Individual Unit Selection Frame UI Discussion

Hey,

This is something that has been irking me for a while!

Basically, I would like a individual unit selection frame at the bottom ala SC2 and War3. One suggestion is to have a 5*8 board, or 4x10 board. I think a simple portrait and 2 bars below for hp and plate\cd\charges is what people would be most happy with.

On a relate topic, I also think that shift box select should remove from selection. One problem is that people try and shift click very fast, and they move a single pixel with mice and it registers as shift box, which doesn't remove the unit from the group. This is really annoying, and unintuitive, especially coming from SC2.

Comments

  • TokOwa forced me to write that I agree

  • I agree with both these points. Both of them as been bugging me alot.

  • Very agree with the first point !

  • Yes, both things are very important!

  • SirSir Member

    Individual unit selection frame is a valid concern, though it has some UI design implications. Could you elaborate on what use cases it solves? Maybe they overlap those and both could be solved with the same features.

    The shift box select removing from selection thing is absolutely necessary!

  • @Sir said:
    Individual unit selection frame is a valid concern, though it has some UI design implications. Could you elaborate on what use cases it solves? Maybe they overlap those and both could be solved with the same features.

    Hey, I looked through the thread and it doesn't seem like a good solution to me. I'm also not 100% sure of which implementation that is being referred to so I'll stick to the OP. For me personally, the act of warping in and the act of unit control is two independent actions. Tying them together creates a scheme that caters only to a specific kind of user, while being ambiguous to others and potentially harmful in certain situations. E.g. I use my engineer and then warp in, now I have the warped in units on my engineer group. I don't want this.

    My suggestion which is basically what is being done in SC2 and Wc3 allows a player to quickly sort out units in any kind of dimension:

    • If I want to pull back my injured units, cool, I can do that by shift clicking all my injured units.
    • If I want to send a mixed group to the bottom right, I can move -> shift click the units I want -> Remake the unit groups.
    • If I want to select a certain unit type, I can control click that unit type.
    • If I want to exclude a certain unit type, I can control+shift+click that unit type.

    Why is this a clear improvement over the current scheme? Because I might want to create smaller groups that are a mix of certain units, rather than just a certain unit type. I might want 2 hit squads with 2 dervishes and an apocalyte rather than gather all my casters in one group.

    Some additional benefit:

    • Gives players a constant quick overview over the selected units.
    • I can select specific units and control them via the unit frame reliably, as opposed to having to click them on the map, which gets difficult when units are really quick. Currently selecting a single unit on the map is surprisingly difficult due to the 2nd issue in this thread's OP.

    The big difference between this post and the other post is that this one relates to the overall ease of organising your squad, while the other threads seem to integrate the organisation into the warp-in which I don't think is a good way of doing it. I think if we had this easy way of organising the squad that I suggest here, we probably solve around 75% of the issues that the other thread has.

  • This is such a fundamental thing that I can barely fathom that we are even discussing it... The devs surely must have considered this and it would be interesting to hear what their stance on it is.

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