Easier Walking

[JackBread]

I have only a couple of ideas.

1) The camera should always be centered on the character. That way, people can move places faster. Keep the scroll mouse button+drag to move the camera, though. Make a click on the scroll mouse button recenter the camera.

2) They should be hot keys on the buttons that you can use to increase and decrease your speed. Foxes get annoying and I can't bother to stop and press the sprinting button.

3) Someone on Bay 12 Forums said that walking should be click and hold/drag instead of clicking over and over.

[loftar]

We have experimented with a few camera movement patterns, actually. We've found that moving cameras in general have the great disadvantage of making objects a lot harder to hit while walking, so we've had to scrap most of our ideas with them. But yes, camera control is definitely something which should be improved; we just don't know how, yet.

You are most likely right that there should be hot keys for the various speeds. I did consider Ctrl+[1-4] at some point, but I no longer remember the reason why I rejected it. :)
For now, it is worth noting that Ctrl-R cycles through the running speeds.

Holding and dragging is not necessarily a bad idea, but I'm concerned about the bandwidth it would consume to process continuous updates. Rather, I think the better idea would be to be able to click on the minimap to walk somewhere. I'm going to implement that some time. :)

[sami1337]

You don't need to send 20 clicks a second. Just use the average of what people do. About 3 times a second.

[Laremere]

For the camera, one way that may work to improve it could be to have it work how it does now when a player is simply moving back and forth on the screen working on stuff, then if they constantly are walking, have the camera slowly center. I think that would be fluid and practical.

[Trafalgar]

I like the way Ultima Online handled it:

To the user, it appears that:

• Their character is always in the center of the screen
• Pressing and holding the right mouse button results in the character running towards the mouse cursor (or walking). (Left click normally interacts with stuff in UO)
• Clicking the left mouse button (IIRC) while holding the right mouse button, and then releasing both buttons, results in your character walking towards your mouse cursor without you having to hold any buttons. Right-clicking again will make your character stop moving.

What was really going on in the protocol:
UO was tile based, and every time the user tried to move into a tile, the client sent a move request packet with two variables (IIRC): one byte for a direction to move bitflag or'd with a speed bitflag, and another byte for a movement step number (0, 1, 2, 3, etc, it increased each time the client sent the packet and wrapped back to 0 upon passing 255, IIRC) to the server. The client proceeded as if it was successful while awaiting confirmation from the server and would do multiple steps up to 8 or so (random guess from fuzzy memory) before stopping even if it didn't get a response from the server right away. The server checked each move packet and would send back move success or move failure packets. Move success packets just told the client everything was great, it can keep going, and maybe it told it that it can forget previous position data too. The move failure packet indicated which movement step number the client should roll back to (the client kept a list of previous positions prior to each movement attempt in case they failed), and invalidated that move attempt and all move attempts after it.

Normally the client would be checking its own local data files and so forth to see if a move was valid, and not even sending a move request if not, but If there was ever a glitch where the client thought it could move somewhere and the server went 'umm nope', what it would look like was rubber-banding - like, try to walk into a type of terrain that the client said was OK and the server said NO WALKING FOR YOU, and your character looks like he's walking into it and being yanked back repeatedly. Of course someone running in front of you or a monster spawning or whatever could also block your path unexpectedly too.

Side note: UO used TCP with the nagle algorithm disabled, and some of the emulators run pretty well - the bandwidth requirements aren't bad. Of course all the packets are compressed too, come to think of it.

[theTrav]

You don't need to send 20 clicks a second. Just use the average of what people do. About 3 times a second.

Alternatively you could implement a separate move command that just sends a "I'm walking in this direction" and a "I stop walking" command bound to mouse down and mouse up, maybe make the first command automatically time out after some long-ish time to account for lag...

[Öx]

I would argue that something needs to change.

I am already starting to get incipient RSI in my mouse hand index finger after just two days of playing. I think I will have to to drop out of the game because of this.

I do think I am an exceptional case, but I also think there are far too many unnecessary mouseclicks in the game.

[sami1337]

Exceptional, probably. But something to take into consideration? I think so.

But i have a suggestion for you. Get an autoclicker. like autohotkey. I can help you get a script to use with it if you want.
What it does is repeat (as many times as you want) the click while you hold the button. At the same time right click stays the same.

I do see some conflicts with inventory management though. Infact, i'll just try myself.
Actually, hotshit. It works much better than i thought. Although it's pretty impossible to click any action buttons at 1000 clicks per second
Didn't try 3 clicks per second tho..