom In
MouseWheelDown: Zoom Out
1: Geo Speed1
2: Geo Speed2
3: Geo Speed3
4: Geo Speed4
5: Geo Speed5
6: Geo Speed6
MouseMiddle: Intercept
B: Bases
G: Graphs
U: Ufopaedia
Escape: Options
F: Fundings
**Default key mapping in battlescape
UpArrow: unit goes up
DownArrow: unit goes down
LeftArrow: left menu
RightArrow: right menu
Return: end of turn
Escape: options menu
BackSpace: go to next unit, remove current from the queue
Tab: go to next unit
Space: go to inventory
PageUp: view goes up one level
PageDown: view goes down one level
1: reserve mode off
2: reserve mode snap
3: reserve mode auto
4: reserve mode aimed
In all honesty I like to take my time playing instead for speeding through it. So I’ve never really cared much for shortcuts.
But if you must I suggest using the spacebar to center in on your currently selected unit.
There were traditional Gollops keys (used in RebelStar/LaserSquad) Left-Right for turning, and Up-Down for step forward/step backward(!).
“Step backward” will require sufficient number of lines of code, because animation sequence is reversed :). Though I think it will be quite beneficial.
Moving unit down/up could be done with PgUp/PgDown.
You know, Seb76’s key mapping is not the best possible, considering intention to have unit control with keyboard only (which could help with ported versions too)…
Of course these “moving” actions should be abled with modifier keys only, such as ctrl or shift.. Ordinary cursor keys and pgup/pgdown should work as battlescape scrolling/leveling (in screen space).
I think a shortcut for fast selecting the firing mode, auto reloading with last used ammunition type and toggling between visible aliens in line of fire would be awesome.
The UFO extender shortcuts look good, but to me the most important is arrows to rotate geoscape. 🙂