Knights and Merchants.net Forum

Hey, I have an idea for the Remake. Not sure if this has been suggested before but I'd very much like to set my own hotkeys. Most primarily, I'd like to set WASD as my arrow keys, as the arrow keys are my primary form of moving the screen during battles or inside my city and they are most uncomfortable to use.

In addition, it'd be nice if we could assign hotkeys to buildings, fields, and roads. So by pressing (for example) F1 then R, I could quickly select the construct road function. Some would be tricky, since there are lots of smithies and such (what letter to use for those?) but that's a great reason to make the hotkeys configurable.

What do you guys think?

very nice idea, I will say - yes

I agree with this idea, especially since hotkeys are usable during the moment when somebody is lagging, and not actual clics

It'd be good for people who don't know htokeys too. If they were able to configure it, they'd discover some hotkeys, I'm sure many people don't know about the "t" hotkey.

Can you guys make a whole list of proposed shortcuts?

F1-F4 are reserved for building panes iirc.

I guess they want to make it self-configurable. So actually they'd only need stuff to be able to be assigned to any key on the keyboard (well, not any, but for example A-Z and 0-9).

We need some template to start with

Well, i made a MSword document taking as much as possible the first letter from each building as 'hotkey' however that mostly isn't possible since there are several buildings starting with an S/M/B/W

Also i think Road/Field/Vineyard should be F1/F2/F3 because there a 25 buildings and my alphabet only goes to 26 so if we make Road(R) Field(F) and Vineyard(V) we must place some buildings in the F-series. (normal numeric is kept for squads)

Storehouse .(S)
School .(H)
Inn .(N)
Barracks .(B)
Quarry .(Q)
Woodcutter .(W)
Sawmill .(Y)
Farm .(F)
Mill .(M)
Bakery .(K)
Swine farm .(N)
Butcher's .(U)
Fisherman's .(F)
Vineyard .(V)
Gold mine .(G)
Coal mine .(C)
Iron mine .(I)
Metallurgist's .(E)
Weapons workshop .(P)
Tannery .(T)
Armory workshop .(A)
Stables .(L)
Iron smithy .(Z)
Weapon smithy .(D)
Armor smithy .(J)
Watchtower .(X)

Road .(F1)
Fields .(F2)
Vineyard .(F3)

It might look confusing but i think people get used to it in a while and if the option to change these to every players own wishes it won't be that much of a problem.

When de-selected WSAD could be used to move your screen around (dubble function)

Players could be given the option to change the hotkeys to num-pad keys but for some laptop gamers that would be impossible :P Since not all laptops have a num-pad.

F1 F2 F3 F4 are already taken by menu tabs.

T is already taken by "Show teams"
some keys are already taken by warriors command (halt, run, etc..)

You need to take that into account when designing a new layout.
Also note that there are many locales in KAM and they would also need to be taken care of.

Completing Krom's answer:
F5 - x1 speed (SP and Replays only)
F6 - x3 speed (SP and Replays only)
F7 - x6 speed (SP and Replays only)
F8 - x10 speed (SP and Replays only)

Full list of KaM Remake hotkeys can be found in Readme.html (albeit cheatkeys are not listed there)

Hmm, well what about 2 sets of hotkeys ? 1. When you selected the 'building mode' and 2. When you de-select 'building mode'.

I.e. Starcraft II, terran, When you have selected a Barracks you can train marines by pressing A but when you select the marine himself you can make him attack by pressing A.

Don't forget that we also have the keys of

, . /

Age of Kings used these as some of the hotkeys since there are so many buildings there, too

But, then again, I'm not sure what your keyboard layouts are (maybe even missing these keys?).

This is the main part of the thread I really like .
The hotkeys F1-F8 are nice to use, but the others I would be like select them yourself in an extra options menu, like
Move screen up [select key]
Move screen down [select key]
Move screen to left [select key]
Move screen to right [select key]
Show team names [select key]
Build road [select key]
Build vineyard [select key]
Build farmland [select key]
Build storehouse [select key]
...
Build Watchtower [select key]
Open/close chat [select key]
Place beacon [select key]
Open next message [select key]
Delete message [select key]
Open/close playerlistthingie [select key]
Pause [select key]
Move troops [select key]
...
Start storm attack [select key]

just to start with

One problem though, it can clash with keys assigned to buildings, though solved by not allowing numbers to be used as a key.

I don't see a huge problem with certain conflicts. For example, pressing T would build a tower if the building panel was up, but would show ownership when the building panel wasn't up.