New U.I. Suggestion: Hot Select for units

I bet theres some way to set this up. This game started off being crazy customizable with lots of widgets and personalized keybinds/selection keys. I think somewhere along the line they decided to make it more uniform and harder to personalize because too confusing and lot of bugs etc.

If you look in your Zero-K folder there is LuaUI > Configs > ZKKeys.lua - you can open this with text editor and youll see lines like

"AllMap+_Not_Builder_Not_Building_Not_Transport_Aircraft_Radar+_ClearSelection_SelectAll+", "ctrl+s"}, "

Which is some really specific way of setting up selection keybinds. You might be able to edit this document if you get someone to explain what sort of keybinds you want setting up and how to do it.

Made a ticket for the selection suggestion https://github.com/ZeroK-RTS/Zero-K/issues/3008

The buiding suggestion already exists but requires editing the keybinds file manually (since if you bind a few things to the same key through the ingame UI it clears the others).

Alt-number causes all new units of the same type that are in your selection to be auto-added to that number group.
Ctrl-Z selects all the units of the same type that you have selected.

So, one way to implement (kind of) what you wanted:

-assign different unit types to different numbers, or several to one (for example fighters and bombers to Alt-5).
Now you can press 5 to select all of these aircraft, click the bomber in the selection box at the bottom of the screen, and press ctrl-z to select all bombers.

Anarchid Cool, I didn't know that! right-clicking deselects a unit. Can I shift-right-click to deselect a type?

Tried, Works!
So if you have a selection, you can shift-rightclick a unit picture in the unit selection box at the bottom of the screen to remove that unit type from the selection, or shift-leftclick to select only that unit type.

Resurrecting this post because I'm looking deeper into how to implement these changes and I've had time to cement more precisely how it should function.

I'll be using some of the images here to clarify what I'm trying to do.
https://imgur.com/a/vCbIRSo

There is a Simplified version of what I'm trying to do and then an Ideal version.

I'll tackle the Simplified version first (accessing all units in global selection settings):

The simple version of "Hot Select" is assigning Global Selection to all units based on their default grid construction letter. The spacebar is currently criminally under used for taking up so much keyboard real-estate. Glaive is built with "W", so holding spacebar and pressing W should select all of your glaives. Likewise for pressing Spacebar+E to select all of your Ronin. This is mostly consistent across all factories so Space+W would always globally select Raiders, Space+D would always select your anti-air, etc. If you have 2+ factories then Spacebar+W should select all raiders from all factories, but this could be edited to user preference.

Under [Settings> Hotkeys> Selection] is a section for "Global Selection", but only a handful of units are listed here (see reference image 1). If I could add every unit to Global Selection, I could do the entire simplified version of "Hot Select". Currently I would need to dive into config files to make this happen, and I'm struggling to understand the config files and how I would need to manipulate them as I don't have a background in coding.

A lot of the infrastructure already exists. All of the Settings UI that could be used to make this work already exists to add hotkeys for specific unit INFO Panels, but not to select them globally (see reference image 2). How can I repurpose all of this great work that's already been done to add a full list of Global Select hotkeys?

Then the Ideal version (creating a better default for everyone):

Ideally all of these Global Hot Selects should have their own section in the Hotkey Settings Tab to be configured.

• Defaults for all units sharing their lettering with the factory construction letter

• Default for Spacebar as the "Global Hot Selection" button

• Spacebar does not activate "Global Hot Selection" while construction queue or factory queue is active

• Spacebar+Shift+Key = add units to current selection

• Spacebar+Ctrl+Key = subtract units from current selection

• When nothing is selected, Spacebar+Key uses global selection. When units are selected, Spacebar+key filters only among the currently selected units.

• Strider Hub units and missiles exempted by default

• Air and sea units should probably not overlap as they don't share unit roles with ground factories.

• S F G & H tend to be less uniform in their role and may need some special tuning to be more useful defaults when more than 1 factory is in play

• There are plenty of free keys left to modify with Spacebar to give a unique key to air units, sea, striders, bombs, lobsters, transports, etc.

As the spacebar isn't currently used outside of queue order commands, if these were defaults it shouldn't affect any new players experience. Players could choose to never interact with the system, or minimally decide to use it only for quickly grabbing their forgotten Anti-air units with spacebar+D without setting any Control Groups or Auto Groups.

Zero-K has the reputation of having the best User Interface of any Real Time Strategy game and I think this system would be an amazing addition in terms of putting decision power into the hands of the player with as little resistance as possible. It also frees up your Control Groups to set actual battle squads in the #1-#5 slots instead of spending those on Auto Groups.

Any comments appreciated as I try to determine if there's enough interest in this to work on implementing it to be useable for everyone or if this is something I'll just be working out for my own personal config files. I don't know how to do it yet (reading the documentation currently) so any advice or guidance would be cool.

Thanks!

So far I'm looking at using what's been done inside this widget as a starting point: https://github.com/ZeroK-RTS/Zero-K/blob/master/LuaUI/Widgets/gui_selectkeys.lua

This is the widget that currently handles all the options for

• options_path = 'Hotkeys/Selection'

Looks like it was created in 2010 which is why it's such a piecemeal collection of global options instead of holistic.

It would probably be best to implement the simplified version first by expanding the options inside this widget to simply include every unit.