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[Draba]

I frequently use loadouts that look something like this:
1. manually fired heavy kinetic/energy weapons
2. manually fired anti-armor weapons/missiles
3. pd/low-flux weapons on autofire

It is awkward to switch to 2. when the target is flickering shields, venting or is overloaded.
I think having instant access to 2 separate weapon groups would be a great addition, making combat more fluid.
The most convenient solution would be to have a way to directly fire a weapon group, but it'd mean
the turrets have to follow the cursor and mess up autofire.

An alternative that doesn't interfere with it would be to have a "secondary" fire button
using non-autofire weapons that are either not currently selected, or are in a specific group.
Downside of using the not selected version is that every idle turret moving with the active group may be a bit misleading.

[TaLaR]

Having secondary manual selection would be nice. And a reason for me to buy mouse with more buttons

[Sy]

where would you put a 2nd fire button though? many people don't have further, easily accessible buttons on their mouse that aren't used for something already, and a keyboard button that needs to be held continuously might be awkward to use combined with movement controls and other keyboard functions.

i still think having the option to make a weapon group fire directly by pressing the associated weapon group key, rather than having to switch to it and fire normally, would be better. that could be done through a toggle in the loadout screen's weapon groups panel.

that also wouldn't be ideal if you wanna continuously fire two weapon groups manually at the same time (for above mentioned reasons), but i think it would be very useful for strong burst weapons with long firing delays (Antimatter Blasters, Tachyon Lances, mod HE burst weapons) as well as limited-ammo missiles that generally need to be timed well to be effective (the new Sabots, all kinds of finisher missiles, torpedos).

[Elaron]

Another option might be to allow weapons to be in more than one group, though how that could be clearly shown on the combat UI is something an actual designer would have to solve.

[Sy]

Another option might be to allow weapons to be in more than one group, though how that could be clearly shown on the combat UI is something an actual designer would have to solve.

yeah, that would probably be a better solution to Draba's problem. i don't think it would need anything more to be shown in the UI than is already there, just that need to be able to toggle a weapon's assigned groups individually, rather than that only being able to switch between exclusive groups:



for convenience, shift-clicking could still be used to make the selection for all weapons of that type, ctrl-click could be used to switch like in the current system, to reduce the number of necessary clicks. alternatively, ctrl-click could even be used to allow selecting multiple groups, with normal click retaining its current functionality.

edit: oh wait, you meant in the combat UI... i still think it could just include all weapons in each group they're in, no? so ones that are in more than one group would show up more than once, but i don't think that's an issue, each group still clearly shows what's in it.

[Deshara]

Yeah you're not using the weapon group UI to figure out which weapons you have in-combat so it's a non-issue

[Elaron]

edit: oh wait, you meant in the combat UI... i still think it could just include all weapons in each group they're in, no? so ones that are in more than one group would show up more than once, but i don't think that's an issue, each group still clearly shows what's in it.

The thing I was concerned about is that the combat UI seems to be predicated more on the list being by weapon group and with each weapon in each group. If my suggestion were to be implemented, it may have issues with extreme examples like an Onslaught whose pilot decided to add all weapons to all groups. Maybe make it a simple organized list, and clearly highlight which weapons are active in the currently selected group? Probably no need to even show which weapons are in which groups as the highlighting should make working that out fairly easy to discover for all, other than players who aren't familiar with the concept of grouping weapons.

[Sy]

agreed. showing only the weapons of the currently selected group might be a good idea even for the current weapon group mechanics anyway, since it's usually unnecessary information during combat, and could be removed/reduced to clean up the UI a bit.

non-selected groups could still be displayed with their respective numbers, status of autofire and alternating fire, and maybe something simple like the total number of weapons in that group (or total of each type, so that a group that has only missiles in it would clearly show as such). that would be more than enough info for a player who created the loadout, and would still clearly show how many other weapon groups there are to select for someone who is not entirely familar with the loadout or even the concept of weapon groups itself.
and since weapon groups can be switched while the game is paused, even if the player has no idea about what the different groups include, it's easy to just switch between them to get info on all available weapons. in fact, it might even be easier to figure out the content/purpose of each group if the information is a bit more 'focused', rather than always showing everything.


even with all that said though, i don't think showing a weapon in more than one group in the current UI would really create problems in practice. most weapons would still be in only a single group, and crazy edge-cases like your Onslaught example are already possible by dividing the weapons of one type into several groups.
for example, on an Onslaught with Mjolnirs, Heavy Needlers and Light Needlers mounted on the 'nose' and 'arms', you could use 3 weapon groups that each contain 1x Mjolnir, 1x Heavy Needler and 2x Light Needlers, to be able to control leftward, forward and rightward facing turrets independently of the other two directions. so even though these groups only include a total of 3 different types of weapons, the UI would still display a total of 9 weapons in individual lines.

[Draba]

where would you put a 2nd fire button though? many people don't have further, easily accessible buttons on their mouse that aren't used for something already, and a keyboard button that needs to be held continuously might be awkward to use combined with movement controls and other keyboard functions.

Could be freely rebindable so what the default is doesn't matter too much.
Weapon groups work well enough without it, just an optional QoL improvement.

i still think having the option to make a weapon group fire directly by pressing the associated weapon group key, rather than having to switch to it and fire normally, would be better. that could be done through a toggle in the loadout screen's weapon groups panel.

That'd have been fine with me, but as Alex has written earlier that doesn't play nice with autofire.
The toggle could make unselected, non-autofire weapons follow the crosshair.
I'd certainly prefer easier access to secondary weapons over the visual feedback(inactive turrets not moving),
a toggle would give an option to keep the current behavior, too.

Another option might be to allow weapons to be in more than one group, though how that could be clearly shown on the combat UI is something an actual designer would have to solve.

My problem is that it's kinda finnicky to switch weapon groups, and it happens pretty often.
Against shields the window where shields are down is usually pretty small, it's a bit of a hassle to switch back and forth between heavy needlers and maulers, for example.

[Sy]

That'd have been fine with me, but as Alex has written earlier that doesn't play nice with autofire.
The toggle could make unselected, non-autofire weapons follow the crosshair.

they already do that. all turrets in weapon groups that are not on autofire follow the cursor even while they are not selected (while the cursor is no further than 15° outside their firing angle, iirc).

i believe Alex doesn't want to add this toggle mainly because of UI concerns, like how to show turret angles or ammo counts of weapons in a group that can't be selected. but i think they could just be shown at all times, since most groups will still be used normally, and the ones that would use this toggle are generally ones that have only a single weapon type in them (you wouldn't wanna put Antimatter Blasters in a group with Harpoons, for example).