Action based Cursors

[Ishmaru]

I think Megaglest would benefit from having its cursor change states depending on what action will be taken when user clicks.
For example:

When no units selected:
Cursor not over unit or building=Normal Cursor
Cursor over unit or building = Selection Cursor

When uinit is selected:
Cursor over ground = Normal Cursor
Cursor over non walkable (water + Tileset) = No Walk Cursor
Cursor over enemy unit =  Target Cursor
Cursor over a resource = Harvest Cursor
Cursor over repairable unit = Repair Cursor

Just to make sure we are on same page, I mean something like the cursor from Red Alert:


The icons change to attack icon when hovering over target, to show what action would be taken when a user right clicks.

It would be great if the cursor could be animated too but not as important And of course customizable cursor sets would be great too!

[Omega]

GAE displays the icon of a command with the cursor when a command is selected. That could work pretty good.

[Coldfusionstorm]

Make it optionable, as most other things .

[uncle]

Good idea.

Inspiration from Starcraft (consider implementing cursors changing when moving the map):


(http://gnome-look.org/content/show.php/Starcraft+Cursor+Theme?content=123277)

[titi]

hm, what ishmaru suggests is a bit complicated, what about this:

If you select an action ( like attack ) and you have to give a location/target for this action your curser changes to the cursor image coming with the command, or as Omega said a combined cursor with normal cursor + the icon of the command itself ....

I think thats more useful and easier to do .

[MuwuM]

If you select an action ( like attack ) and you have to give a location/target for this action your curser changes to the cursor image coming with the command, or as Omega said a combined cursor with normal cursor + the icon of the command itself ....

Yes, that sounds good, but it would be also helpful to have 2 cursors like

When no units selected:
Cursor not over unit or building=Normal Cursor
Cursor over unit or building = Selection Cursor (maybe only a green version of default cursor)

yellow was a comment by me.

[titi]

I have a lot of these things working now , but I am not sure if its really good . The cursor changes all the time .. a bit annoying.

Problems at the moment:
- What to do if you have several selected units and they all have an attack command, but different ones. What to display?
- Setting meetingpoint does not effect the cursor.

not implemented yet: special cursors

-----------------
new idea:
What about a faction specific cursor for each command type that can be given?
----------------
 

[Omega]

- What to do if you have several selected units and they all have an attack command, but different ones. What to display?

It would display the same single icon that is displayed in the regular GUI (see this image). I'm not entirely sure how that icon is chosen, but the same one should be used for the cursor.

[Ishmaru]

It would be easiest if all attacks had same attack icon.

What's the problem with changeing the cursor? Many mainstream rts like starcraft + comand and conquer, dune use different cursors. Let me try to draw some icons and see if I could make it clearer.

Just to make sure we are on same page, I mean something like the cursor from Red Alert:


The icons change to attack icon when hovering over target, to show what action would be taken when a user right clicks.

Good idea.

Inspiration from Starcraft (consider implementing cursors changing when moving the map):


(http://gnome-look.org/content/show.php/Starcraft+Cursor+Theme?content=123277)

these are an extreme but close to what I ment.

[Omega]

The problem with using one icon per command type (that is, one icon for all attack commands, etc) is that radically different commands would also have to use this icon. Take repair, for example. It's not uncommon to have two repair different "types" of repair skills, one used to repair buildings and the other being a traditional "healing" for regular units.

[Ishmaru]

We could have more icons, but the more complex this gets the more I fear it wont get implemented...

Alternatively, the cursors could be same but different colors:
White= Normal
Red= Attack
Green= Move
Blue = Heal/Repair/Build
Yellow= Harvest
etc
Just cursor should be more noticeable

This is what i really want out of this:

The real reason I proposed this is because their is no "feedback" to know that when right click an enemy or resource that the selected unit will attack or harvest. There is a lot of time where i miss a enemy unit by a pixel or two because its small size, or because its moving, or because the animation and the result is my army walking right up to the enemy instead of shooting the enemy. In a normal glest game its annoying and in a fast pace environment its DEVISTATING. I know that if i can see my cursor change (even a simple color change) when i hover over an enemy unit/resource I can make more precise clicks and prevent this problem.

To be honest this is my biggest concern. However the system is done, is ok as long as it has what I said above.

[titi]

What I did now is not exactly what you wanted first, but gives more feedback to the player than before ( we talked about it a bit in the chat too ).

Now every command given with the right mousebutton, which has as a target a unit or a resource, is highlighted for a second with an animated circle around the unit which gets smaller. This is very obvious and you insantly know what you clicked.

Beside of this the cursor now shows an image with the action when you have two click commands.
Looks like this:

 

[Ishmaru]

Tried this in svn and it looks works great! Thank you!

[MuwuM]

Maybe it would be nice to change the color of the blue circle to grey if the target is not suitable for the command:

Harvest-command + Ressource -> blue
Attack-command + unit -> blue (or red)
Harvest-command + unit -> grey
Attack-command + ressource -> grey

But atm the feature is great-looking 

[uncle]

The color of the cursor must to be bright and with a high contrast even when played on a tilest similar to desert (bright soil). Keep that in mind.

[Coldfusionstorm]

Does this support seperate cusor texture?, i find that just taking the picture of a icon is a little limited.