Brood War Hotkeys

[Frederic Laureano]

Note: Most general and ingame hotkeys also work, e.g. F10, Alt+M to open the game menu. The others that have particular usage in the replay viewer are Mouse Wheel (StarCraft: Remastered) and F6 (StarCraft: Remastered) to control zoom, Shift+F2-F4 and F2-F4 to control camera locations, Ctrl+C, Alt+C to center screen on selected unit(s), Shift+Tab to switch between player colors and diplomacy colors in the minimap and main screen (StarCraft: Remastered only switches between those two modes whereas non-remastered supports three modes as described in Ingame), Tab to toggle whether to show terrain in minimap, Ctrl+R to toggle multiplayer ranking mode if game type is Use Map Settings (UMS). Control group selection hotkeys might also work for one of the players (this seems like a glitch?), e.g. Alt+Number, Double tap on Number to select units from the numbered control group then center screen to them. You can't change the control group assignments though.

A hotkey is a key or set of keys which perform a specific function with regards to time efficiency. Hotkeys are vital as they allow for orders and commands to be delivered quickly, thus allowing for better control, and much more efficient time management.

There are profile options for Standard, Grid (which maps everything to 15 specific keys), left-handed options for both, and the original StarCraft's hotkeys, as well as custom profiles. The hotkeys below are for the right-handed Standard template.

Higher and widescreen resolution. Redone character portraits. Real-time lighting. Less compressed audio. That's about the long and short of what's new in StarCraft: Remastered. For $15 you can bolt these nicer-looking and sounding features onto your existing copy of the 1998 classic. (Which, even if you somehow avoided buying a Battle Chest compilation for nearly 20 years, is now free in its unaltered form.)

I'll admit that this latest excuse to play the original StarCraft and its expansion, Brood War, appealed to me. Maybe it's because I was eight years old at the time, but the campaign's dark, sometimes comedic, sometimes horrific tale of space rednecks fighting giant bugs and psychic plant people has stuck with me like few games of the era. It certainly made more of an impression than the nonsensical science-fantasy soup that the series became across the StarCraft 2 trilogy.

Part of the StarCraft competitive scene is in the same boat, albeit for different reasons. "Quality of life" improvements, like better hotkeys and user interface options, made SC2 a fundamentally different experience than the first game and its expansion. It's more accessible for casual fans (like me), but high-level players have long expressed frustration that the sequels automate too much of Brood War's hands-on design. There's resurging interest in the original game among pro players and casters as a result.

StarCraft: Remastered feels specifically catered to them. It runs in the same client as the original game. The F5 key switches between the flashy and not-so-flashy graphics on the fly. The two "versions" of StarCraft interact with each other just fine in multiplayer. The only gameplay benefit that I can think of is that playing in widescreen might provide extra map awareness.

The rest of the remaster just gussies up the game that you've had two decades to make your mind up about. Longtime fans may appreciate the original gameplay's bump to a full screen, or the ability to stream a flashier version of the game on sites like Twitch.

It doesn't help me, however. Going back to Brood War, I sorely miss those same changes to SC2 that aggrieve top players. Control groups, capped at 12 units, feel tiny. Micromanaging my workers to start harvesting resources is painfully slow. I find myself constantly trying to queue building construction, only to remember I can't in this game. This completely upsets my rhythm.

Which isn't to say I don't see the appeal. StarCraft is as much a game of short-term skill as it is about long-term strategy. The remaster nods to that necessity with the addition of an in-game actions-per-minute counter. You can even set it to alert you if your movements drop below a certain frequency.

Watching that precision play out is impressive, and only more so with refreshed visuals. But try as I might, I couldn't really keep up with the few thousand weapons-grade players still searching for ranked matches after all these years. In my experience, matching into games took a little less than a minute. It takes me about that long to lose to a Zergling run, too.

That leaves players at my skill level with a consolation prize: a nostalgia trip through the single-player campaign. And, hey! That's still pretty good. User interface foibles aside, nothing has ever quite recaptured SC1's blend of backwoods sci-fi and high-concept horror. One minute your Vulture pilot is picking his nose and balking at orders. The next, a planet-killing warlord betrays you by throwing an all-devouring swarm at your favorite psychic commando. The game drips with personality, from the stilted claymation-y cutscenes to the annoyed responses of in-game units.

