Suggestion: "Precise mouse mode"

[Nicant]

Watching a few streams on CW4, I had the idea of holding a key to slow the mouse cursor down a bit to be more precise when building units/painting terrain. For example, if you hold down the Alt key, your mouse cursor will slow down and you can place units more accurately(Like the tower/collector unit). Any thoughts?

[Karsten75]

I wonder if that could help with "drawing" straight lines for terraforming or terrain in the editor.

[knucracker]

I use a hardware cursor... so cursor movement doesn't get sluggish on machines where the game runs slowly.  So the only thing I think I can control is the image of the cursor.  The movement is under the control of the OS (and it is more complicated that you might think... it isn't a linear response on either windows or the mac, and the movement curve on MacOS is different than under windows, can be configured, etc.)

[Karsten75]

And I recently found out that Windows basically ignores the mouse acceleration  settings. :)

[Nicant]

Ah, that sucks. Thanks for responding!

[Ionizer]

I wonder if that could help with "drawing" straight lines for terraforming or terrain in the editor.

A few ideas.

A modifier key that locks the mouse direction to a single axis.  Other games/paint/drawing programs do this.

Click and drag a line to draw/erase/modify terrain.   Line/circle/square filled/unfilled tools.

[MrMikey]

You guys really need to get a mouse with a snipe button (lowers dpi) or learn how to (abuse) autohotkey - That software can do exactly what you ask (and its freeware), can lock the mouse input to one axis or change the dpi with a keypress. Just requires some basic script language knowhow and it has tons of good tutorials/already made scripts so ite really easy to get into.

If you haven't heard about it... geez - Prepared to get amazed how far script automation have gone (using it with excel com objects etc nearly have automated myself out of work if they found out :)). So in a way... the software made it possible for me top get time to post this tip to you while still "working"

Only issue i can see with this is with a rotatable/isom map... Ie X/Y aren't constants, then some real support are needed in the game. That said a simple key bind with a speed modifier for mouse input shouldn't be many lines of code (Sorry Virgilvv for spilling the beans :))

[JoaoPistori]

My suggestion is: A way to draw terrain not by cells, but by drawing lines, as if we were drawing a blueprint. When drawing complex terrain cell by cell my hand hurts a lot.

The idea is to draw connected lines like we were drawing a polygon, and once the polygon is closed, the selected terrain level is drawn completely inside that polygon (of course, you can't draw 0.8, 0.1, 0.9 cell, so the value has to be rounded).

This can be implemented via scripts (CRPL/4RPL), of course, but would be nice if the engine already had those functions, making it easier and faster to start drawing terrain. For rectangles it might be easy with script cores; for complex shapes it might be not, requiring the creation of smaller sectors/nodes by the engine/script to be able to draw the terrain inside that complex drawing. That's basically the way a first-person 3D game generates the nodes for physics, texture display and etc. I know the engine is completely different, but it would only process those sectors/nodes to draw the terrain and then it's done and it (the engine) doesn't have to worry with them anymore.

Another way to do it indirectly in CW4 is by drawing the polygons on a blank image, and then import the image with the built-in function that transforms image into terrain, which is already a big help. Some functions of PaintNet can also help a lot for "anti-aliasing terrain".

There's a big difference between "focusing on the problem" and "focusing on the solution".

[Jaycephus]

The Logitech G600 mouse is a dirt-cheap "MMO" mouse with lots of buttons, and the software to customize them all. Plus, one click can change the key mapping to a second and third customization. One thing you can customize is the mouse speed, and you can switch back and forth between multiple speed setups. So you can click to super-slow speed as you place something, and immediately click back to normal mouse speed after you are done.
There are probably a wide range of gaming mice that do this, but I've had this mouse for two years or so, and it really is very cheap right now.

[chwooly]

in CW3 when I am terraforming a long line I just hold down the mouse button and use the arrow keys to move the map, It works in PF as well, I get straight lines and it saves me aggro from having lines all over the place. As I haven't made a map in years, I can't say for sure that it works in the editor but logically I don't see why it wouldn't. I also don't see why that would change in CW4 unless WASD is not going to implemented in it for some reason.


Cheers

[Karsten75]

For the record:

CW4 now implements forced straight cursor movement along either the x- or z-axis. Just hold down the Ctrl key while building units, altering terrain, terraforming and most other activities involving cursor movement that might require a straight line. 

Oh, and if you are wondering about that "z-axis" thing, that's one of the two coordinates for moving on a plane in 3D.  Blame Unity.