I have created a mod to build structures and units using hotkeys without using the buildmode included in FA. It contains an economic default keyboard layout for structures, units and actions.

Acknowledgments:
This Mod is based on some parts of the SCA UI Mod for Supreme Commander (Vanilla) made by Saya, Cleopatrae and Goom, as well as the GUI Mod from Goom. The Mods was created with courtesy of Saya, Cleopatrae and Goom. Many members of VoW were helpfull aswell, Especially Zock and Cola_Colin. NeverRizing5on from Halcyon also helped me!

Warning:

Before using this mod it is highly recommended to backup your FA-preferences! Depending on your OS and Language you can find the file somewhere like %USERPROFILE%\Local Settings\Application Data\Gas Powered Games\Supreme Commander Forged Alliance
All hotkeys used by my mod can't be used for their old action.
There is no support for anybody, who has not read and understood this entire post.

The Keyboard Layout:

As image:




Generally all hotkeys are designed to be used by the left hand and the left little finger on shift.

q: Patrol
a: Reclaim
z: Buildingloop on/off
Tab: Pause on/off
~\:Unit ability on/off (for example stealth, mfac's,shields)


Building structures - without the buildmode:

All hotkeys represent a group of structures, for example:

T1 engi selected:

• hit F once: T1 power generator
• hit F twice: hydro plant
• hit F three times: T1 power generator again...

T3 engi selected:

• hit F once: T3 power generator
• hit F twice: T2 power generator
• hit F three times: T1 power generator
• hit F four times: hydro plant
• hit F five times: back to T3 power generator ...

To illustrate it:


Generally the structure which you usually want to build will the first in the cycle. That is usually the highest tech one, with exception for T2 Ari before T3 Ari and TML before SML.

• the topmost keys (werty) are: factory (land/air/naval/quantum), radar/sonar, shield/stealth, tmd/smd, experimental
• the middle keys (sdfgh) are eco: mex,fac,pgen, templates, engie stations
• the lowest keys (xcvbnm) are weapons: pd, AA/air stage, torpedo, ari, tml/sml, upgrade anything.

G switches through the templates. If activated in GAZ/Goom UI you can use any factions templates.

The upgrade key will upgrady all selected buildings at once, even if they have a differend type.
For example: You have selected a T1 mex and a T2 fac and pushing "m" the mex will tech to T2 and the fac will tech to T3.
This only works for one techstage now, you can't tech a T1 mex direct to T3 using m.

Building Units - without the buildmode:

• w-u: T1 Engi, T1 Units sorted like the arrangement in the UI. (Exception: a gap for Seraphim, because they have no Lab)
• s-l: T2 Engi, T2 Units with some exceptions
• x-m: T3 Engi, T3 Units with some exceptions

If you hold shift while pushing a unit hotkey 5 of those unit wil be put in the queue.
If you hold alt while pushing a unit hotkey, the entire queue will be removed except for the unit that in production right now and the selected new unit will be put into the queue.

Installation of the mod:

The mod needs the GAZ UI mod (successor of Gooms UI mod, you can find it in the vault, too), which is activating the FA-keymapping.
If you did not use GAZ UI until now, install and test it first!

To install hotbuild copy the zip-file into the folder %USERPROFILE%\My Documents\My Games\Gas Powered Games\Supreme Commander Forged Alliance\Mods (may differ depending on your OS/language). DO NOT UNZIP IT.
First you have to activate it as a UI mod, try it in skirmish.
Once in the game push F1 and click on reset and choose to use the hotbuild defaults. Now you can try if the mod works, if not please restart FA and trz again.

Configuration:

Using F1 you can reach the keybinding window of GAZ UI you reconfigure the keyboard maping, but not single units or structures. More information about this follows in the next post.
In the usual options you can disable or enable the cycle preview and set the time, after the cycle is reset.

