Quick ship movement suggestiosn

I'd really like a way to select a ship without resetting its autopilot. Perhaps via right-click?

-Robert

If it's not too hard to implement, maybe a solution is to highlight in the mini-map the destination quadrant of a ship on auto-pilot if the mouse pointer is on the ship. This would be a lot like the popup help for some of the buttons in the UI.

Bert said "... mini-map the destination quadrant ...".

Quadrant? That implies one of four of something. Have you noticed that everything in GC/Win calls the squares in the minimap as "segments"? Since there was one h*** of an outcry with GC/OS2 when they were called quadrants I suspect Brad chose not to make the same mistake this time.

clicking on ships in mini-map can be a real pain in the ass when playing on huge maps

Lucky,

I looked at the game screen when I got home, and they are called sectors, so quadrants is incorrect. I was not aware of the controversy in GC OS/2. I think it's splitting hairs, but I don't want to go there

Bert

Bert,

Sometimes hairs have to be split to maintain understandable communication, such as the distinction between a defection and a rebellion. Sometimes it is something that just draws you (or me) up short, such as quadrant vs sector. With GalCiv (as with Star Trek) when someone says quadrant I thinik one quarter of the galaxy. A quadrant of a circle is a particular quarter of that circle to me. Etc..

We can't use right click to select a ship without canceling its autopilot, because right-click is what you use to set the destination.

The mouseover suggestion would probably slow the game down because it would have to to do constant hit detection whenever your mouse was somewhere on the sectormap, and it would definitely take time to code it correctly, because it would have to not interfere with the scrolling/dragging code.


I have added 2 sort options to the ship list: sector and destination sector (listed as destination), which should help.

I could add the destination cursors to the mouse hit detection so that if you left clicked on one, it could bring up the ship list filtered to show all of your ships that were headed for that tile.

I see that you can select a ship without cancelling its autopilot from the ship list, so why not just make that the default? That is, when you select a ship, the autopitlot just doesn't get cancelled. Maybe it stops, but if you don't change the destination, it will continue on eventually.

The ship list idea is nice--what I think eSnaffu might be getting at is something like a colored square around a ship's destination sector (or something finer-grained like a little circle) on the minimap when the ship is selected.

Here's an unrelated mini-map suggestion--when you select the "show stars", "show ships" etc. options, the items in question "flash" a few times on the minimap. If you like the idea, then maybe a sub-button for each category that triggers the flashing (or turns it on and off). If you want to go further, a way to pick a race and flash their assets (in the minimap!--get your mind out of the gutter! :D).

-Robert

That smiley should have been LOL .

-Robert

robert u r so english