New U.I. Suggestion: Hot Select for units

I'm a long time Planetary Annihilation: Titans player and have just recently jumped on the Zero-K zeitgeist following the Steam release. One of the main draws for both of these games is the level of customization for User Interface. PA even allows for modding of UI, which allows players to assemble their UI through modular additions. Of these UI Mods for PA, probably the most popular is HotBuild2. Hotbuild2 for PA contains a feature that I relied on heavily to control my army in that game, and so far this feature is not represented in Zero-K.

I suggest having the ability to select or de-select a unit type by using Hotkeys. Lets call it Hot Select. Ideally it should be the same hotkey that is used to create the unit at a factory, for consistency.

For example: in PA I would select my bombers by first pressing "Select All Air Units" and then pressing R to narrow my selection to ONLY bombers. Likewise, I could select my Fighter jets by pressing "Select All Air Units" and then press E. This made it extremely easy to micro my airforce as I could very quickly move my bombers and fighters independently to avoid AA or engage the enemy bombers. I could also deselect a unit type after pressing "Select All Air Units" by using the CTRL modifier. This is far more efficient than using CTRL groups or ALT CTRL groups. Hot select allows your micro to play out like this: Draw a box around your army, press a key to select artillery, then click to position your artillery. Draw another box, Press a key to select stealth units, then click to send them to a specific target. This provides a LOT of fine control over your army with very few key presses or having to reconfigure your CTRL groups mid-battle.

If you are having trouble visualizing it, here's a Youtube video introducing HotBuild2 to Plannetary Annihilation. Jump to around 2:45 to see the settings screen where units can be assigned to keys.



So, as a new player to this game, what would it take to implement this feature for Zero-K? Could we use the Windows Key as a new modifier for Hot Selecting units? Let me know if you would also be interested in this UI feature. I would appreciate if someone who knows the game better could describe the benefits or drawbacks of what I'm describing and how difficult it would be to implement. Thanks!

I like the sound of it. Spring games in general have pretty complex and deep unit selection tools, but I haven't seen anything quite like this. I'm not as familiar as I'd like to be with the ingame widgets and gadgets, but I can't imagine it would be that hard to do. ALT CTRL groups are nice, but it would be nice to hotkey selection/deselection from an existing selection.

Read this section: https://springrts.com/wiki/Uikeys.txt#selections

Do not implement the selection keys verbatim, as the hotkey system presented on the Spring wiki is outdated. Instead, open LuaUI/Config/zk_keys.lua and add lines. There are already some selection keys in the hotkeys file around line 150. See how far you get, although I think this system may be somewhat limited in the categories that it can access. We could possibly add some nicer categories or it may be easier to write a widget. https://zero-k.info/mediawiki/index.php?title=Mod_Creation#Widgets

We could likely make unit selection keys configurable through the hotkeys menu. This would require some hax similar to the grid hotkey settings in order to make the same key select multiple unit types simultaneously. Alternately, each action could select all units with a hotkey identical to that action.

You can also shift-click in the unit list window to select all of this type within current selection.

No idea, try it? :P

Yes, you can currently click into the unit list window to select/deselect units. However, having to manually mouse over to click buttons in the UI is very inefficient. Also, it means that you can not build a muscle memory and teach yourself the hand movements to select the units you want to command. I'm always striving to have a control scheme that I don't have to consciously think about while I play, and for that I need Hotkeys for my unit selection. Since making this thread, I've also been considering the amount of control that the combination of ALT CTRL Groups and Hotkey Selections would give you when used in tandem. It seems very powerful to select any unit on the field within 2 button presses. Until that is possible I'll have to settle for shift clicking into the unit list window. Thanks for the work around though!