3x4 Tray Options

[Tailcoat]

I don't know if this has been looked at since I haven't played in a while, but I'd love an option to arrange the power tray in a 3x4 configuration.
I wanted to jump into the game again, but since I started using one of those MMO mice with the 12 side buttons, I can't go back to clicking on the power tray buttons or hunting-and-pecking number keys.

 

I tried arranging the trays in the same way as those buttons so I could learn to use my MMO mouse with it, but I couldn't replicate that 3x4 grid, so I thought I'd suggest it as an option here.

[Rudra]

Uhm... you can... right click the power tray and select the 3x4 option from the list. My primary character, a MM, uses three 3x4 power trays set up on the right side of my screen.

[Etched]

I use 4,  6x2 set up on all my toons with the main tray on top of them. works really well for me.

 

@Etched

[biostem]

4 hours ago, Tailcoat said:

I'd love an option to arrange the power tray in a 3x4 configuration

Below are the options available to us:

[Ghost]

7 hours ago, biostem said:

Below are the options available to us:

Sunuva…

[Etched]

If im not mistakin, it was like that durin Live, too.

 

@Etched

[A.I.D.A.]

I just wish the 2x6 and 6x2 trays were in alignment with themselves. Here is a 6x2 tray in-game:

 

Why did they make that second row offset so much, back in Live? Move that bottom row exactly one button's worth to the right, call it a 5x2 instead, and then it'd be golden. But what we actually have here is a 4x2, with two extra little half-columns on either end.

 

Edit: same with the 3x4's and 4x3's too. These do not actually represent the button layouts of MMO mice:

Edited September 26, 2023 by A.I.D.A.

[A.I.D.A.]

For reference, here is what I ended up doing with my own bars:

 

That 3x3 side cluster where I put all my toggles, is bound to 3/4ths of my Naga's side buttons.

[Rudra]

3 hours ago, Etched said:

If im not mistakin, it was like that durin Live, too.

 

@Etched

Yes, it was. My MM is set up the exact same way I was back on Live. 9 active power trays with 3 of them set up in the 3x4 configuration to save usable screen space.

[Rudra]

2 hours ago, A.I.D.A. said:

I just wish the 2x6 and 6x2 trays were in alignment with themselves. Here is a 6x2 tray in-game:

 

Why did they make that second row offset so much, back in Live? Move that bottom row exactly one button's worth to the right, call it a 5x2 instead, and then it'd be golden. But what we actually have here is a 4x2, with two extra little half-columns on either end.

 

Edit: same with the 3x4's and 4x3's too. These do not actually represent the button layouts of MMO mice:

Well, to be fair with the 3x4, it is a 12-position setup that holds 10 actual positions. So some discrepancy is to be expected. It looks like the game is coded to keep the tray contiguous, so unless they can break up the tray to change the alignment or insert a ghost position to align the bubs, the trays aren't going to line up perfectly.

[Tailcoat]

Ok, I see that the weird tray alignment of not being in an even grid was the issue. It's been a while since I played. I wish I could have a power tray of 12 buttons in a grid, but I do like A.I.D.A.'s idea.

[A.I.D.A.]

3 hours ago, Tailcoat said:

Ok, I see that the weird tray alignment of not being in an even grid was the issue. It's been a while since I played. I wish I could have a power tray of 12 buttons in a grid, but I do like A.I.D.A.'s idea.

 

I hope it helps. The only reason I didn't make mine 3x4 is because I use buttons 10, 11 and 12 on the Naga for other things outside of the game.

[biostem]

3 hours ago, Tailcoat said:

Ok, I see that the weird tray alignment of not being in an even grid was the issue. It's been a while since I played. I wish I could have a power tray of 12 buttons in a grid, but I do like A.I.D.A.'s idea.

The issue is that each power bar, as they are implemented, needs to have the tray # and back/next GUI elements.  It would require a lot of work, but they could probably implement some sort of tighter layout which omitted the GUI elements - you'd have to right click then to do any management... 

[A.I.D.A.]

I've seen plenty of games with those elements sitting just outside of the hotbar, or even optionally hideable. If they must be present and wasting screen space, then splitting them out into a separate UI container from the bar wouldn't likely have been very difficult -- but it probably would have had to have been done by the exceptionally incompetent Live devs back in the day, because by now that's probably unraveling too much spaghetti code.

 

As for needing to right-click to do any management, is that such a bad thing? How many people actually page their bars during gameplay, instead of setting them up once and saving the default layout they like, and just dragging powers to the slots when they learn them? I'm willing to bet the number is small enough not to have to worry what they think on the matter.

 

If someone actually has three pages of powers on a single, 10-slot bar, and manually pages between those pages in a single bar, I don't think I actually want that person on my team anyway. "Sorry I wasted half that fight not activating powers, I was looking through 30 power slots on a 10-slot window . . ."