Said soldiers move and act just like they always have, frozen to the same animation cycles as in the original, but they look wonderful. In fact, the extra fidelity adds even more character to the already memorable game. Cracks in the terrain, foliage on withered trees, street signs in urban centers that you can actually read: they all place the faded character of the Milky Way's Koprulu Sector in sharper focus.

Here, Jim Raynor isn't a soft-edged, small-town sheriff. He's another glowering, perfectly chiseled space marine. Kerrigan looks less like a TV fortune teller with space goggles and more like a high-tech super-soldier. Arcturus Mengsk looks at least 50 percent less like an older Kurt Russell.

Some players might like the idiosyncrasies born from the sloppier parts of StarCraft's controls. I, on the other hand, like the awkward, dirty look of its initial character models. These cleaned and straightened-out figures just don't quite mesh with the backwater future the rest of the game conveys.

This example follows some of the work on Human Complement C3a Receptor (C3aR) from Reid and coworkers [Reid-2014]. C3aR is a G-protein coupled receptor important for the human inflammatory processes and has been identified as a potential drug target for several inflammatory diseases. In their work, Reid replaced a bridging ether with a heterocycle to convert a known antagonist compound into a potent and selective agonist for Human C3aR. In this example, we will design analogs to the known compound. The results will include several compounds studied by Reid.

Open vBROOD by double-clicking the icon or typing vBROOD at a command prompt. The GUI will start, displaying the information screen and the five primary task buttons (Build and Run, Build a new query, Run BROOD, Filtering, and View Results).

The BROOD database is a directory. After the default BROOD database has been downloaded, you need to unpack it and select the new directory. We do not recommend renaming the BROOD database, since you must then rename all the files contained within it. Consistency is required to prevent confusion between the name of the database and the files being searched under that name.

Of the five primary tasks, the one most commonly used Build and Run. This brings you to a five-step GUI wizard that takes you through building and editing a query, selecting an optional property filter, selecting parameters for the BROOD search, and visualizing the results.

Load the molecule c3a-4.sdf by clicking on the small folder icon in the molecule entry space, then navigate to the brood* directory of the **OpenEye-applications data installation and load the file c3a-4.sdf.

On the left, the current molecular property table is now filled to reflect the properties of themolecule. These calculated properties can be used as a guide to consider some of the things thatmight need to be changed in the loaded molecule.

The c3a compound 4 has appropriate aqueous formal charges. BROOD retains the state of the molecule as it is in the input file, so make sure your query molecule is in the charge and tautomer state you desire before loading it into BROOD.

Multiple fragments can be selected by shift-clicking. In this case, though, we will simply lasso the fragment we want to select. Hold down the Left button on your mouse and circle the fragment of the molecule shown in the image below. The lassoed fragment will then be highlighted (Figure: Selecting a query fragment).

In general, if the molecule you loaded in this step has 3D coordinates, BROOD will use them and will replace the fragment in place. This allows fragment replacement to work in an active site. If the loaded molecule has only 2D coordinates, then a single low-energy conformer will be generated for the ligand using OMEGA technology.

As the wizard moves to the second stage, the fragment is extracted from the whole molecule and is displayed along with the color atoms generated from the input structure. This interface is designed to help users inspect and edit either the shape or color (i.e., chemistry) atoms of the query. Initially, the three heavy-atom, two attachment-point query will appear annotated with an acceptor color atom. In this example, Reid and coworkers discovered that this acceptor moiety is extremely important. Emphasis to the color force field at this point will be added as well as a constraint.

Now click on the same acceptor atom we chose above. A dashed circle will appear around the atom, annotating the newly added constraint. The query should now look similar to the figure Color and constrain on query fragment.

This interface allows BROOD to filter the output by the properties of constructed molecules with replacement fragments. For example, BROOD filters by simple rule-of-five, predicted bioavailability, and complexity. Any constructed molecules that fail to meet these property filters will not appear in the output. In all cases, the property filters consider the properties of the whole molecule (rather than only the fragment).

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