Local widgets will be blocked - submit your widgets to game!

Zero-K is meant to be mainly a game and not a coding contest.

Widgets can unedeniably assist players by helping them with micromanagement even past any concievable human level.

Therefore, to ensure fairness in increasingly competetive game, all widgets should be easilly available to all players or not available at all.

For that reason Zero-K will block out local widgets in stable versions of the game (test version will continue to allow them to allow their development).

But worry not you coders and widget users -

If you have some great widget that you cannot live without and that isnt included in the game already, post a link and a description here.

If its useful and goes along with design goals well, it will be included!

Form of widget/gadget will stay the same Anarchid. Cut off date is in a week or so .. to coincide with some stable.

Yeah extra spam will be annoying we will need better widget list and better distinction between "default on" widgets and specialized highly personal stuff.

Well you dont know what people have already :) And this will just ensure fairness, not stop people from making new widgets. I would include even both jseah widgets.

Obviously, I would mind. Alot.

I don't see why we shouldn't allow it though. We always did, and the game has not broken. Even the most powerful of widgets (custom formation) didn't break BA. Everyone just got the widget.
Widgets have been a part of spring, and is what makes the game unique. Don't take it away.

My intention was always to release the widgets after each PW round. The idea is to give a short testing period and impose a cost to people who request it. In the hope I actually get feedback.


Freeform coding and reduction of micromanagement (eg. Godde makes his outlaws fire all the time, while no one else can) is something that should be allowed.
Please don't make me regret giving out the widgets.


If you are really fixed on doing this, I hope your rules for inclusion are lax and thus almost everything gets in unless it causes crashes or packet overflow. To do otherwise would discourage innovation.
If I make LLT sweep fire (I can do it in about a day), will it make it in?

If you make LLT sweepfire I think we have to seriously think about how our cloaking mechanics work and possibly add an equivalent to seismic detector (Say, have radar disable jamming within 1/3rd its range, or such).

This sort of thing is good and makes us challenge our own mechanics and the way they operate.

Here's what I'll miss:

Being able to use Combo Overhead Camera with WASD.

Turning radar mode on automatically at battle start, but not when speccing.

Making adv. playerlist not clutter the list with spectators when playing.

Chili core selector moving the camera to the factory position with right click instead of left click.

Los colors that -only- show radar coverage, since I think it's far more important to know where your radar coverage reaches than what your units see - and the default los mode, which shows both radar and los, is just way too ugly with all the random colors. Also I have /dark and /bright commands to adjust the brightness of the los shadows on excessively dark/bright maps.

Chili chat hides spectator chat when playing in a team, but not when speccing/watching a replay, or playing 1v1 or FFA. This way I can focus on ally chat in a teamgame, instead of getting spammed by some balance discussion that specs are doing with global chat.

Binding building starter (nanoframe) widget to a different key than Q.

Since I use WASD to scroll, I don't want to use the gesture menu with keyboard. But I don't like the way the mouse-only gesture menu interacts with multiple cons (especially if I have two comms and wanna push with them side by side). So I use a hybrid mode, in which Q opens the gesture menu, but only mouse is used to select the building to construct.

Unit shapes widget modified to show a teal circle around unselected cloaked units that you or your allies own. Makes seeing them immensely easier, especially with luashaders=0 where there's no special cloak effect.

Receive units indicator playing a sound when getting units. Without the sound it's just way too easy to miss that you've received some units.

Holdfire fix, that makes units stop shooting immediately when put to hold fire, instead of still trying to finish their last chosen target.

Cloak fire state widget not affecting the commander. It's not fun to use a sniper commander if the widget constantly puts it to hold fire.

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These tweaks are accumulated during a long time span, usually as a result of me losing a game because of UI difficulties. So nothing earth shattering, but they make playing immensely smoother for me.

Some of this is probably worth committing, like the widget that makes cloaked units easier to notice, but it'll be some work for me to get epic menu to recognize these options - since most is stuff that probably won't be on by default.

Antero, there are menu entries for holdfire+stop and holdpos+stop. You can bind keeys to those.

I feel your pain on much of this stuff though. Most of it should be integrated into the game as options.

The ZK version of Unit Shapes has been changed from its original functionality. Instead of highlighting all units in their teamcolor and selected units in white, it now does nothing for all units and highlights selected units in green.

I prefer the original functionality. Actually, I prefer a slightly tweaked version of the original (slightly reducing the alpha and size of the halos). Could the original functionality be restored as a menu option? Could the internal parameters be exposed as menu options?

This decision feels like punishing people who like to tweak the UI in order to get at people who want to "cheat". Surely, for example, the choice of which playerlist widget to use will have no affect on gameplay and should be in the hands of the users, no?

I don't like or understand the decision at all.
It would stop innovation and achieve nothing.

I don't have any personal widgets at the moment, but had plans for some.
Now testing would become practically impossible, because there are never big games in test version (and why would there be?). Testing in single player has no lag, while testing with small amount of people wouldn't produce complex situations you may need.

Also if every widget anyone ever uses will have to be included in ZK stable, there would be huge clutter and hundreds of questions about how each widget works...

I don't see any point in this decision.
It is doing a big harm to stop a potential small harm.

Who decided to block local widgets, anyway? It seems like the only one actually for the idea is Licho