Suggestion: Using the mouse for movement

[PattyG]

When playing a mission I feel that you should be able to left click in a direction around your exo and have it move in that direction, rather than limiting movement to only the wasd keys. I think this style of movement would work well in a game such as this where the movement is turn based. An example of this type of movement can be seen in Dungeons of Dredmor where the player is able to use the mouse or wasd to move their character.

[x4000]

We did try this, but it was far too easy to mis-click and felt terrible.  I'm afraid it's not in the cards, apologies!

[PattyG]

That's a shame.

[x4000]

It felt incredibly, incredibly clunky.  And generally moving multiple tiles at a time is a super super bad idea anyhow -- if there are any enemy robots around, which there usually either are or soon will be.  Dredmor doesn't have so much ranged combat or (IIRC) quite so many enemies at once, so it wasn't as big of a thing.  And definitely your guy there is way less fragile.  Here if you give a long movement order and then your exos run into enemy fire, it needed to make the exo stop.  Or if the exo was about to run into the range of enemy detection, it needed to stop.  Etc. 

That's part of what made it so incredibly jerky to move around, because your exo was constantly disobeying and stopping in order to avoid getting shot up.  Prior to that, giving mouse movement orders was just generally suicide.  And before both, clicking near enemies was very often a big problem, because it was super easy to accidentally click where an enemy just moved out of and try to move there, rather than having it attack the tile, which is what you meant to do, etc.

TLDR: Bot deaths were abundant due to misclicks, and the movement felt jerky and unclean if we tried to help out with that.  So in the end this controls more like an FPS game.

[Mick]

I think you should reconsider.

It can be done in a way that isn't prone to misclicks if you limit the movement area to around the exo, and only allow a step at a time per-click. It should even have a visual indicator on the screen when the cursor is within a "click-to-move area", showing which direction the exo would move on a left click.

Other graphical roguelikes get by just fine allowing mouse click movement, I don't see why this one should be any different.

[Misery]

It can be done in a way that isn't prone to misclicks if you limit the movement area to around the exo, and only allow a step at a time per-click.

If I recall correctly wasnt this the way that Dredmor does it?   Not entirely sure about that as I often prefer to use the keyboard for it.  But I remember that the mouse movement wasnt at all problematic.

Done like that, it could work just fine for this game.  Theoretically.

[x4000]

Ranged combat is why.  Moving on a left click would work better now that left click doesn't handle the tooltips -- previously we had to do right-click.  But honestly this is a rat-hole in my opinion, a long slide into a lot of unpleasant stuff that can't be solved well.  Having all the enemies not only be ranged, but long ranged, and in numbers, just does not work for mouse movement. 

It sounds good until you really think it through, or in our case try it.  Giving a "simple move order" that takes you into a location that gets you shot up is Not Fun with capital letters.  It leads to doing lots of tiny clicks here and there, not doing the longer clicks like you might expect.

Only allowing a single step per click would of course solve the problems, but I can't imagine that anyone really wants that?  And since you can only move in cardinal directions, if someone clicks at an angle, what does that mean?  Go which direction first?  That decision is pretty important, because then that can determine if you get shot or not on that movement.  So then we wind up needing, what, some sort of predictive AI to make sure the pathing is optimal in terms of not getting shot.  Or players need to remember to not click diagonals.

Plus then we have this huge visual indicator all over the place any time your mouse cursor is anywhere in range of clicking, or else the visual indicator is so small people can't see it.  Or there's no visual indicator, and then it's not clear.

See what I mean about a rat hole?

One thing I could see working, if someone just hates touching the keyboard, would be to let players left click on the map tiles directly to the NSEW and have them move to that tile.  Or click and hold to move in that direction.  Basically substituting for the WASD keys, but only in a really limited, clear zone.  Something along those lines.

