[Freeciv-Dev] Re: Mouse selection

["Pierre de Mouveaux" <p_de_mouveaux@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Well, Corey,

the 'g' key is OK to enter a city or a stack, thats perfectly true!

I tried Freeciv yesterday.
I show the app to a friend who played *a lot* CIV I, and was disapointed 
with the keyboard-only controls. Also, think of playng with some laptop 
keyboards...
I then added this functionality. Big jump in an unknown code!. But easy job, 
due to it's good structuration!
It took a couple of hours to do the modificaions, getting the 'general 
feeling' of the code, and a lot of "fgrep -n "get_unit_on_focus()" *{.c,.h}" 
and the like!
On the question of using CTRL key for entering cities or stacking units on a 
tile while left clicking on adjacent tiles:
For me, holding the CTRL key was a 'natural' gesture to 'force' the mouse 
click to behave in an 'alternative' way (notice all the quotes, as it's a 
very personal point of view!)
At first, I sent the new unit position directly to the server, using the 
same mechanism as the 'goto' function. It had the un-esthetical 
particularity to draw a flashing "G" in the upper right corner of the unit's 
icon, and this "G" sometimes got stucked!!! (Seems that the server sometimes 
needs complementary informations to process the goto state. Maybe a status 
flag in the units data structure?).
Using 'g' is also certainly a mater of experience with the game. I belive 
that experienced users makes a huge usage of the 'g' key;-)).
Notice that unlige the 'g' function, the mouse alows only moves to adjacent 
tiles. This is not a bug, but (truely) a feature;-)))). It mimics the 
original Civ behaviour.
Maybe, the 'g' key is more related to long distance (premedited!) moves, and 
the CTRL key feels more like a 'mouse modifier' in immediate moves? Well, 
it's all a matter of taste!
To be complete, I would say that there could be a more sophisticated way to 
achieve the goal of differencing mouse actions on owened units or cities. 
Here's a way that seem to be coherent with current 'look&feel' of the 
civclient application.
- Have some popups that apears in the following situations:
   - If the selected unit is adjacent to a city and we click on that
     city, have a popup (like with stacked units) with 2 butons:
       - "Complete move"
       - "Enter city"
   - If selected unit is adjacent to an other owned unit (stacked or
     not), and we want to go on the same tile, we open the "select
     unit" popup (the one for stacked units) with a suplementary
     button (on top) "Complete move".
- Or maybe have an alternative mouse buttons assignement, if mouse
 moves enabled (right mouse to select cities and units, reserve left
 button to unit moves, use 'c' or CTRL-click to center view)? Should
 be user selectable in preferences dialogs, to avoid disturbing
 seasoned players!

Anyway, I don't know if these patch are of general interest: moving units 
with the mouse, like in the original Civ, doesn't seem to be in the wishlist 
for the game! AI improvement is far more usefull... and interesting!
[I also noticed a slight modification in the 1.8.3 source code. If people 
are interested, I can make diffs against the latest beta version].
Pierre.

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