[Mastadon]

That seems rather arcane. How would any new player know that you'd have to wait 1.5 seconds to get the closest enemy target when the command itself just says "Target Next Closest Hostile Ship"? That's about as "Xbox 360 context sensitive" as my previous suggestion.

In light of this, I still feel that "Target Closest Hostile" needs to be it's own key command for clarity. The 1.5 second wait seems even more hokey than having Target Closest Attacker falling back Target Closest Hostile when no attackers are present.

I don't think it's rather arcane at all. Rather, I believe it reflects 's intent to allow players to select the closest hostile or, if they so desire, the next closest / farthest hostile if they press the key within a certain amount of time so as to indicate player intent to keep shuffling targets. I don't really see the benefit to having a specialized targeting key that just targets the closest hostile when I can just wait 1.5 seconds to get the closest hostile.

Besides, in a dogfight scenario, I usually don't care about which potential victim is actually closest as much as I do about helping him become life-long friends with one of my missiles...

[MatthTheGeek]

That seems rather arcane. How would any new player know that you'd have to wait 1.5 seconds to get the closest enemy target when the command itself just says "Target Next Closest Hostile Ship"?

Back when I was a new player that was as instinctive to me as it gets. And until this thread, I never thought it should or even could have been otherwise.

[redsniper]

Yeah I think I figured out the behavior of the H key pretty quickly when I first started playing FS and I never realized it was a problem for anyone until now...

[jr2]

I just wish there was a way to reduce the wait to, say, 0.5 or 0.7 seconds.  When desperately shooting down hordes of enemy bombers with fighters flying everywhere, 1.5 seconds is an eternity.  Although, when it's that thick, you usually don't have to worry about finding a target until you clear out the pocket of bogeys around you and are looking for the next pocket to decimate, hopefully before they manage to implant their bombs into the convoy you're escorting.

[MatthTheGeek]

If you really want to improve the current targetting system, instead of f*cking around with the parts that work as intended and are perfectly fine for 99% players, one thing I think would really benefit to everyone would be a "Target closest bomber". Not the one we already have, but one that would ignore bombs, just cycle through bombers.

[jr2]

Maybe make that Alt+B?

[MatthTheGeek]

The key is irrelevant, you can change it anyway. It could even simply be unbound by default as far as I'm concerned.

[chief1983]

With the new pilot code, that should be a possibility.

[Swifty]

It looks like adding that additional key isn't going to cause problems. I'll also throw in the target closest bomber command.

[mjn.mixael]

I know this doesn't really belong in this topic.. but since we are talking about adding keybinds here it is anyway. (Feel free to split discussion if need be.)

What do people think of adding 2 or 3 null keybinds. Keys that are assigned to an action called 'Special Action' or something, but don't do anything by default. The idea here is to add a couple keybinds for FREDers to use so we don't have to keep stealing the mutliplayer keys all the time.

[Spoon]

I know this doesn't really belong in this topic.. but since we are talking about adding keybinds here it is anyway. (Feel free to split discussion if need be.)

What do people think of adding 2 or 3 null keybinds. Keys that are assigned to an action called 'Special Action' or something, but don't do anything by default. The idea here is to add a couple keybinds for FREDers to use so we don't have to keep stealing the mutliplayer keys all the time.

I support this!
Poor Alt-X is getting so abused right now...

[Mastadon]

If you really want to improve the current targetting system, instead of f*cking around with the parts that work as intended and are perfectly fine for 99% players, one thing I think would really benefit to everyone would be a "Target closest bomber". Not the one we already have, but one that would ignore bombs, just cycle through bombers.

I'm already working on that, I just need to stop procrastinating and finish what I started!

[MatthTheGeek]

No, what you're doing is modifying the existing key behaviour. Which is exactly what I don't want. I haven't spent years mastering FS controls just so you could steal them away, thank you very much.

What I was asking was adding a new key so we have more options without changing the existing behaviour.

[Mastadon]

Well, "stealing away the FS controls" as you put it is one part of the patch, but another part of the patch is adding a specific key to only cycle through enemy bombers.

On the "stealing" note, I really don't see what the big problem is. Seriously, what is so twisted and wrong about wanting to find the bomb(er) is closest to you first rather than the one that was created by the Freespace engine first? The Freespace controls as they were designed were never meant to handle the kind of bombing action you see in a number of popular mods. They are, to be perfectly blunt, broken in the case of fleet defense scenarios because there is no way to prioritize which bomb(er) gets targeted and, in a fleet defense scenario, you need to have such a prioritization to successfully find and destroy enemy bomb(ers).

Having said all of that, it might be possible to make it such that either users or mission designers can turn on the "bomb(er) prioritization" feature and have the FS engine default to the original behavior if neither the user nor the mission designer wants the feature turned on. I wonder if this could be set as a table option of some sort...

[MatthTheGeek]

Nah, actually that works for me. I misunderstood what your patch was doing. Tis all good. Thanks for the clarification.

[karajorma]

Please don't give us yet another pointless table entry we have to support for all of eternity!

You're right, plain and simple. The system as designed is quite clearly broken and targeting the first created bomb not only is clearly the result of a bad programming kludge it also is counter-intuitive to all the other targeting keys which work exactly as you'd fix the bomb key.

[chief1983]

This thread definitely got some emotional responses from some people, and the commits here are already giving me a headache.  I've spent the better part of the day trying to sort out what code between 8841, 8842, 8843, and 8848 was actually needed to fix _just_ the bug in #2659, and what was related to this new feature.  I still can't tell for certain what does what.  Additionally, this new feature does seem to be digging into the skin of some people, as I do agree that this behavior change and its adverse side affects are modifying retail behavior (even if for the better).  But given the fact that the next release will be the new pilot code, which will allow adding all sorts of new keypresses, I'm now wondering if it would be better to back this change out entirely for the time being, and have it rewritten as a new command, instead of modifying an existing command.  As it stands, I can't even be certain that .14 is working as intended, because 8848 was the only commit backported, and I'm not sure that was the commit that was supposed to fix 2659 or not (which was filed by Mastadon before his feature patch even hit trunk).  I think everyone would be fine with it only cycling attackers, and not all hostiles, as long as the current behavior of the default R action is maintained.  Because currently, this would make it such that there is no key you could spam in the heat of battle and be _certain_ it's the closest attacker (or thing to spew missiles at).  Getting rid of that one key is bound to bother some people, so I think this is likely to be a good compromise, only made possible with the new pilot code.