 

Ridiculous XD

[Rudra]

16 minutes ago, A.I.D.A. said:

I've seen plenty of games with those elements sitting just outside of the hotbar, or even optionally hideable. If they must be present and wasting screen space, then splitting them out into a separate UI container from the bar wouldn't likely have been very difficult -- but it probably would have had to have been done by the exceptionally incompetent Live devs back in the day, because by now that's probably unraveling too much spaghetti code.

 

As for needing to right-click to do any management, is that such a bad thing? How many people actually page their bars during gameplay, instead of setting them up once and saving the default layout they like, and just dragging powers to the slots when they learn them? I'm willing to bet the number is small enough not to have to worry what they think on the matter.

 

If someone actually has three pages of powers on a single, 10-slot bar, and manually pages between those pages in a single bar, I don't think I actually want that person on my team anyway. "Sorry I wasted half that fight not activating powers, I was looking through 30 power slots on a 10-slot window . . ."

 

Ridiculous XD

I actually do use the tray selection button. On my main even. My primary character, my Ninja/Dark MM, has all 9 trays open and on the screen at all times. However, I change what the bottom tray on the base 3-tray window is on a regular basis depending on what I am doing. If my current priority is fighting? I use my default set up. If my current priority is just getting around? My bottom tray becomes tray 9 and my former tray 9 becomes tray 1. So I can just press the button I want and go. And if things start attacking me while I am doing so? I change my bottom tray back to tray 1 and the former tray 9 tray back to tray 9. It all depends on what I want to be able to quick press buttons for and what I'm willing to mouse click.

[A.I.D.A.]

That's not 'during gameplay,' that's 'during downtime, and once at the beginning of gameplay.' Two extra mouse clicks for the one person who uses the GUI selector at all outside of initial setup is a small price to pay for the screenspace it saves every single player on the server.

 

You can also just give your travel powers binds of their own. Personally, I dedicate toggled travel powers to V and Shift+V, while I tend to use CTRL+LBUTTON for teleport.

 

Here's a snippet of my bind file for a character that uses both, actually:

V "powexec_name Mystic Flight"
SHIFT+V "powexec_name Hover"
CTRL+LBUTTON "powexec_name Translocation"

 

I still drag the flying ones up to one of my top bars so that I can see which flight powers are toggled on, but their placement on the hotbar has nothing to do with the button being pressed to activate them. I'll even do that with some ground target powers I macro to cast at a preferred spot (on me, on my target, etc, depending on the power) -- I might slot it on my bar in a place that's normally activated by Shift+4, but in that character's individual bind file, I'll rebind Shift+4 to a powexec command for it. The icon is just put on the bar so I can see its recharge timer.

 

Edited September 28, 2023 by A.I.D.A.

[Rudra]

10 minutes ago, A.I.D.A. said:

That's not 'during gameplay,' that's 'during downtime, and once at the beginning of gameplay.' Two extra mouse clicks for the one person who uses the GUI selector at all outside of initial setup is a small price to pay for the screenspace it saves every single player on the server.

 

You can also just give your travel powers binds of their own. Personally, I dedicate toggled travel powers to V and Shift+V, while I tend to use CTRL+LBUTTON for teleport.

 

Here's a snippet of my bind file for a character that uses both, actually:

V "powexec_name Mystic Flight"
SHIFT+V "powexec_name Hover"
CTRL+LBUTTON "powexec_name Translocation"

 

I still drag the flying ones up to one of my top bars so that I can see which flight powers are toggled on, but their placement on the hotbar has nothing to do with the button being pressed to activate them. I'll even do that with some ground target powers I macro to cast at a preferred spot (on me, on my target, etc, depending on the power) -- I might slot it on my bar in a place that's normally activated by Shift+4, but in that character's individual bind file, I'll rebind Shift+4 to a powexec command for it. The icon is just put on the bar so I can see its recharge timer.

 

What do you mean that isn't during game play? I am most definitely logged in and playing the game when I change my bottom tray. Even during combats, like I already said. The whole

 

18 minutes ago, Rudra said:

And if things start attacking me while I am doing so? I change my bottom tray back to tray 1 and the former tray 9 tray back to tray 9.

bit. That's me, changing my trays during combat. Not during downtime, not once at beginning of play.

 

Edit: I also don't use key binds. (I do use macros, but that's something else entirely.) Why would I want to try and remember which key binds are applicable to which character? Or even what keys I bound in the 1st place? (Binds work great for others. Good on them. Enjoy your binds.) Especially since all I have to do is click an arrow or two to switch between the two trays I want fast button presses on.

Edited September 28, 2023 by Rudra

[A.I.D.A.]

