Hotkeys for toggle states not working properly

[Brian-Catcow-B]

Description

Clicking the UI for toggle state boxes (not sure of the actual name of those things), like holdfire/returnfire/fireatwill, on/off (in radar jammers, eg), or holdposition/maneuver/roam works exactly as intended, cycling between the different states perfectly. However, using the hotkey (mouse over to see what the hotkey is with your settings) does not work properly. What happens instead is it takes anywhere from 1 (intended) to 7 presses of the hotkey in my experience to get the state to change. I'm not sure what the pattern is for how many key presses it takes, but it seems like some states are "harder" to get out of using the hotkey, like return fire -> fire at will, which sometimes takes way more than 7 key presses.

I'm using grid keys.

Expected Behaviour

Every key press of the toggle state hotkey toggles to the next state

Actual Behaviour

Not every key press of the toggle state hotkey toggles to the next state

Reproduction steps

Start a game, select your commander, and press L a bunch of times, watching the holdfire/returnfire/fireatwill state change (or not).

Other

From my testing, the following don't work properly:

• L for holdfire/returnfire/fireatwill.
• T for repeat on/off.
• ; for holdpos/maneuver/roam.
• B for on/off (do ctrl+enter -> /cheat then ctrl+enter -> /give armjamt).

And these following do work:

• K for visible/cloaked.
• Y for wait on/off.

Idk if there are any more.

[TheChronographer]

Define 'a bunch of times'.

The state based toggles are based on a keychain of one two or three presses within a certain time. I believe the default is 750 milliseconds.

• A Single press will go to the green state: fire at will, roam, repeat on, on, cloak etc.

• A double press will go to the Red State: hold fire, hold position, repeat off, off, visible.

• A triple press will go to the yellow state: return fire, manoeuvre, etc.

You can change these to a toggle bind, with custom key binds. However that can cause the user confusion if they select multiple units with different States E.g. some units that hold fire and some units in fire it will.

[Brian-Catcow-B]

Oh... It might be nice to have that as part of the tooltip of the ones it applies to because I never would have guessed that nor figured it out.

Also, the way TA fixes the multiple units selected with different fire states issue is it has a 4th state where all 3 options are selected with a weaker green and if you toggle it, they all get set to fire at will. I feel like that's a good compromise, then the default ui could be set to toggle through the options like clicking does, with an option in the settings to have a tap system for selecting a specific one. This system seems to already be implemented for visible/cloaked except that the ui doesn't indicate that there are differences in which options are chosen across the units selected. It's actually the same with all the other ones except only for clicking the button, not using the hotkey, and I suppose it's also the case that the game somewhat arbitrarily chooses which state to show, and clicking on the button moves it to the next state based on the state you see there, so that's not ideal.

I feel like it makes little sense which ui buttons are determined to use the tap method and which ones toggle through the options. Like why does visible/cloaked work differently with the hotkey? I still think the default should be toggling through the options even when using the hotkey, with an additional state added for showing that there are multiple selections.

[TheChronographer]

Fair enough about the tool tip lack of info. It is shown how the traffic light states work in the keybind help image displayed in game: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/beyond-all-reason/Beyond-All-Reason/refs/heads/master/luaui/images/keybinds/grid_keys.png

But maybe I'll raise it to be added to the website as well.

You can use custom keybinds to change it to a toggle which acts more like the click, instead of binding firestate 1 and firestate 0 and firestate 2 you can just bind firestate and it will cycle though them I believe. The advantage of the current system is that if you press it once, (or twice etc.) you 100% know the state of all units you selected. I'd have to do some testing with the other system but maybe that would be more suitable for you if that's more similar to TA.

Does visible/cloak work differently? Seems I was mistaken, that one doesn't have the traffic light icons on the cheat sheet image. So that makes sense why they act as 'working' by your tests.

Reguardless, I'd say not a bug, if fire state move state trajectory and repeat are behaving with the taps as described.

[Brian-Catcow-B]

Okay interesting... visible/cloak (K on grid) and on/off for radar jammers (B on grid, idk if anything else has on/off state currently) are both toggles that have the red light green light system on that image. Obviously there's almost no use-case for disabling jammers (considering they don't take energy, which is kinda weird imo but ok), but someday someone will get to this issue #3453 and the on/off toggle will matter again.

Also, I wouldn't glean the info about tapping from the colored lights of that image, so I think a tooltip is definitely in order for those (and maybe making the other toggles behave the same? idk, cloak feels like it should be special because 99.99% of the time you just want to cloak/uncloak your commander and that's something you usually pay attention to the state of, but I could understand regulating that one too).

[TheChronographer]

The on/off button on that image is slightly outdated I think. It's actually two/three different binds on there. On/off, for jammers and radars that doesn't use the state toggle system. But also trajectory which does. So I guess it's showing a traffic light for the trajectory toggle part. Confusing, I agree.

(and some other unit specific toggles that got removed recently)

[Brian-Catcow-B]

Ah okay. I assume things like the hound unit fire type which was removed awhile back would fall under that. Interestingly radars can't be turned off, but I guess since they don't take energy either, there isn't any point in adding that lol.

So I suppose after discussion, this issue boils down to the following steps as a solution:

1. Normalize the behavior across the different "choice" buttons to be tap when using hotkeys.
2. Add a tooltip to each specifying that 1 tap goes to green, 2 to red, 3 to yellow (when applicable), but perhaps clearer and more concise.
3. (Optional) Add a special state for the "choice" buttons to display for when multiple units with different options selected are all selected at once, where clicking that option will then default to whatever the green option is for all the units selected (right now it sorta chooses arbitrarily which unit to show the state of for any given choice button and clicking it puts all selected units to the next state). What actually to show? Well, see TA for the inspiration for this, but yeah probably some half-dark shade of each option filled in would probably indicate well, and for the text just put "fire state" or "move state" or whatever name of the choice the button is.

I think that ends up being a decent solution that will make enough people mad that it will be worth our while.

[ewang7421]

but someday someone will get to this issue #3453 and the on/off toggle will matter again.

Is there any additional work that needs to be done for that issue? The functionality is present when the experimental "shields rework v2.0" option is enabled.

[Brian-Catcow-B]

Is there any additional work that needs to be done for that issue? The functionality is present when the experimental "shields rework v2.0" option is enabled.

I didn't check the shield rework, so maybe that fixes it. I suppose the issue shouldn't be closed until the default settings allow the deflectors to be on/off-able