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110% yes. I've been playing Stellaris, and they actually put hotkey references in the tooltip! I can't do everything with the keyboard, but I'm doing way more t

110% yes. I've been playing Stellaris, and they actually put hotkey references in the tooltip! I can't do everything with the keyboard, but I'm doing way more than I was. Hotkeys are great and we should encourage more tooltips & labels with them. Not just in videogames, but in anything that could benefit from hotkeys.

DonHopkins 10y ago
Stellaris is magnificent! It's incredibly deep and complex, but it has a great user interface, and they've been totally thorough about putting helpful color coded pop-up tooltips everywhere there's something interesting to point at, giving you information about every icon and button, revealing keyboard shortcuts, and telling you one or more tasks that you need to do to first to enable disabled buttons. I really hate the cargo-cult tradition of disabled menu items that don't tell you anything about why they're disabled, or what you can do to enable them. That's so frustrating, it's like the computer knows something you want to know to do what you want to do, but it won't tell you, because you have to guess. Even better: Clicking on a disabled item should start a dialog to help you satisfy the prerequisites before performing disabled the action, instead of just ignoring you or telling you to go somewhere else. I was able to trade alien pets to a highly advanced xenophilic civilization who wouldn't otherwise talk to me, in exchange for civilian access to their space! I felt like Harry Mudd sneaking through Klingon space with a space shuttle full of tribbles!
- LoSboccacc 10y ago
  Jeez if stellaris is considered deep what'd be your opinion on distant world: universe? Mind you I'm enjoying it but many parts fall extremely flat. Like corvette balance and topped war scores.
  - emp_zealoth 10y ago
    Apparently a game called M.O.R.E. is lurking around, promising all kinds of crazy depth (I'm super sad how bad SotS 2 was :( ) I totally agree that Stellaris kind of falls flat atm IMO - the foundation is rock solid, the game looks gorgeous and the music just blows you away...but then you play on Hard and literally nothing happens for 6 hours. Eventually a war happens and instantly degenerates into a massive my-blob-chasing-your-blob-benny-hill-nonsense :/ And you can't even achieve anything because of 100 warscore limit! Apparently there are serious improvements coming soon though(Allegedly a lot of content wasn't polished enough before the deadline so minimal viable product happened)
    - eropple 10y ago
      > massive my-blob-chasing-your-blob-benny-hill-nonsense In our attempts at multiplayer, we've already reduced ourselves to calling this "Yakety Saxxing".
    - thaumasiotes 10y ago
      > Eventually a war happens and instantly degenerates into a massive my-blob-chasing-your-blob-benny-hill-nonsense :/ You might be surprised by some actual wars.
      - emp_zealoth 10y ago
        I would go out on a limb and stipulate that letting an enemy army free reign behind one's lines is a sure way to get rekt. It's just in Stellaris it takes a year for anything to happen from bombardment... It really needs some improvement to wartime movement
  - Dayshine 10y ago
    It's the first version of a Paradox game, give it a few expansions. EU4 has taken close to a decade to get where it is.
TeMPOraL 10y ago
Emacs has a nice way of teaching people shortcuts. If you invoke a command via some menu or M-x full-command-name that has a shortcut bound to it, you'll get a message in the minibuffer saying "You can also run full-command-name with: shortcut". It's a very non-invasive way to teach people shortcuts just-in-time.
- civilian 10y ago
  Huh, that is awesome. As a novice vimpire I'd love to figure out a teaching tool like that for vim. Vim doesn't really have a menu-- but maybe something that recognizes what series of edits you just made and suggests a shortcut? (I.e. "You just traveled to the end of a line and deleted a ". You could have done 'A[esc]dw' or whatever it is. Like I said, I'm bad at vim over here.)

DonHopkins 10y ago

Stellaris is magnificent! It's incredibly deep and complex, but it has a great user interface, and they've been totally thorough about putting helpful color coded pop-up tooltips everywhere there's something interesting to point at, giving you information about every icon and button, revealing keyboard shortcuts, and telling you one or more tasks that you need to do to first to enable disabled buttons. I really hate the cargo-cult tradition of disabled menu items that don't tell you anything about why they're disabled, or what you can do to enable them. That's so frustrating, it's like the computer knows something you want to know to do what you want to do, but it won't tell you, because you have to guess. Even better: Clicking on a disabled item should start a dialog to help you satisfy the prerequisites before performing disabled the action, instead of just ignoring you or telling you to go somewhere else. I was able to trade alien pets to a highly advanced xenophilic civilization who wouldn't otherwise talk to me, in exchange for civilian access to their space! I felt like Harry Mudd sneaking through Klingon space with a space shuttle full of tribbles!

LoSboccacc 10y ago
Jeez if stellaris is considered deep what'd be your opinion on distant world: universe? Mind you I'm enjoying it but many parts fall extremely flat. Like corvette balance and topped war scores.
- emp_zealoth 10y ago
  Apparently a game called M.O.R.E. is lurking around, promising all kinds of crazy depth (I'm super sad how bad SotS 2 was :( ) I totally agree that Stellaris kind of falls flat atm IMO - the foundation is rock solid, the game looks gorgeous and the music just blows you away...but then you play on Hard and literally nothing happens for 6 hours. Eventually a war happens and instantly degenerates into a massive my-blob-chasing-your-blob-benny-hill-nonsense :/ And you can't even achieve anything because of 100 warscore limit! Apparently there are serious improvements coming soon though(Allegedly a lot of content wasn't polished enough before the deadline so minimal viable product happened)
  - eropple 10y ago
    > massive my-blob-chasing-your-blob-benny-hill-nonsense In our attempts at multiplayer, we've already reduced ourselves to calling this "Yakety Saxxing".
  - thaumasiotes 10y ago
    > Eventually a war happens and instantly degenerates into a massive my-blob-chasing-your-blob-benny-hill-nonsense :/ You might be surprised by some actual wars.
    - emp_zealoth 10y ago
      I would go out on a limb and stipulate that letting an enemy army free reign behind one's lines is a sure way to get rekt. It's just in Stellaris it takes a year for anything to happen from bombardment... It really needs some improvement to wartime movement
- Dayshine 10y ago
  It's the first version of a Paradox game, give it a few expansions. EU4 has taken close to a decade to get where it is.

TeMPOraL 10y ago

Emacs has a nice way of teaching people shortcuts. If you invoke a command via some menu or M-x full-command-name that has a shortcut bound to it, you'll get a message in the minibuffer saying "You can also run full-command-name with: shortcut". It's a very non-invasive way to teach people shortcuts just-in-time.

civilian 10y ago
Huh, that is awesome. As a novice vimpire I'd love to figure out a teaching tool like that for vim. Vim doesn't really have a menu-- but maybe something that recognizes what series of edits you just made and suggests a shortcut? (I.e. "You just traveled to the end of a line and deleted a ". You could have done 'A[esc]dw' or whatever it is. Like I said, I'm bad at vim over here.)