Downtime is when you're not fighting. Gameplay is when you're fighting. Anyway, I'm actually blocking you this time, to preempt another utter bullshit-fest like your behaviour in that other thread, Rudra.

[Rudra]

5 hours ago, A.I.D.A. said:

Downtime is when you're not fighting. Gameplay is when you're fighting. Anyway, I'm actually blocking you this time, to preempt another utter bullshit-fest like your behaviour in that other thread, Rudra.

 

5 hours ago, Rudra said:

That's me, changing my trays during combat.

 

(Edit: I guess a better example would have been my Blasters.... Their tray 1 is all their range attacks and their tray 2 is all their melee attacks [including from the Fighting pool which is part of their chain]. And when two or more enemies manage to get in melee range, I swap the bottom tray from 1 to 2 and use melee attacks to finish off the opposition.)

Edited September 29, 2023 by Rudra

[A.I.D.A.]

Anyway, back to the actual content of the thread now! The funny thing is that there actually is a Naga tray in Options -> Controls:

 

. . . and as you can see, it still has that little 10th button, making it asymmetrical with the stack of three bars you can expand the main tray to. That asymmetry, coupled with the fact that I only use buttons 1~5 because 6 is unwieldy to press from WASD position, is the reason I don't personally use it, and elected to put the 3x3 Naga cluster in slots 8~0 on the main bar instead. The 6's and 7's aren't even bound to anything, they're just dead space that I would love to completely remove if I could. In a competently designed UI, I would be able to shrink bars to 5 buttons in size, arrange the grids of the bars with two or more rows as I like them, and remove the background of the bar's 'window' so that it only shows the buttons, or even hide buttons without a power slotted into them (briefly showing the empty buttons while a dragged power is on the mouse for placement purposes). But as we all know, back in the day, Cryptic did not really have very many competent designers, and it's their code we're saddled with today. CoH was, after all, under the "care" of Jack "Players Don't Need To See Damage Floaters" Emmert for far too much of its lifespan.

 

Edited September 28, 2023 by A.I.D.A.

[biostem]

22 hours ago, A.I.D.A. said:

In a competently designed UI, I would be able to shrink bars to 5 buttons in size, arrange the grids of the bars with two or more rows as I like them, and remove the background of the bar's 'window' so that it only shows the buttons, or even hide buttons without a power slotted into them (briefly showing the empty buttons while a dragged power is on the mouse for placement purposes).

The thing is, the power bars are "standardized" - they all have 10 spots, the indicator for which tray number they are, and a previous/next button.  The notion of having non-standard trays came much later, AFAIK.  Heck, many modern games offer far less customization than this.  Either way, you can simply bind the keys directly, with no power bar necessary...

[A.I.D.A.]

Yep. They were badly designed by Cryptic back in the day and so we're stuck with them.

[Rudra]

3 hours ago, biostem said:

The thing is, the power bars are "standardized" - they all have 10 spots, the indicator for which tray number they are, and a previous/next button.  The notion of having non-standard trays came much later, AFAIK.  Heck, many modern games offer far less customization than this.  Either way, you can simply bind the keys directly, with no power bar necessary...

 

2 hours ago, A.I.D.A. said:

Yep. They were badly designed by Cryptic back in the day and so we're stuck with them.

Like @biostem said, they were the standard power trays at the time the game was developed and released. In fact, if I remember correctly, there wasn't even a push for different style trays until a couple years after the game launched. So not exactly a Cryptic Studios problem.

 

(Edit: And as the Controls screen shot shows, the Live devs even went back and did their best to accommodate the new gaming mice released at the time.)

Edited September 30, 2023 by Rudra

[Tailcoat]

Ooh, it'd be nice if the Naga tray had 12 power spaces instead of just 10. I don't know if 12 thumb-side buttons is standard for MMO mice, but I could imagine that adding more spaces could break things in the code. 

If it's possible to open multiple Naga trays, that could help. When I've got a character fully stocked with powers, the 3 default trays end up full of buttons, so I need to see a lot more than just 10 spaces at a time. 

[Rudra]

2 minutes ago, Tailcoat said:

Ooh, it'd be nice if the Naga tray had 12 power spaces instead of just 10. I don't know if 12 thumb-side buttons is standard for MMO mice, but I could imagine that adding more spaces could break things in the code. 

If it's possible to open multiple Naga trays, that could help. When I've got a character fully stocked with powers, the 3 default trays end up full of buttons, so I need to see a lot more than just 10 spaces at a time. 

Pretty sure the reason the Razer Naga Mouse Tray still has the same 10 spots as the other power trays is because, like you said, the game can't handle an expanded tray. (I don't remember what exactly the devs said at the time they posted the update that added the gaming mouse power tray, but I do remember something to the tune of "this is what we can do with the game". It was probably the first time I even paid attention to what was going on with the devs and the updates. It was a pretty big deal at the time.)