Important Notes about the EN Version:

I have originally created this mod for the german keyboard layout, it has been used for quite some time now.
To help the community I have also created an international version for english keyboard layout, hoever I can not test this it by myself. So I depend on your bugreports. The only changes are in the default keymapping where z is swapped with y due and the console-key (~`) is adapted.

Changelog:

V8: Public release (Including an en Version)
V9: Merged version including both default keymappings (en and de)
There is no need for germans to update to V9

Download Zulan's hotbuild Version 9 from the VoW server.

P.S.

If you have hotbuild_en (which was avaiable <1 day only), then it is highly recommended to disable it, remove the file and use hotbuild V9 instead! Hotbuild_en just caues problems.

This is still on my todo-list :

• Upgrade straight from T1 to T3.
• Put functions like "Next idle factory" on some hotkeys when nothing is selected. This isn't that easy.

What i want to do, but is technical very hard to do:

• Use the <>| key on a german keyboard. (look at http://forums.gaspowered.com/viewtopic.php?t=26063)
• Use different templates with different hotkeys. That's difficult because i would have to merge the list of the blueprintIds and the templateIds.

A few technical details:

The FA keymapping system allows only one action per key. Thats why the mod uses an additional table (buildingtab) containing a list of blueprintIDs.
For example:



Depending on the type of the selected units (Building or Engi) the buildable blueprints from this table will be added into the building queue of structures or the cycle preview of the Engi will be generated.
I would like to make that more customizable, but that would require a complex click-GUI in addition to the current keybinding UI.
If somebody really needs this and the mod is running stable, i will try to make it at least customizable with the preferences. Until then you can customize your wishes with the buildingtab.lua, but dont forget the commas and brackets or your FA will get errors.

To customize the Mod you have to unzip the hotbuild.zip to a new folder called hotbuild and put hotbuild.zip somewhere else.

Buildingactions are saved into the Game.prefs, the reason for this workaround is that the keybindings has to be available before the loadscreen and thus usual hook system do not work. The GUI mod uses the same workaround, presumably for the same reason. (I guess GAZ does it in this way, too)

/ reserved for additional comments on comments /

interesting, i shall try this tonight.

and props for proper use of '%USERPROFILE%', good work.

A pity that there is no environment variable pointing directly, %USERPROFILE%\Local Settings\Application Data\ or the My Documents path... is there?

AFAIK there is no such environment variable avaible from the LUAs...
However you could use the little handy function named "Mod Locator' in order to get the path, then you could start to "go backward" from this path.
i.e. myPath will contain the full path to the mod location. so you could "cut" the part of the path you won't need.

There would be an alternative solution that would use this kind of function:


Hoping this helps

lol Manimal, 'USERPROFILE%' is an environmental variable for Windows. -Zulan- is using this to install the mod, not use the mod.

I know this is a variable for (and from) Windows since ages.

May be I misunderstood him...

I can tell how to get it from Inno Setup script for an installer if this is really what Zulan needs.

The game lacks badly a few essential variables such as Mod path and such %variable% from MS's among others that we could access from "anywhere" within the LUAs.

Oh my! So this was what Colin_Cola was using in his WeGame video!

Thank you so much for releasing! I'll try it out tonight ^^

hmm, now this is interesting, i'll give this a try


Edit: so far im liking this, really nice and really quick to build stuff,
now i need to see if this all still works with AZUI as well(hope it does)
Edit2: it works with AZUI!!


now i've tried this without any mods at all and i get this error everytime i press a hotkey button


i do have all other mods off/removed and this still occurs, while im still about to build things i thouhgt it would be nice to let you know about this.

Edit3: another thing i noticed, im unable to build the FireBeetle using hotkeys(not a really big problem) i suggest making it L like the field engie if thats posisble


Edit4: well seems to work fine with some other UI mods, sadly my BlackOps mod doesn't really work well with it, as you cant build any custom units via hot keys i really like this mod, but its going to be hard to use it if i cant use it with unit packs and such.

