Proposed "Find Planet" screen

[BadgerBadger]

So one thing I really wanted in AIWC was a way to quickly find a particular planet. It was hard on a large planet map to quickly find a planet of interest, especially when I had loaded a game I hadn't touched for a while.

To solve this problem, I have extended the "Planet" menu to have a "Find Planet" button; clicking this button pops up a new menu with a box to type the name in. One types the name in and then clicks the "Find" button and the galaxy map centers on the planet.

I previously had opened Mantis bug 0019030, but this seemed like a fun and easy weekend project.

I am attaching some pictures and the code.

[x4000]

SWEET!  This is why I suddenly love the moddability of all this even more.  People coming up with ideas like this and figuring out ways to accomplish it is absolutely awesome.

[Draco18s]

Brilliant.

[BadgerBadger]

Hey Chris/Keith, I wasn't able to get this feature to block out all in-game hotkeys (Tab, WASD). Is there an easy way to do that which I am missing?

[x4000]

Kinda-sorta? We have a thing that checks for that sort of blockage, but I'm not sure we have a generalized hook that allows it to be turned on.  That's a Keith-area thing, though, so he should be able to expose that as a general hook I'd think.

[eRe4s3r]

I feel like this interesting coding achievement warrants that I point back to my original sidebar proposal... which you can read here
https://forums.arcengames.com/ai-war-ii/ship-icons/msg213862/#msg213862 (and that thread is interesting for many other reasons as it was, afaik, the only centralized place where we talked exclusively about GUI elements....

figure it might be worth to bring that old mockup back up because when you got search functionality already in there, then keith doesn't have to code it and the sidebar can get to be "there" faster ;p

[BadgerBadger]

Okay. @Keith, I'm looking for a hook that says "When someone has a text box highlighted, ignore all hotkeys they type and just put all input toward the text box". How doable is that?

[keith.lamothe]

Okay. @Keith, I'm looking for a hook that says "When someone has a text box highlighted, ignore all hotkeys they type and just put all input toward the text box". How doable is that?

I don't know yet, I didn't get it doing that for the uniterm console, hence why the camera tends to pan around as one is typing into that. I think those camera controls are particularly embedded in the configuration-of-unity side of things (rather than code files), so it's likely to be trickier to get a hook in there for if(TextboxHasFocus)return;

But I'm sure we'll figure something out; wouldn't really be shippable if you can't type a console command without the camera going everywhere.

[x4000]

Okay. @Keith, I'm looking for a hook that says "When someone has a text box highlighted, ignore all hotkeys they type and just put all input toward the text box". How doable is that?

I don't know yet, I didn't get it doing that for the uniterm console, hence why the camera tends to pan around as one is typing into that. I think those camera controls are particularly embedded in the configuration-of-unity side of things (rather than code files), so it's likely to be trickier to get a hook in there for if(TextboxHasFocus)return;

But I'm sure we'll figure something out; wouldn't really be shippable if you can't type a console command without the camera going everywhere.

Oh, whoops.  Yeah, actually I fixed that a while ago and put in some code that can easily be checked for that.

There's Engine_Universal.IsAnyTextboxFocused in the Arcen.Universal namespace.  That is a raw bool, so changing its value is inadvised; but that's a case of stripping off a layer of protection for a layer of speed.  At any rate, checking its state should be all you need.

Actually, hang on.  This actually just falls under me needing to add one more thing, because this should automatically work and just wasn't looking for the newer class properly.

* Put in a fix that should prevent keybinds from triggering while a textbox is focused.  We'd already done this for regular textboxes, but since moving over to TextMeshPro textboxes that was busted.  If it doesn't work properly now, please do let us know.

Thanks!

[BadgerBadger]

Neat. I should be able to do tab-completion of planet names now!

[keith.lamothe]

Neat. I should be able to do tab-completion of planet names now!

AI: ... why did you just nuke Lampson? I didn't even have anything there.
Player: Autocomplete. Meant Lamport.
AI: Oh. Yea, I hate it when that happens.

[BadgerBadger]

Characters like WASD no longer affect typing in text boxes, which is great! It looks like Tab still swaps between planet/galaxy view when typing in text boxes, but I think that's fine.

I have done a bit more to enhance this. I now correctly prevent you from finding planets for which you don't have BasicIntel. Also I've enabled autocomplete for unique prefixes. In the picture I attached, hitting ~ will now automatically finish the planet name "Dunkels" for you, so you don't have to type the whole name in for long planet names.

[x4000]

The fact that tab still does that just means that wherever the tab code is, isn't properly checking to see if there's a textbox highlighted.  That should be easily fixed, although Keith would know where that is better.  It's one for mantis.

Awesome that autocomplete and those other features are working, though!  I would advise against ~ simply because a lot of keyboards don't have that -- German, for instance, lack that at all. And it's in an odd place on a variety of others.

Super cool, at any rate!

[BadgerBadger]

The autocomplete character is set as a variable in the code, so I can make it anything y'all would prefer. Any recommendation? Maybe I'll let y'all fix Tab with textboxes, then use that?

[WolfWhiteFire]

At the rate BadgerBadger is going, you are going to have to add him to the credits as an assistant/volunteer coder or something like that. So far I have seen BadgerBadger code some new map types, though I don't know if they will be in the base game, added the ability to name save games, and now this.