Quality of Life Improvements

As I've been getting the game out there more, there's a couple of features that many players have mentioned the game is missing.

1. Waypoints

Yep, this one has been a sore spot for many players. They're kind of a pain to implement, but they've also been a staple of the genre since...at least 1998? So I finally got around to putting them in.

2. Keymappings

One of the biggest requests I get is "I want this hotkey to be [insert key name here]". However there isn't much consistency between players. Some want to use WASD to pan around the map. Others want the button grid to match their keyboard layout. Since it's hard to know what a player is going to want ahead of time, I've finally got around to implementing remappable hotkeys. This one was a major pain to implement, as the hotkeys were scattered all over the codebase, but I hope it will give some players a better experience.

3. Infantry unit symbols

I'm not sure how this one will go over, but someone pointed out that it can be difficult to tell infantry units apart, especially when you have a bunch selected. I'd be interested in hearing if this helps things or just clutters the UI.

4. Attack move

I thought this one deserved a special mention, as it has actually been in the game since at least March of 2018. Unfortunately, no one has been able to find it! See, when I originally wrote the UI, I thought it'd be cool if the hotkeys for building units matched the layout of your keyboard. Unfortunately this meant the A key would be for building units, not attacking. I figured, "no problem! I'll just use ctrl + right click for attack move!" Boy was that a mistake.

Playtesting has revealed that many players believe attack move doesn't exist in the game because it isn't where they expect it. I tried to work around this by tutorializing it in the second mission, but for players who ignore tutorial messages or go straight to skirmish mode, they completely miss this.

In the end, it was pointed out to me that even if ctrl + right click feels like a better fit for my game, I'm fighting decades worth of player experience that it should be A + left click (thanks Blizzard!). So I have finally yielded and given up on my grid based layout for building units (which also confused people) and switched to a more traditional control scheme.

Anyways, that's all for now. I hope these improvements help give some people a better gaming experience.