Warcraft 3 Keyboard Shortcuts

[Ilse Marseau]

Iam running warcraft2 v1.3 under DosBox v0.74 and am having problems assigning a number key [0-9] to a unit or group (control group) in the game also, the spacebar that should center on the location of the last unit transmission does not work. Has anyone had/fixed this problem or have a suggestion?

thanks

I just tested and neither function works in v1.50 of the original game, nor are they listed in the Keystroke Help in the game. Both work in the Battle.net Edition (v2.0), though, so it would seem that they're functions that were added later and you're reading material that assumes that you have the BNE Windows version, not the original DOS version.

No, this came up before. CTRL+# keys in Warcraft II

I was excited at first not being able to number groups was my biggest hate of the Warcraft series, that and the 8 unit limit (4 in WC1) and would of gone mad if it was available all along.

Thanks for the responses. I guess I'll stop trying to "fix" it. For some reason the quote "You can't polish a turd" comes to mind. It's a damm frustrating game as is. I only discovered it 3 weeks ago... thanks again.

If you think that the DOS version of Warcraft II is frustrating, try playing the original Warcraft: Orcs & Humans. That'll make you appreciate Warcraft II a whole lot more. In W1, you can't just select a unit, click somewhere on the map and watch him go do the most appropriate action for that location (walk to, attack, harvest, repair, etc.). You have to explicitly mouse over to the command bar and choose the action, even if it's simply Move, then mouse back to the main window and click on the destination. Fortunately, there's a way to improve the control scheme with the help of a 3rd party utility, which makes the game much less frustrating to play, but playing without it first definitely gives you an appreciation for how much of an improvement Warcraft II's control scheme was (even if later versions improved it even more).

In W1, you can't just select a unit, click somewhere on the map and watch him go do the most appropriate action for that location (walk to, attack, harvest, repair, etc.). You have to explicitly mouse over to the command bar and choose the action, even if it's simply Move, then mouse back to the main window and click on the destination.

Yeah, I understand, but that just highlights how inconvenient the control scheme is. It's not really any easier, IMO, to move your hand back and forth between A and M without looking at the keyboard than it is to simply move the mouse to the command bar.

Warcraft 1 actually does have group select. You have to hold down CTRL to draw your box around units (or use the script that I linked earlier so that you don't have to hold down CTRL). You can't select more than 4 units at a time, though, and you're right that Dune II had no group select at all (but modern recreations like dune Dynasty do).

In a mouse driven desktop application, with a ribbon style interface and which has no menubar, what is the best way for users to learn about the shortcuts and accelerators which can help a user work more efficiently.

My first instinct is that tooltips on hover over the buttons in the ribbon should show the accelerator in the information shown, so as to aid incremental discovery. But is that enough? I'd like to consider a multi-channel approach and introduce other mechanisms to increase learnability, in which case what other mechanisms would best help?

Rahuls tip about a quick notification early on that there are even shortcuts available is great and undo/redo shortcuts might be a good example to teach this by. The simple use of ? to bring up the shortcut lists to browse is nice.

The use of tooltips on Alt or Ctrl is a good idea (where appropriate), although I believe a second or so delay may be necessary so they did not popup immediately every time you used Ctrl+Z or Alt-Tab. This would work nicely for ribbon interfaces.

Gnats observation of a synchronized symmetry of mouse action in drawing window and keyboard command window below is very common in the CAD industry where there can be literally thousands of commands to be used. It also reminded me that in Pro/Engineer, users can customise and manage multi-key commands called mapkeys to access functionality from the keyboard, eg *csb* = *C*reate *S*olid *B*lend. This is a great example of one area where keyboard shortcut functionality should be designed in from day one (Rahul's tip below).

You could try to approach this with an, "tell them about better ways to do what they are doing when they do it" approach. For example, if I am selecting text and clicking bold, that is fine, but if I do that over and over maybe have a modeless (non disruptive, out of the way) notification that could say something like, "Did you know you can press ctrl-b to bold selected text?"

