Commo Rose: You're doing it wrong.
HeatSurge
Some Guy Join Date: 2012-09-15 Member: 159438Members, Reinforced - Supporter
Some Guy Join Date: 2012-09-15 Member: 159438Members, Reinforced - Supporter
OK, I think I was actually listened to back in the day a year ago towards the end of the beta when I suggested a commo rose a la battlefield games.
Thanks for taking the suggestion and implementing it, I think it's really quite useful and I like it a lot more than having all those commands on keys on the keyboard. It works fine, however, if someone at the studio wants a nice pet UI project, I think it would be good to revisit it for a slight polish and to make it perfect.
Refer to this BF 2142 video:
First issue: The commo rose shouldn't have a mouse pointer.
It shouldn't be needed to actually aim a pointer at boxes on the screen. This slows down the commo rose, making it more painful and slower to use in a fast-paced game like ns2. You should be able to just "jam" the mouse towards a direction and issue the command. This would make the commo rose much faster and easier to use.
Second issue: The command shouldn't require a mouse click.
Press commo rose key, jam mouse, release commo rose key. The command highlighted is executed. Saves a mouse click, makes the commo rose less annoying to use, and again, faster.
Third issue: The commands should be 'direction specific' as much as possible.
For example, in BF, the "up" direction was "go go go", "down" was "follow me" or "get out" in vehicles. "up left" was "yes" / "up right" was "no"... etc. etc. This might not necessarily apply to NS2, but generally it would be nice for memorization to have the commands make sense as much as possible ("up" = go go go, "down" = wait, "center" = alien spotted, or something to that effect).
Fourth issue: It should be symmetrical and sectional.
I'm not sure how many commands there are now, and if they can be in pairs, but the size of the "sectors" where you jam the mouse should probably be equal, symmetrical, or predictable. It's just nice that way.
Also, I think it would be perfect to have the center button (which was a smart "spot" command in BF games, automatically spotting whatever you were looking at using in-game chat) as a "alien spotted" button on marines. I'm not sure what you should put there on aliens though, maybe nothing? Asymmetry ftw, amirite?
Anyway, this is probably pretty low on the list after the almighty "moar optimization plz" and fixing crashes etc., but I just wanted to voice my concerns there :-P . Ty for reading.
Edit: If someone has any other suggestions on how to make it better WITH MINIMAL WORK (i.e. without recording new voiceovers, etc.), feel free to post... At this stage of the game development, I doubt they'll record additional voice samples and make them sound like the original, nor is it really that necessary imo. I guess you never know though.
Thanks for taking the suggestion and implementing it, I think it's really quite useful and I like it a lot more than having all those commands on keys on the keyboard. It works fine, however, if someone at the studio wants a nice pet UI project, I think it would be good to revisit it for a slight polish and to make it perfect.
Refer to this BF 2142 video:
First issue: The commo rose shouldn't have a mouse pointer.
It shouldn't be needed to actually aim a pointer at boxes on the screen. This slows down the commo rose, making it more painful and slower to use in a fast-paced game like ns2. You should be able to just "jam" the mouse towards a direction and issue the command. This would make the commo rose much faster and easier to use.
Second issue: The command shouldn't require a mouse click.
Press commo rose key, jam mouse, release commo rose key. The command highlighted is executed. Saves a mouse click, makes the commo rose less annoying to use, and again, faster.
Third issue: The commands should be 'direction specific' as much as possible.
For example, in BF, the "up" direction was "go go go", "down" was "follow me" or "get out" in vehicles. "up left" was "yes" / "up right" was "no"... etc. etc. This might not necessarily apply to NS2, but generally it would be nice for memorization to have the commands make sense as much as possible ("up" = go go go, "down" = wait, "center" = alien spotted, or something to that effect).
Fourth issue: It should be symmetrical and sectional.
I'm not sure how many commands there are now, and if they can be in pairs, but the size of the "sectors" where you jam the mouse should probably be equal, symmetrical, or predictable. It's just nice that way.
Also, I think it would be perfect to have the center button (which was a smart "spot" command in BF games, automatically spotting whatever you were looking at using in-game chat) as a "alien spotted" button on marines. I'm not sure what you should put there on aliens though, maybe nothing? Asymmetry ftw, amirite?
Anyway, this is probably pretty low on the list after the almighty "moar optimization plz" and fixing crashes etc., but I just wanted to voice my concerns there :-P . Ty for reading.
