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IDProjectCategoryLast Update
0016190Stars Beyond ReachSuggestionMay 27, 2015 12:53 pm
ReporterTheVampire100 Assigned ToChris_McElligottPark  
Status resolvedResolutionfixed 
Fixed in Version0.822 (Revised Mouse Controls) 
Summary0016190: Right click or mid click to get to detail screen of buildings
DescriptionJust a trivial thing but I find it more comfortable to right click for a detailed screen instead of crtl + left click, especially if you want to check multiple buildings.
TagsNo tags attached.

Relationships

related to 0016805 resolvedChris_McElligottPark Right-click to cancel building placement 

Activities

Chris_McElligottPark

Apr 15, 2015 8:26 am

administrator   ~0039981

We used to do it that way, but since right-click backs you out of sections in the hud, that doesn't work. If you're in the middle of a battle, then often you want to see the details of targets. Right-clicking them would take you out of attack mode, though, then you'd have to click again in order to see the details. Then go back into attack mode, then click the building to attack it... ugh.

The ctrl+click change was introduced to make that not be such a thing. That said, I had the thought the other day to make a direct-click binding for this that opens the details, that is mapped to mouse button 4 by default. That only helps people who have 5 button or more mice, but if you really wanted to shift that to right-click you could. Or middle-mouse button, actually, if you don't use drag and pan.

keith.lamothe

May 18, 2015 10:50 am

administrator   ~0040936

For 0.822:

* Previously you had to ctrl+click a tile to get the details window, now that's just right-click.
** Right click no longer cancels building-placement/etc, nor does the "right-click a building to open the build menu to place more of that building" behavior, since those would conflict with this.

Thanks :)

ptarth

May 18, 2015 11:40 am

reporter   ~0040939

Can we keep right click to cancel building mode (has priority over right click for building details)?

jerith

May 18, 2015 11:46 am

reporter   ~0040941

Yeah, those two functions tend not to conflict and cancelling a build without reaching across the keyboard is nice. :-)

Chris_McElligottPark

May 18, 2015 11:46 am

administrator   ~0040942

Definitely not -- then you can't click into the details of things on the map when you are in that mode looking at things. We had that a long while ago, and it felt just awful to me, hence the shift to Ctrl+click to get away from that. But that felt awful as well.

Getting out of the placement mode is something you can now do with mouse button 4, though, if you have one. You could also rebind that to something else if you prefer.

I'm open to other suggestions on this once you have a chance to give it a spin -- really and truly, I want this to be as comfortable as possible for everyone. But that specific suggestion impedes gameplay in a huge way that I already experienced a month or so ago, so that one is out for me.

jerith

May 18, 2015 11:52 am

reporter   ~0040943

Chris: Do you often want to look inside a building while placing another building and then pop back out to continue placing? If so, I'd be interested to hear why -- maybe the info you need could be put in the tooltip instead?

Also, I can see this being more annoying when multiple clicks were required to get all the way out of placement mode and right-click also closed the window you were looking at. With the new logic, right-click twice will reliably get you to the building details whether you're in placement mode or not and right-click once will either cancel (if you're in placement mode) or show details (if you're not).

ptarth

May 18, 2015 11:54 am

reporter   ~0040945

Last edited: May 18, 2015 12:22 pm

I'm a bit confused here. Sure, I haven't tried it yet, and that's an important note, but Chris your text suggests we are misunderstanding each other. Let me try to make a list to see if that clarifies what I (and I'm pretty sure jerith) is try to say.

Main interface: right click => Building Info
Clicked on Industry Buildings: right click => cancel back to main
Clicked on place Police within Service building: right click => cancel back to Service building selection
Clicked on place Police within Service building: right click on building in build menu => Building Info

Chris_McElligottPark

May 18, 2015 12:07 pm

administrator   ~0040946

Yes, I know precisely what you mean.

And no, I almost never want to see the details of another building while I am in placement mode -- though occasionally that happens. When this is absolutely _criticial_ is during military mode, which needs to have the same mechanical handling as building placement.

During that mode, I absolutely constantly am wanting to check out details of a building I am thinking about attacking. It's easy to say to put things into a tooltip, but you never know what I am specifically going to want to see, and eventually the screen is covered in tooltips.