As long as the notification wasn't obtrusive, didn't pop up all of the time, and was intelligent about the times it did show up, then I think that would be a really positive way for users to begin to familiarize themselves with the shortcuts of the application.

Edit. Office 2010 uses a similar approach for shortcuts. They use the ALT key which makes shortcuts difficult to discover (compared to the use of CTRL key). I paste an example below to illustrate how PowerPoint shows shortcuts to navigate through the tabs and to trigger actions:

I've also always liked how Gmail does keyboard shortcuts. They're very simple, not requiring you to learn and use multiple keys at the same time and you can pop open a pane displaying all of them just by typing "?".

Blizzard have also done a lot of thinking about shortcuts in World of Warcraft. The game starts you off by teaching you that pressing 1 attacks, but clicking works too. So you're multi-modal from the start and can develop a preference to your liking. They're consistent about displaying which keys activate certain commands in the user interface, often by displaying a particular letter in bold/yellow to remind you. And like Gmail, they've kept shortcuts simple, using most of the keyboard's letters and numbers for core functionality. It's possible to create more complex shortcuts through customisation but immediate play is possible just by pressing "1" and "q", for instance.

We've thought a bit about this in our product Handcraft. Since it's a code editor, your hands are on the keys most of the time so it's convenient to be able to do things with the keyboard from an ease of use and productivity point of view. But one of our priorities with the editor is to remain "uneditor-ey" when compared with IDEs like Visual Studio. So our goal is to keep the screen very clean and focused. As such we don't want keyboard tips and mouseovers everywhere.

I haven't yet figured how to apply similar trick particularly to keyboard shortcuts but to me the most thrilling way of "converting" novice users from mouse to general keyboard/command-line interaction was one I've seen in some old version (13? 14?) AutoCAD.

In that version, there was a large pane one could 'paint on' using mouse and menus and another, smaller 'text edit' like pane below that was showing and allowing to input/edit commands that matched actions performed with mouse.

The effect was just incredible. Just think of it - you (typical sloooow newbie) painfully moving mouse trying to pick the correct pixel for the center of your circle, then painfully click through a dozen of menus to set desired radius and line width and after you're finally done you see in that pane below something like

circle center(112, 27) radius(88) line(7) (syntax isn't exact, too much time passed and I don't remember its details).

Now, guess what? next time you wanted to move your circle few pixels or make the line a bit wider / narrower, you didn't even try to use mouse - you just went to that smaller window and edited it like

circle center(118, 24) radius(88) line(9)... and next time you wanted to draw a new circle, again, you just typed stuff in that pane below - simply because it was so obviously easier than with mouse. Real magic

Basic Controls

Warcraft III: Frozen Throne is played with both the mouse and keyboard in tandem, and the controls can be quite complex and take some getting used to. Fortunately the basic commands (move, attack, do this, build that) are very simple. It's only when you get into the more sophisticated commands that you'll need to study the manual and practice.

In general, the easy thing to do is click on a guy so he's selected, then left click on the ground somewhere to make him move, or left click on another unit to make him attack that unit. Play through the Tutorial Campaign, it will get you started.

F1: This switches the currently selected unit to your first Hero. Double-tap F1 quickly to center the view on him as well. Note that if you have more than one Hero, additional heroes are accessed using F2, F3, and so on, up through F7. You will never have more than three Heroes in a typical multiplayer game, however.

CTRL+1: This creates a "Group." First, gather everyone you want in a particular group together. Use the mouse to lasso them so they're all highlighted. Then set them as a Group by pressing the one key while holding down the control key. Then, whenever you want to get back to this group, you only have to hit the "1" key again. Note that you can have multiple groups -- choose different guys and hit CTRL+2, CTRL+3, etc.

TAB: This switches between subgroups within a Group. So for example, if you had five riflemen and three knights with your hero in Group 1, and you wanted to select just the riflemen to target an enemy air unit, you would hit "1" first to select that group, then hit TAB to switch the emphasis from the Hero to the Riflemen.

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