Edit: If someone has any other suggestions on how to make it better WITH MINIMAL WORK (i.e. without recording new voiceovers, etc.), feel free to post... At this stage of the game development, I doubt they'll record additional voice samples and make them sound like the original, nor is it really that necessary imo. I guess you never know though.
Comments
You can already bind most of the useful ones. I have no idea why they didn't include "Need weld" but I stopped trying to understand UWE logic a long time ago.
Binds suck and are useless IMO, which is where the commo rose rocks.
Also the "go go go" is already in - there's a command that says "let's move" or "let's go" on marines. I'm suggesting that it's moved to the "up" position. Up=forward=go. Makes sense?
Oh... kay...
Wait...what? Who said that.
Samus never said that. He said if someone improved the rose menu via a workshop mod, it wouldn't pass consistency checking on any server. And even if someone did, it would never be implemented by UWE officially.
(back to topic) I do however see what he is saying. I would prefer to just move the mouse in the direction of the choice I wanted not having to use it to move an actual mouse cursor.
I think 'GOGOGO' would be very usefull for pub play to get some mob / wolfpack action going (for once).
(side note)BF 2142 is the best multiplayer game I've seen so far, albeit with a few rough edges.
The last thing I want to deal with when trying to be alert because a good player can kill you in .3-.5 seconds is moving my fingers off the critical keys they need to be on to access a faraway bind. The commo rose is an extremely effective way of reducing that motion.
I have put about 1000 hours into BF2142 and it is hands down my favorite multiplayer of all time (sorry ns2). The com rose was ESSENTIAL to that game since you needed about 10 different things to request at a time. With a game like ns2 you perhaps need only 3 buttons to press for requests, but it doesn't make it faster. Having said that though, even with the binds a good com rose will always be faster than different button presses. Instead of having to put your commands into 3 different key binds, you put them all in one, and a flick with a mouse. 3 keybinds is cumbersome. It feels like you are cramming keys to press on a keyboard. What happens when you run out of keys to bind? Will you put them all the way out to H? because that is one of the binds. WHat happens when you press G instead of H in the most crucial moment? it isn't fluid and its unintuitive. The com rose is a better option overall.
Still played it more than BF3. Nothing beats the old feeling of BF2 though. I miss that.
Titan mode on 2142, albeit buggy and quite unstable totally rocked my world. It certainly wasnt the best quality BF game, but I did have a great deal of fun playing it.
I cant help but feel like this is a comment coming from someone who has never used a commo-rose extensively and just disregards it as something for console only that has no place on PC. I found the one in BF3 for example once I learned my way around it to be a very efficient way of getting out commands which I pulled off just as quick as I would be able to hit a single button press.
Maybe its just a preference thing but I sometimes find it hard to conveniently place all the keybinds I would want around my keyboard in a comfortable easy to navigate manner. In BF3 for example I had the commo rose on Q and I could access all the commands I needed with ease, all off of a single bind.
More to the point, I see it as a preference thing. There may well be an optimal solution if you are playing at the highest level, but for many players a well designed and improved commo rose would be a nice feature.
The comm rose in BF3 was horrible. It was nigh impossible to select a command that wasn't in the corner.
Personally I never bothered using the commo in NS2 short of goofing about. All the important requests are bound by default and taunt has a special key on the mouse.
Agreed, anything worth using gets a hotkey on the keyboard by default. Imagine having to request a medpack with the commo while fighting of a skulk.
These changes to the existing commo sound solid though.
No, they dont
Can we all agree, fans of commo rose or not, that the current one in ns2 could do with a little rehash, just to make it so you dont have to click on a teeny-tiny oval to get the command you want? You should indeed just be able to drag in a direction and release the key to use a command. Or even just make the hitboxes for the current commands bigger, that's a minor change and would make it expontentially more comfortable to use
This isn't a problem with the commo rose, and yes - when I played BF2/2142 lots of people used the commo rose. BC2 is when things started to get stupid/COD-y, because there was no commander anymore, and on top of that regen health, and the maps were much smaller, so in favor of squad movement, it was more about twitch/corner shooting. So no need for anything beyond requesting ammo from people...
But anyway, again, whether you like it or not, it's already in the game. The thread is about improving on what's already in the game, not qq/^^ about the concept.