hrm, yea a numpad-based quick key dealy is a pretty easy sell, but as i2amroy says, we’re sooo busy with other stuff I’m not sure when that would happen. I do like radial menus in general, possibly even a heirarchial one, so you have chained combos, like so:
7 8 7 8 9 8 9
\| \|/ |/
4-7 8 9-6
\ | /
7 \ | / 9
\ \|/ /
4-4---5---6-6
/ /|\ \
1 / | \ 3
/ | \
4-1 2 3-6
/| /|\ |\
1 2 1 2 3 2 3
Either 5 or some other hotkey would start menu interaction, then you’d hit numpad keys to chose the action. Meanwhile it would display a menu that displays where you are in the command tree. This sounds terribly complicated, but if you’ve used a radial menu, you know how this works, it’s very intuitive, and it tells you what the options are at each step of the way. In practice, you learn the key combos for the commands you actually use a lot very rapidly, but it also gives you prompts when you’re new to the system, and you can always navigate around the tree (‘5’ backs out by a level, so you can go back and chose a different branch).
In actual use, you’d want to cluster similar commands together, so maybe ‘7’ gets assigned crafting comands, and 7-4 gets craft, 7-7 gets construct, and 7-8 gets disassemble. Meanwhile, 9 might be ranged attacks, with 9-8 getting throw, 9-6 getting fire, and 9-9 getting reload.
There are a bunch of variants, for example instead of the ‘7’ cluster being like above, you can widen it out to be like:
[code]
7 8 9
|/
4-7-6
/|
1 2
5
This reduces the depth of the tree, but loses the "directionality" of the pattern I posted first.
The nice thing is, we could implement it such that it handles both, pick some default that we think works well, but then players could reconfigure it to their preference.
