I love how keyboard focused Underrail is. The way quick and combat items are arranged is great, and the native usage of shift/control to modify what those respective bars do is a great idea clearly driven by a person who enjoys interacting with games and UI in a keyboard-centric manner.
I have a few suggestions on how to improve keyboard driven gameplay even more (I know, 10 years late). I'm an old player of the Infinity Engine games - and those were another example of great keyboard-driven gameplay/UI navigation. Why do I mention the IE games? Well, they had a combat log just like Underrail. It was actually a combined dialogue/combat log, so more primitive than Underrail's implementation. But old Bioware anticipated the same thing that Styg and company did with Underrail: that periodically the player would want to change the log window size, or even hide it.
IE games (excepting IWD2, let's not talk about that one) let you raise or lower the height of the log through the use keyboard PGUP and PGDN keys. The increments that the log changed were fixed, and if you hit PGDN at the lowest increment of the log then the log was completely hidden.
I'd like to propose something similar for Underrail. The inclusion of new control binding options for:
- Decrease log width (with the final "step" in decreasing the log width hiding it)
- Increase log width (when log is hidden, the first "step" displays the log)
- Change log type (i.e. toggle between combat or dialogue displayed, or hide the the log)
The log width would change in increments already available through the mouse-driven settings menu, i.e. 20% above 100%. Once the log is shrunk to only 100% width, hitting the key again would hide the log. Conversely, if the log is hidden, hitting the key to increase log width would show the previous log type at 100%.
Changing log type may not actually make sense to be a configurable hotkey, but rather work like SHIFT does for quick and combat items, so that shift+(increase/decrease) log width will cycle through displaying either the combat or dialogue logs, or hide the log entirely.
Since there are visual UI elements for all 3 types of logs (combat, dialogue, hidden) and they are arranged in a vertical order, the logic of which "direction" you change the log type in is dictated by whether you invoked changing the log type through shift+increase width (change type "UP", cycling to the bottom once you hit the top - combat) or decrease width (change type "DOWN", cycling to the top once you hit the bottom - hidden).
This also means there are effectively TWO ways to hide the log: through decreasing the width below 100%, and by cycling the displayed log type to hidden. I think power users would really appreciate the latter option. If they play with a log width of greater than 100%, cycling the log type to "hidden" through SHIFT+ would preserve the log width when it is eventually unhidden. Obviously if you hide the log through decreasing the width, increasing the width to show it again means the player starts at 100%.
Suggested key bindings would be HOME to decrease log width, END to increase it (because those are associated with the correct logical directions, <-- and -->). If you want changing log type to be user configurable and not use the SHIFT+ hardcoded logic, I suggest PGUP/DN, because those are associated with the correct logical directions of navigating log type arranged in a vertical order.
Some other grab-bag ideas to improve controls- Please recognize MOUSETHUMB as a valid binding option, it is not currently
- We can currently bind combat items to the numpad keys, and they do not conflict with regular quick items bound to 1, 2, 3 etc. But this is buggy, and breaks SHIFT+combat invoking reload options for your guns.
- When the mouse is hovering over the log, give the log focus so that the mouse wheel can scroll it. Currently the mouse wheel cannot scroll the log
Thanks for reading, hopefully I made it clear what I'm suggesting. I'm *hoping* the keybindings for the log are pretty trivial to implement, and have a real chance of consideration in a future patch.
