Continued from this postCurrent behaviourEsc hides/unhides menu bar and any options/exit menu currently open. Menu bar is in corner of screen. Click on the buttons on the menu bar to open options menu. Click the question mark button to open the (sparse) help window. Click on the X on the menu bar (or press Shift + Esc) to open a window with the exit options (resign, voteresign, just leave). This strikes me as being A) unnecessarily different from other games, and B) increasing the number of clicks required. It doesn't help that the menu bar is tucked in the corner of the screen so you may not even notice it appearing/disappearing. My proposed changesReplace the menu bar with a Big Window in the centre of the screen. This Big Window has the buttons for opening settings, opening the help window, and for quitting the game, as well as other stuff we might add later. Also a button for "return to game." Esc hides/unhides the Big Window and all the various windows, as usual. Volume slider probably gets moved into game/settings window. Current menu bar may be retained, or the clock/FPS functions may be just moved off to their own tiny window somewhere and the rest deleted. Thoughts?
+11 / -0
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In single player, summoning the esc menu should probably also pause the game. If we're going by what other games do , that's what SC1 did.
+1 / -0
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Just gotta make sure that can be disabled. I'm annoyed by games using ESC to cancel things AND to open a window that blocks most or all of the screen.
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well it's a bit counter intuitive to hide the menu when escape is pressed. escape is usually associated with canceling or exiting, so it would be better if it had one of those functions. [S] pretty much already stops things so it would make sense if it popped up the exit options menu instead.
+0 / -0
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I can see where this is coming from, as it is hard to see all settings at with the current menu setup; but given that hitting Esc, regardless of context, summons the menu, I'd use a different key. On my setup. I've remapped it to F10, which is pretty standard for this sort of thing among RTS games. And before anyone brings it up, properly consuming Esc when it affects game state (such as canceling from an Integral tab or an order) would be a nice fix, but it would still be really easy to get into the menu if one hits Esc multiple times or mistakenly when they aren't needing to cancel anything. As long as the trigger key isn't Esc by default, I like this idea.
+1 / -0
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I'm OK with this. I'd reserve the ESC key for cancel and bind the menu to F10.
+1 / -0
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When I designed it, the intention was that the menu would be in the middle or toward the left of the top edge of the screen. Like every other menu in the world.  I acknowledge the difference here as in this example the menu is slim and ever-present.
+0 / -0
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Draft version:  (Not shown: confirmation window for resign/exit) May condense the exit options into a single section, like the settings are. Still bound to Esc at this stage; I'm not sure about changing it since Esc is pretty much the standard "press this for menu/to exit" button in most games
+8 / -1
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<3 While i loved the easily adjustable volume/sound, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense from a design perspective in the first place, so losing it isn't that terrible. And aside from that, it really looks like a menu a user would expect to see on pressing esc.
+0 / -0
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@MauranKilom They don't seem mutually exclusive. I wouldn't mind keeping the little menu bar with the volume visible - just get rid of all the other buttons except for a single "menu" button that would show the Main Menu. Maybe throw on a "Pause ||" button. Then leave the "volume/menu-launcher bar" always-visible, and F10 opens the Main Menu. edit: F10, not Esc.
+1 / -0
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As I said, Esc isn't consumed by aborting a command, and even if it were you'd still have to know when you aren't cancelling something, so F10 is a less confusable command.
+1 / -0
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Yeah, I do have to agree with Shadowfury333 about the keybind - I instinctively use Esc to cancel actions (particularly terraform actions) and I'm sure many other players do. Binding menu to F10 would be nice - especially if you keep the onscreen button to invoke it so players don't need to know the hotkey.
+2 / -0
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I like the game-time & real-time clock. @KingRaptor's design seems neat tho, except that it have no clock anywhere...hmmmm
+1 / -0
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The "keep clocks and volume bars where they are, have all setting stuff etc. moved to an f10-exclusive menu" option does indeed sound like the best solution. I approve.
+1 / -0
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A lot of games will use escape for exiting out of things, so if you are several levels deep you'll hit escape a few times, each one taking you up a layer, until you get to the final layer where it toggles the main/exit menu on and off. If we can have that behaviour, that would be best. Escape SHOULD allow an exit. Not knowing how to exit the game or access options is bad for new players. If you're going to have the 'big menu' show up at the same time as the options submenus as shown there, make them tabs along it's side. They're really the navigation section for the menu, they should not be in their own window. Unless that's purely for demonstration purposes.
+4 / -0
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you got point, @saktoth . however, many people here support the F10 thing. why not bind the default action to ESC but make very easy keychange option to whatever the player like directly in the main menue screen. generally i want the time/volume settings always visible ;) edit: i meant ESC not F10 by default binding, but silly brainz got interrupt
+0 / -0
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1. We have too many options. 2. Escape should always be the default for exiting the game if there is no persistent button.
+1 / -0
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In spring/zK ESC is used for playing (example: cancel giving build orders) So players will hit ESC a few times too much, menu must work with that. Showing a large menu everytime you accidently hit "cancel" a bit too hastly would be very annoying. F10 might be better key, but how would players know about it unless they played Starcraft? The current zK ESC menu is rather small on big screens: I have in rl seen new players hit ESC repeatedly but not noticing that a menu came up in some corner. Seems stupid but remember: You know where the menu will show for you, for new players it is like one of those "spot the difference" -pictures. I think the default ESC menu from spring does some things right: If you press ESC it will say in chat: "press shift+ESC to exit", which then would bring up the resign menu. It will not obstruct in playing you if you accidently hit ESC once too much: Just one line of chat appears, it will also not accidently hide your ingame clock etc. To new players a chatconsole is hopefully familiar enough idea that they will notice the text. (They might still ignore it because at gamestart the chat is filled with so much technical nonsense spam... but that is maybe a different problem)
+2 / -0
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Well, the StarCraft GUI does say F10 on the menu button. It's right there on the screen. F10 was the standard "quit" key back in the early-'90s (Pepperidge Farm remembers, and so does Blizzard - old game company is old). You could always do a console-message for "Use F10 for menu or to quit" or make the menu-button blink or something, which would make accidental Escapes kind of harmless... but we already have enough spam in the console. UI is hard.
+0 / -0
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Well, how hard is it to have a default-off advanced option to show the engine console spam in chat? That way most players would only see actual chat messages in that box, Zero-K would look a lot less like a tech demo, and developers can still turn the option on to do live debug echoes. It seems like this not existing is a non-trivial hurdle towards any explicit UI hints (though assuming your audience will read things isn't usually safe, so the flashing idea is good too).
+2 / -0
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