I've decided to fork this new command panel, if for no other reason than I hate it.
There are things that it does well, for example:
-When you select a factory the 'units' menu always appears by default, even when spectating.
-Empty tabs are now hidden and the remaining tabs fill the entire tab-bar space.
-It now disappears when nothing is selected, freeing up unused screen space.
-It no longer resets if you hit some random key such as control, alt, shift, space, and arrow keys.
But at the same time there are some changes which, imo, are completely unjustified in the context of ZK. These include:
-Adding hotkeys for constructing units.
ZK never, ever needed hotkeys for units for several reasons. First is that you rarely ever need to change your fac queue except infrequently when you're changing you unit composition. In fact the most time consuming part of factory management in zk is that, in case you
do want to change your unit composition it takes many clicks to remove items that are already on the queue. Clearing it is slow but everything else is nearly zero hassle.
Also, you change your rally points more frequently than your unit composition, and doing that often
does require hotkeys, with which the unit hotkeys conflict. Moving the unit hotkeys to the right on the keyboard may fix that, but then the unit hotkeys will in general no longer be as consistent or convenient to reach, which defeats the (already dubious) original purpose of having them.
-Rearranging the unit ordering for no good reason.
The old unit ordering was left to right, top to bottom, raiders, assaulty stuff, arty, and then special units, with each category internally sorted by unit price. It was easy to learn, made good sense and made things easy to find between facs. The new ordering is arbitrary and often puts units that would normally go together in awkward positions. Given that the people making the changes still believe that there is something that needs to be "fixed" it is obvious that there will never be an agreement between sides on the issue.
-Hiding the tab bar when only the 'orders' tab is available.
This is a minor issue but, if your layout looks like mine this sometimes causes an ugly hole in the layout, and is inconsistent.
Another thing is that, in the future apparently there are plans to merge the integral (command panel) menu with the selected units panel, thus forcing everyone to use the new shitty layout. It will also be horizontal and eat up your screen space in awkward ways. Forking the command panel early is a defense against this arbitrary bad UI design, and I plan to tackle it before the escape route from this nonsense is cut off. I plan to keep all of the 'good' features from the list above, while eliminating all of the items from the 'bad' list below it.
I also plan on including a new feature where stop commands issued to factories will clear their build queue instead of clearing the rally point. My reasoning is that resetting the rally point is so trivially easy that it would not create any hassle if stop no longer cleared it, but clearing the command queue is a serious pain so turning it into a one-click operation would be a serious reduction in hassle.
Does anyone else have any requests or objections for this?