GUI for orbital layer still needs improvement; my humble suggestions!

Played a 2v2 game last night with my friend and noticed that the orbital layer can still get incredibly fiddly to control, especially in the latter game. I don't feel this has been talked about in a while, so here are some suggestions/hopes.

1) Orbital units launched from a launcher, or built from an orbital factory, need to 'fan out' automatically upon construction. At the moment they overlap and it can be suuuuuuper fiddly to select what you want. Often I find myself selecting an avenger, ctrl-z'ing (yes, just made that a verb) to select a bunch more of them, and then moving them out of the bloody way so I can pick out that one radar/fabber/whatever. Having them fan out over time would be some improvement.

2) How about some kind of graphical toggle that lets you only select and see orbital units. Towards the end of the game I played yesterday, our planet was flooded with avengers and fabbers and so on. It's chaotic.

3) Perhaps some hotkeys to select certain, specific units. Often you want an orbital fabber or something in an emergency. Hotkeys would help.

4) Is it possible to increase the distance of the orbital layer from the planet. Sometimes I feel like orbital layer is too close to the planet. This might be possible right now, but I checked the settings again yesterday and couldn't find anything. Maybe there is a mod that lets you do this. I think it would help anyway.

5) Probably other stuff that I can't think of right now

The orbital layer + planets is the main thing that makes PA unique, and I'd really like it to be polished and shiny! Anyway, let's discuss, and hopefully Uber can confirm that they plan to improve this aspect of the game?

stacking should be an absolute no-no game wide. there are so many damn issues that applying said rule would solve.

+1, especially for the 'filter selection' option.

I envisage a tool bar on the RH side of the screen (below the 'actions' bar) that allows you to switch between 'layers' for selection.

Ideally we would have:
Land/sea combat, land/sea fabbers
Air Combat, Air Fabbers
Orbital Combat, Orbital Fabbers


These could be 'tick boxes' type options that can be toggled individually. Have everything turned on and you get selection as it is now, however you can quickly just select one (right click may disable all but highlighted) or specifically unselected one type (left click on one to remove it from available selection) e.g. prevent you selecting air when you have a large land force.

I'm guessing this would require additional code adding to each unit to specify what 'layer' it is in however, so might be rather allot of work. Still being able to filter between land, air and orbital would make managing things late game *so much* easier

@jables I know you guys are busy with lots of things right now, still I'm wondering if anything like this is on the cards?

I'll take a look into it. Should be something doable, just not sure where it would fall in priority list.

I think once zoomed out to "orbital level" (at best what that means would be configured by a slider in the options) should result in something like this with additional control over the selection: https://forums.uberent.com/threads/suggestion-to-improve-orbital-view.64534/

Why?
- It allows to clearly see orbital units
- However it still gives an idea of what is going on on the ground at the same time
- It should enforce "select orbital units only", so it becomes possible to make a box around orbital units without selecting other units.

To me these things are what prevents me from "wanting" to use orbital. If balance should require it I have to use it, but so far using orbital feels pretty bad to me and I don't want to use it more than I have to.

EDIT:
Another random issue that I just remembered about selecting stuff:
When making a selection box over 21 fabbers and 22 tanks it selects the tanks. When making a selection box over 22 fabbers and 21 tanks it selects the fabbers. That's plain horrible,as counting the fabbers and tanks becomes quickly impossible as numbers grow.
It should always select tanks(any "battleunit") first, like it did in FA.

Well, us here at Orbital Warfare Overhaul would just love it to be HIGH on the priority list, but we're not you, so just let us know when you guys get some progress on it! ^.^

1) Have you tried an area move command for the factory? Maybe area patrol. Most of the time you will produce one unit (like the avenger) on loop. With the odd, one-off builds mixed in via Crtl+Clicking. I even installed the mod that sets all factories to Loop build by default.
But overall this is one of the things they propably have to work on

2) I am pretty sure there is such an option. At least one of the player made toutorials noted it. I think somewhere in the camera options.

3) I agree with that being helpfull. Maybe they could copy the construction hotkeys for this? One to go into "selection hotkey mode", one to select the units of that type. That would be two buttons, but still pretty short and it would be identical between both systems.

4) That would also affect the surface area of the orbital layer and could thus affect ground-to orbit and orbit-to-ground weapon ranges. So it could have some unwanted results on the balance.

There once was an option I think to hide ground icons when zoomed out. However it did not have any effect on the selection, so you basically just hurt yourself because you easily ended up selecting stuff on the ground without even being able to see it.
I cant find that option anymore.
Doing a test this screen shows some of the -imho really bad- issues we have right now with the usability of orbital:

That is the result of selecting via a box. I can't think of a possible reason why I would ever select ground based fighters and orbital units together like that.

The only way to reliably solve this is to do this:

So I have to move the whole camera to select orbital stuff. Ofc if I have a lot of orbital this way makes it pretty hard to select something specific in orbit, as they all merge together in location.

Also I fully agree that orbital needs to be considerably higher up, because of this:

This is roughly the zoom level I go to when I want to get an overview and move the camera. I quite often do big selection boxes on this zoom level to i.e. select a big chunk of my army. Now those orbital units are in the way again and I have to zoom in to be able to not select them by accident:

Now I can select my dox, but my vision of the planet is not optimal anymore, I am missing out on the top and the bottom of it, this is not the overview I want to have.
Imho orbital should only be visible when on this kind of zoom level:

So be a lot higher up for that. This is currently just barely above the zoom before it goes to celestial, so that would need too happen a little later. To prevent effects on gameplay simply speed up the up/down movement.

Another things that annoys me about celestial view:

This happens when I zoom out a lot from a planet and use the middle mouse. It moves the camera to the right, the planet loses focus. I can't see any use of this. The only effective way out is to use the list of planets or a camera anchor.
I'd like it to always stay focused on either a planet or the sun. Never enter this "free move" mode. Same for the system editor btw.

ups I just wanted to test if the "hide other icons when on orbital" option still existed and ended up posting a full explanation of what I think is currently bad in terms of orbital controls.

Yea, one thing I have learned so far playing with the orbital mod, is that the orbital and multi planet UI still needs work. In addition to the selection issues above, it is extremely difficult to keep track of units on multiple planets as well as all the orbit units.

I think a celestial minimap is needed, so I can use the PIP to look at a 2nd planet, instead of just using it as a celestial view.

This might sound a bit presumptuous, but I believe something like this should be fairly high in the priority list considering that it is a core game element when playing on more than one planet.

The system works!!

Some more thought about this: make the orbital shell show up when this zoom level is reached and have the orbital shell blur out icons below it as described in posts above.

Yeah me too. Ideally the it should be a slider option though, everyone's different. But that seems about right. Maybe a little more zoomed in... see! Need a slider!

I was disappointed to find that orbital selection GUI is still incredibly fiddly, and there is no filter to toggle every other type of unit 'off' (e.g. hide them) so that you can easily select orbital units and move them around etc. Is this moddable? Are there any plans to implement this in the future?

I think there is a mod on PAMM that helps with this. (by wondible)

Thanks, I'll have a look for it.

Keybind Extensions by wondible.