The other thing that used to happen when the mode was as described -- ptarth, what you described is exactly how it used to work and I hated it -- was that it would confuse my fingers to no end. I'd be in a placement or military mode, and suddenly wonder about some building, and right click on it. Oops, I'm now out of that mode! And I didn't even get the info popup I wanted. Now I have to click again. Okay, now I have the info. Now go all the way back into the mode I was in before... it was a nightmare.

jerith

May 18, 2015 12:12 pm

reporter   ~0040947

Ah, I didn't think about attacking.

I'd probably bind both "cancel placement/attack" and "look at building info" to right-click, but also bind "look at building info" to shift+right-click or something. Using the latter works for the military situation where you want to inspect without changing mode and having the former lets you use the more convenient option when you don't care much about mode.

Alternatively, maybe getting into attack mode should be cheaper. If I could hit a button for "attack with helicopters" or whatever, changing mode matters less because changing back is easy.

jerith

May 18, 2015 12:16 pm

reporter   ~0040948

Actually, buttons for attacking is a great idea even without this. I'll create a new issue for it.

ptarth

May 18, 2015 12:17 pm

reporter   ~0040949

Last edited: May 18, 2015 12:18 pm

Ah, that explains it. I've never wondered about the detailed functions of buildings I'm about to attack. They were either primary military targets (Interceptors of type X), secondary military targets (offensive buildings and other interceptors), or cleanup (everything else). If they were military buildings, I already know what they are. If not a military building, then I've not been too concerned about what I'm shooting.

This feels like TLF wherein I came in after release. Everyone else had experienced the different combat versions that occurred during the beta, and I hadn't. So my expectations and habits were different.

Chris_McElligottPark

May 18, 2015 12:32 pm

administrator   ~0040952

Buttons for attacking are something that I do want to add, yes. That said, if the game requires hotkeys like that to feel fluidly playable at all, then there's a big problem because new players won't know them. So I've been avoiding that sort of thing thus far partly to force us to do things the "slightly inefficient" way and make sure the game is still fun that way.

Generally speaking, my other goal is to make sure that the functions of the mouse buttons change around as little as possible depending on your context. If "look at building" is ever shift+click, then it will ALWAYS be shift+click. But getting back to one click opening of details is exactly what this original request was about, and I agree with it.

Generally speaking when it comes to going in and out of modes, I think that hitting Esc is a lot easier than button+click, and a lot less frequent in general. If you don't want to touch the keyboard, then just mousing back over the category you have open and left-clicking it one more time takes you out of that category anyhow. So technically neither a mouse with more than two buttons, nor any use of the keyboard at all, is required here. It depends on whether you prefer to hit escape or to go all the way across the screen with your mouse.

jerith

May 18, 2015 12:48 pm

reporter   ~0040955

Sorry, I was a little unclear. The paragraph about shift+right-click was for things I'd like to be able to configure for my use, not necessarily a good default. If the control system allows that (either by allowing one button to bind to both functions and handling the prioritisation sanely or by having a separate "cancel mode or view info" function) I'd be quite happy. (There are probably other ways for me to be happy, but I haven't thought of any yet.)

I definitely agree about simplicity and consistency in the default case. I'm just one of those annoying users for whom the defaults often don't work, and so far Arcen has a great track record for letting me juggle things into configurations that do work for me (and would be horrible for anyone else). :-)

Chris_McElligottPark

May 18, 2015 12:50 pm

administrator   ~0040956

Oh, okay then -- yeah, there are a number of settings that you can change in order to make it more convenient for you, in that case. I'm not sure if exactly what you described above would work in terms of what takes primacy versus what all happens at once, but we'll cross that bridge when we get to it. All of the stuff is fully configurable, anyhow, so if you want to use the K key instead of left mouse button to be your "mouse button," you can technically do that!

ptarth

May 22, 2015 11:50 am

reporter   ~0041047

I still find the lack of right click to cancel building frustrating. I'm working on getting over it, but I thought you might want to keep track of my inner turmoil.

jerith

May 22, 2015 1:04 pm

reporter   ~0041050

Likewise. I also find the right-click-closes-window thing a little disconcerting. (Not requesting changes, just noting that the current setup doesn't work all that well for me.)

ptarth

May 22, 2015 1:38 pm

reporter   ~0041054

Last edited: May 22, 2015 1:39 pm

I'll go ahead and bite the bullet and say I still think I'm right and it should be right click to close when a building is selected. ;)

nas1m

May 23, 2015 11:20 am

reporter   ~0041088

I would second this as well.