But seriously, WASD + Mouse is just super common in games.  Terraria.  Every FPS.  Etc.  Surely this is not like Valley 2 when everyone got all upset about no mouse support.  I mean, I hate walking into something like that, and this has nothing to do with "playing optimally" this time.  It's a matter of how easy it is for people to shoot themselves in the foot and then ragequit for something that is superfluous in the first place.

[x4000]

It can be done in a way that isn't prone to misclicks if you limit the movement area to around the exo, and only allow a step at a time per-click.

If I recall correctly wasnt this the way that Dredmor does it?   Not entirely sure about that as I often prefer to use the keyboard for it.  But I remember that the mouse movement wasnt at all problematic.

Done like that, it could work just fine for this game.  Theoretically.

Dredmor lets you click wherever, or at least in a small range, and then it paths you all the way there.  It feels a little clunky to me, but I was using it a fair bit in that game.  But the problem there is, enemies were not shooting at me while I did this, and my screen view was very small to begin with.  So a lot of the problems of Bionic don't come up there.

You guys are all theorizing, but literally Keith and I had this programmed in, directly after having played it on Dredmor, and it was atrocious here.  The amount of deaths from stupidity on our part was incredibly high, whereas they were very low with WASD.  The amount of rage at misclicks even on our part was quite high, and we knew all the nuances of the game.

It's kind of like multiplayer: we can't in good conscience ship some part of the game that is going to cause that much rage.  And while maybe it could be made to work, in theory, in some fashion: it's a rat hole into which time and money will get dumped.  Is that where you want our attention with the remaining time on the game?  Our time isn't infinite, you know?  So doing one giant feature that is a time sink means other things don't get done, and this feature is definitely a time sink.

Unless it was the "one square at a time from directly adjacent clicks" thing, that would be pretty quick.

[Misery]

Makes sense to me.  I personally dont see the point anyway, since WASD seems convenient.  And really, if I wanna click a bazillion times per game, since it'd likely have to be one tile at a time, well, I could go play Diablo or Dota for that :p

[Mick]

One click per square is all I'm suggesting, and I think it would be valuable. I don't think move to mouse click makes sense.

I don't think diagonals come in to play, since a diagonal is two moves.

The visual indicator I was thinking of was simply something like a small green translucent arrow coming right out of the exo itself showing which direction you would go if you currently left clicked. The clickable area could be pretty generous without conflicting with the buttons on the left hand side, so I don't see how any misclicked movement would really be possible here.

[x4000]

Mick: Okay, sure that would be straightforward and powerful. I don't think it should be on by default, but I can add an option to turn it on. What is described isn't at all like Dredmor, but it is a handy way to avoid using the keyboard if you so desire.

[nas1m]

I would like to give this a shot as well - if the effort necessary is acceptable. The main reason being that it would theoretically free my left hand to control the viewport, something i end up doing a lot - panning a view using the mouse just isn't for me. And for some reason i use the mouse for everything else anyway...

[PattyG]

I think limiting the movement to a single square and providing a clear visual indicator for the direction of movement, like Mick's suggestion, would be a good way to handle this.

But seriously, WASD + Mouse is just super common in games.  Terraria.  Every FPS.  Etc.

This is true, a lot of games now days utilise WASD + mouse but those games are played in real time where you need to be constantly moving around and aiming at the same time. In a game such as Bionic Dues, where everything happens in turns, it would be possible to get mouse only movement to work.

Sure this might not be for everyone but having it as an option for those who want it would be a good idea.

[x4000]

I'm sold on the suggested mechanics for the mouse, by the way -- I will likely even use that myself quite a bit.  It's an elegant solution that I had not thought of.  In terms of "click to move here," which is the only angle of mouse movement I had been considering, that really is what I was talking about as "mouse movement."  And I stand by that being infeasible, and it seems like folks here agree.

But with the new style of mouse movement proposed here, I think that is a super good idea and I appreciate the suggestion.  Actually we did just this sort of movement for mouse-only movement in Shattered Haven, so I don't know why I never thought of that for here!

[PattyG]

Well that is good to hear. Can't wait to start using it in game now.