1.02 patch for Panzer Battles Normandy - Released

[Strela]

Excellent - thanks for all the efforts involved in this.  There's a lot of really good stuff in this update.

I do have a question though - why change a lot of the shortcuts from needing single keys to needing ctrl+key?  
This is MUCH more cumbersome.  A lot of shortcuts now need two hands or an awkward stretch.  Where as previously I could hit the keys very quickly without hardly needing to glance down at the keyboard.

Are the keys user changeable?  If not can we have the option of the old keys back?

Thanks again.

RichG,

Thanks for the commentary. We KNOW changing established hotkeys was always going to be controversial. Trust me we got that feedback from the testing team.

That said as we were adding so many we went back and looked at the rationale for many and there just wasn't any. Adding over 70 shortcut keys meant we had to go to a dual key combo for many and we debated that the best way was to re-lay them all out.

We worked with the following rationale in mind;

Alt Keys are for Menus and Dialog Boxes

Ctrl Keys are for Actions. The Ctrl function is deliberate to ensure a player wants to execute the action.

Natural Keys are for Display functions and in most case toggle meaning they will turn on with one press and turn off on a second press.

Function Keys are for Documentation

Key Pad Keys are for unit movement and duplicate movement state changes


Probably the most controversial choice here is forcing the player to use Ctrl for many regular (single press) items. We did this deliberately as these functions permanently change a units state in many cases (think travel mode etc). Nearly all of these can be done with two fingers on your left hand. (Actually we even left '0' on the numpad as an alternative to Ctrl T for travel mode).

All the above was deliberate and we have found that our play testers got use to it pretty quickly as they got use to the new system - using a mix of the shortcut keys and the new icon bars.

As far as remapping - unfortunately not. There is some things that are immovable in the program and this was one of them.

Thanks and please give it more of a chance, it will feel easier after a few days as you use certain combos etc.

David