Split mex t2/t3 upgrade hotkey

@blackyps said in Split mex t2/t3 upgrade hotkey:

People are capable of pressing hotkeys for units in factories just once. Nobody complains that they get too many scouts queued because they autistically spam the hotkey like they spam their move orders. I fail to see why we need to make everything a choice in the game, when there is clearly a good solution but some people insist on the game accommodating to their style of play.
We recently talked about how having to many options can make things actually worse. A small ui mod that introduces a separate upgrade key should solve this problem without cluttering the options of all players.

I do that sometimes because of input lag. Which brings another annoyance thing that I think recently happened. I can’t cancel things in my queue with a simple right click a lot of the time and now instead just need to go and soft stop and redo my entire queue.

The mex upgrade stuff tends to also happen with input lag making you think an order didnt register.

I made an accidental T3 mex a few times because of this but it's not really an issue anymore.

Ok, I've changed my mind. Having select idle t1 mex & select idle t2 mex would be much better and would also make this obsolete.
And I'll also admit it may have been a bit of skill issue salt.

Are you aware of the "select nearest idle lowest tier mex" hotkey?

I've seen accidental t3 mexes in a ton of games. I think it's worth waiting to see how often it's happening in a couple of months once people adjust. A UI mod is also possible I guess?

There's going to be a new feature where you can right click an extractor and it starts auto upgrading, pauses and then unpauses as your engineers start assisting. I expect this will replace the use of a hotkey to upgrade a tech 1 extractor.

Could some that have issues try it out, give some feedback? You can find it on the FAF Develop game type.

@jip said in Split mex t2/t3 upgrade hotkey:

There's going to be a new feature where you can right click an extractor and it starts auto upgrading, pauses and then unpauses as your engineers start assisting. I expect this will replace the use of a hotkey to upgrade a tech 1 extractor.

I doubt it can replace the use of the hotkey for upgrading entirely, as one of the main benefits of upgrading a mex via hotkey is that you don't have to move your camera or mouse to do so.

The new feature is still a great addition though and one I'll use a lot for sure

@jip Either I get smth wrong or it doesn't really fix the problem since especially early on you want to use the buildpower of the mex as well. If I read that correctly the mexes don't upgrade until the engis assist it and since most engis expand early on, all the other mexes simply don't upgrade?

In that use case you'd want to do it manually, yes. What I usually have is a group of 2 - 4 engineers that upgrade extractors one-by-one to focus the build power. As they start assisting, the extractor unpauses.

My main problem mainly is that I upgrade a mex early on, then see I have mass, select more mexes and smts select the upgrading ones as well by accident cuz I bind my first mexes to the hotkeys 3-5. -> T3 upgrade queues without me noticing since that takes 1 second. So that problem (at least for me) still exists but could be that it's just a thing I have to get used to now

Sounds like a very unusual way to upgrade mexes tbh

This thread made me think of this: https://xkcd.com/1172/

I made this mod that prevents mex's from double upgrading. Might help solve the issue.

What's it do exactly? Prevent queueing the next mex upgrade?

Yeah just looked at it, that's what it does.

Still seeing lots of accidental T3 mexes deciding high level ladder games. It will be a problem perpetually since most of these people aren't active regularly so there will always be people coming in that are not adjusted to the change, and do not know it was made.

Similarly, hotbuild seems to have been made a bit more finicky with switching buildings so you can often make accidental air factories or other things.

It is pretty criminal to be constantly changing the UI of a 17 year old game and messing up everyones muscle memory. Many prominent members of the community are inactive for months at a time, and each time they come back there will be different random UI quirks and new stupid features that are enabled by default, along with a new group of UI mods that were broken and have to be replaced.

Similarly, hotbuild seems to have been made a bit more finicky with switching buildings so you can often make accidental air factories or other things.

This was reported and fixed, will be shipped with the hotfix of tomorrow.

It is pretty criminal to be constantly changing the UI

Usually these are accidental. We're open to feedback, but we can't process feedback that we don't have

It is pretty criminal to be constantly changing the UI of a 17 year old game and messing up everyones muscle memory. Many prominent members of the community are inactive for months at a time, and each time they come back there will be different random UI quirks and new stupid features that are enabled by default, along with a new group of UI mods that were broken and have to be replaced.

"Keep the game fresh otherwise FAF will slowly die"
"No, not like that"

You can't win

Pretty big difference between changing gameplay and changing the UI and controls.

It is clearly a deliberate choice to add new UI things like automatic mex selection with cursor, auto-ringing, reclaim batching, changing upgrade key behavior, and it's a deliberate choice to enable them by default. And it has the side effect of breaking UI mods people have been using for a long time.

It creates a barrier for any player returning from hiatus since they have to go through the interface options and mod vault trying to restore the UI to how it was when they last played.

These things would be good changes in a new game, or in development game, but it's not great for an ancient game that people just come back to from time to time.

I think with faf-develop being played so little, there are always going to be bugs that slip through and you can't fault the contributors for that, especially when they are quick on getting the fixes done once issues are identified.

Ideally we find some to encourage it to be played more - and also a way to avoid downloading the regular game files when going back to normal games.

for intentional changes to actual ui behaviour these should be defaulted to what you currently have in your game.prefs however.

I actually ended up installing Spikey's mod that stops you from upgrading mexes from t1 to t3 with the hotkey. There's just no upside and potentially a massive downside when you start a t3 mex upgrade by accident.