A fully configurable key- & mouse map for the game, maybe even with some simple scripting attached to each button, would help a lot of players adopt the game and excel at it. Why scripting? Because you can do a lot more if you can influence the state of your keybindings to make them more contextual and flexible. Getting a bunch of players during Beta to make traditional "StarCrafty" , "C&Cy" and "Total Annihilationy" bindings and shipping these as examples to choose instead of the default could seed a culture of custom keybinds. Tangential Nostalgia: I remember how in RtCW:ET, I scripted my weapon switch buttons so that in 90% of the cases even the wrong button would give me the right thing, no matter how panically I mashed the keyboard. Stateful keybindings save lives! :mrgreen:
YES YES Not only is it useful and increases user friendliness, it will also allow for differentiation at the upper echelons of play. P.S. I'm loving all your ideas Thygrrr!
they should have a look at Zulans hotbuild mod for FA. It works great for even a high amount of building and unit types.
Frankly there is no reason to not at the very least have re-mappable keys, you guys at Uber are great and all, but there just isn't 1 setup that will work for everyone everywhere. Mike
I was thinking the same, because "Even the most expensive RTS ever has this feature" makes no sense. :lol:
Even the most restrictive in terms of UI has this feature. I would not have been surprised if keybinds were not configurable, justified by some sort of "people can get an advantage with good UI customisation" standpoint.
SupCom's Keybinds were not configurable. TA's Keybinds were not configurable. StarCraft's keybinds were not configurable. Warcraft III's keybinds were not configurable. So make keybinds properly configurable without resorting to mods, PLEASE.
There actually is a hugh discussion about that on teamliquid. There was also a huge discussion when people realized that vow used the hotbuild-mod for some month before releasing it to the public. But yeah, SC2 has that feature, actually SC2 has nearly all features that make sense to have in the game. I wonder how SC2 would play with strategic zoom, maybe somebody can mod it in xD @Thygrrr: Warcraft 3 had a custom key-bindings file. Was a pain to handle without 3rd party tools, but it was doable. But actually Gridkey is totally fine in WC3 and SC2, anyway. No need to configure much xD I would not mind if PA would support gridkeys, aswell.
It would be great if the keybindings were configurable to be able to easily print them so you could memorize your own bindings more easily. Just mapping the bindings to an easy-to-read configuration file would be sufficient for this purpose.
Also relevant is my suggestion to allow any key to be a modifier key. Let users bind A, Z, etc as modifiers so they don't have to use their right hand.
I really think this just might be a bit excessive and as Neutrino said, it's more work to do because of how windows handles keyboard messages. (wont speak for osx or linus because I simply don't know). Would you really need more than what you can modify with ctrl/alt/shift? (plus combinations of them as well?) I mean reasonably an average user can reach how far with their left hand while holding two modifiers comfortably? using ctrl + shift I figure maybe as far as H? I'll just go with G to compensate for maximum comfort so that's bindings for everything from ~ to 5 and down accordingly or ~22 keys without modifier. With that, and the ability to use none, ctrl, alt, shift, ctrl + alt, ctrl + shift, and alt + shift, you reach a grand total of 154 key combos comfortably. So yes, I vote for action mapping as well as the ability to use combos of modifiers (and modifier + mouse buttons, my personal fav ) but additional modifiers might be back-burnered.