Miikka Ryökäs

May 23, 2015 1:07 pm

reporter   ~0041089

How's double-clicking?

Mick

May 27, 2015 11:08 am

reporter   ~0041273

"I'll go ahead and bite the bullet and say I still think I'm right and it should be right click to close when a building is selected. ;)"

Thirded. I'm saddened to find it was actually changed AWAY from this. :(

Chris_McElligottPark

May 27, 2015 11:12 am

administrator   ~0041274

Yep, I have to say that I agree.

Chris_McElligottPark

May 27, 2015 12:53 pm

administrator   ~0041276

Hoorah:

* Some mouse handling changes:
** The ability to drag the view via the middle mouse button has been removed. If you'd like to rebind those controls, of course you can. But right now the only way to do it is with the left mouse button, which is what is likely most commonly expected from players of other 4X games.

* Left clicking your district centers no longer opens the city management window, and left-clicking science or linguistics buildings no longer opens up their subscreens.
** Left clicking scouts and sonar stations does still open their mode, though. Same with attacker buildings.
** The general rule here is that if it changes gui modes on the screen you are in, that's fine (and actually really nice). But if you're being taken to a subscreen, then that was disconcerting and people didn't like that. Plus there are already direct icons for all those things (well, except linguistics) right on the screen.

* The game now consistently uses right-click, including the currently open left sidebar section.
** To view the details of a tile or tech or whatever, you now have to either middle-click or ctrl+left-click.
*** You can rebind the Ctrl key to be something else.

Issue History

Date Modified Username Field Change
Apr 15, 2015 2:47 am TheVampire100 New Issue
Apr 15, 2015 8:24 am Chris_McElligottPark Assigned To => Chris_McElligottPark
Apr 15, 2015 8:24 am Chris_McElligottPark Status new => assigned
Apr 15, 2015 8:26 am Chris_McElligottPark Note Added: 0039981
May 18, 2015 10:50 am keith.lamothe Note Added: 0040936
May 18, 2015 10:50 am keith.lamothe Status assigned => resolved
May 18, 2015 10:50 am keith.lamothe Fixed in Version => 0.822 (Revised Mouse Controls)
May 18, 2015 10:50 am keith.lamothe Resolution open => fixed
May 18, 2015 11:40 am ptarth Note Added: 0040939
May 18, 2015 11:46 am jerith Note Added: 0040941
May 18, 2015 11:46 am Chris_McElligottPark Note Added: 0040942
May 18, 2015 11:52 am jerith Note Added: 0040943
May 18, 2015 11:54 am ptarth Note Added: 0040945
May 18, 2015 12:07 pm Chris_McElligottPark Note Added: 0040946
May 18, 2015 12:12 pm jerith Note Added: 0040947
May 18, 2015 12:16 pm jerith Note Added: 0040948
May 18, 2015 12:17 pm ptarth Note Added: 0040949
May 18, 2015 12:18 pm ptarth Note Edited: 0040949
May 18, 2015 12:22 pm ptarth Note Edited: 0040945
May 18, 2015 12:32 pm Chris_McElligottPark Note Added: 0040952
May 18, 2015 12:48 pm jerith Note Added: 0040955
May 18, 2015 12:50 pm Chris_McElligottPark Note Added: 0040956
May 22, 2015 11:50 am ptarth Note Added: 0041047
May 22, 2015 1:04 pm jerith Note Added: 0041050
May 22, 2015 1:38 pm ptarth Note Added: 0041054
May 22, 2015 1:39 pm ptarth Note Edited: 0041054
May 23, 2015 9:50 am ptarth Relationship added related to 0016805
May 23, 2015 11:20 am nas1m Note Added: 0041088
May 23, 2015 1:07 pm Miikka Ryökäs Note Added: 0041089
May 27, 2015 11:08 am Mick Note Added: 0041273
May 27, 2015 11:12 am Chris_McElligottPark Note Added: 0041274
May 27, 2015 12:53 pm Chris_McElligottPark Note Added: 0041276