I've tried this with only GAZ_UI and your mod enabled, but get this during
the loading screen. <debug text delete since problem was found>

EDIT: I'm on the US keyboard.

EDIT: Found the problem. Your mod was looking for the "hotbuild" folder but you named it "hotbuild_en". However, my F1 key stopped working...

EDIT: Seems like F1 key still works if I disable all mods, but now no longer works either I only have GAZ UI enabled or both GAZ UI and hotbuild.

EDIT: Even when I uncomment initDefaultKeyMap() in hotbuild.lua, F1 still does nothing, and none of the keys shown in the picture is working. It's as if the mod wasn't even enabled, bit I did enable it.

EDIT: It seems like whatever I do, the F1 key function is gone with the mod enabled. I'll have to give up using it for now >_<

Hawk it keeps trying to use the hotkeys after you turn the mod off because they are saved in game.prefs but you can go there and remove that section of the prefs file

I'm using the german version of Hotbuild (having a german Keyboard) and sometimes F1 doesn't work :/
I'm using all kind of UI mods too and I think there is some compatibility problem.

(Will edit the post if I find something else)

Allright, thanks all for the replies. I made the stupid mistake to incompletely renaming the mod while porting it. I have now included the english keyboard defaults in the original mod and just added another selection when reseting the keyboard.

You can now download V9 from the VoW Server

Please disable and completely delete the hotbuild_en mod before.

Since the bug in the hotbuild_en V8 version might have caused all different kinds of problems (including F1 to stop working) I can not deeply investigate whats reported with this version. Please try aswell with the new version after completely removing _en

Yes this is intentional, since I can not think of a reason for someone building firebeeteles (except to humiliate the enemy) I did not include it.



If you really want to, and your somewhat into modding, you can extend the buildingtab with any new blueprint ids. Please have a look at my second post for details.

Hmmm I've only managed to get it to work if I totally wipe out my Game.prefs and began a new profile.

It refuses to play nice with my existing Game.prefs and profile for some reason.

Well...time to recustomized everything I suppose....

EDIT: The first thing I've noticed after using it, is that I started feeling a little uneasy knowing that the hotkeys for Ferry, Unload, Capture and Launch Tactical Missiles are gone.

Do you assign them to the remaining keys or do you just do without them?

great mod, and I cannot play without it anymore

I like the idea but I'm to lazy to use it thou Ill try and get hooked now printing out keylayout

lol, i must not be as famouse as i think i am, i know how to mod, and i've already looked into it, so i'll be adding my own blueprint IDs for my own personal use. great UI mod, really like it

well like he said in his first post he is a maper so he has proly never heard of you .

My focus so far has been on competitive gaming (UI-Mods) rather than unit packs or custom maps, sorry for not recognizing you. But where have you read that I am a maper?

oh sory for some reason I was thinking of someone else sory

What about the french keyboard?
may I help you to do it?
it is an "azerty" keyboard.

qwertzu ==> azertyu
asdeghjkl ==> qsdfghjkl
zxcvbnm ==> wxcvbn,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AZERTY

(I cannot reassign the key manually, it does not work.)

Hi,

I would gladly include a french keyboard layout in my next release. However I'd prefer not to do it just by an image of your keyboard without the possibility to test it. So just do the following:
- unzip the hotbuild.zip to a new folder called hotbuild and put hotbuild.zip somewhere else.
- open defaults/defaultKeyMap_en.lua and modify it accordingly
- e.g. replace
W = 'build__Zulan_11_W',
by
Z = 'build__Zulan_11_W',
- to try, open a game with the mod and reset your layout to the english version
- send me the file somehow

P.S.: I also got the ODG file for the keyboard layout picture if someone wants to adapt it.

ok, Thx. It is done.
I've submited the file to the french community for test.

I did not manage to bind the "²" and "," keys used for toggle_all and upgrade
with the french keyboard.

the draft :
http://files.filefront.com/defaultKeyMa ... einfo.html