I'm seeing too many commanders getting ignored. Yes, yelling at the top of your lungs for 40 minutes straight will certainly get people to listen to you, it's also the most awful way of going about it. It also clearly doesn't work for people with out mics. I don't have any concrete suggestions here, just a few ideas. I know half of them aren't the best, but it's always good to get it down on paper. Pitch in with anything you have. When commander uses voice chat it quiets others down a tad. Some sort of alert button that causes screen to violently flash "SHUT UP SHUT UP COMMANDER NEEDS YOUR ATTENTION" When commander types in all caps his text blinks or turns into some rainbow font or something so people actually see it and read it. Commander has a separate chat button that causes text to appear mid screen like when admins type something. Honestly having trouble thinking of things, I mean commander chat does appear as a lighter color but I don't think that shows up very well on certain monitors and it's not as noticeable. Again, these aren't the best of ideas but it's simply awful how bad people can ignore the commander so easily.
I ignore every single comm if he disagrees with me. It really doesn't matter how loud he talks, at least for me. Oh and, I think you are talking about something like TS3's priority speaker? I don't think that's a bad idea actually.
I disagree. Having commanders useless without a voice is the most effective way of keeping all the 15 year olds away from the comm vehicle. Except the Russian ones, and we have f s space for that
https://forums.empiresmod.com/index.php?threads/commander-message.12824/ in the last post trickster said, "lets call it implemented"
Commanders need better tools, text is fine but easily forgotten. If there were ways to set way points A B etc for example on Choke points, flags, points of interest, maybe with some mapponf entity support then it would be better. Commander has very few tools I would rather be able to drop say a point of interest marker on for example the roofs in crossroads with perhaps some interaction - a point multiplier in the area maybe. Even better if mappers could add a brush or something with a map marker - commanders could weight the importance of that feedbacks to some kind of incentivising multiplier. We all know refinery points are boss, but if players could see markers on a Choke point or something of that nature it would simplify things. Move orders are pretty useless in their current form. Very transient, cancelled by squad orders, etc. Perhaps a build buff could be given to these areas, giving the commander a decision about which points to buff. I dunno, but there are tons of ways we can think of, how many of them are do-able I do not know.
yes there should be more actual markers in 3d space ... something i suggested before, make comm mouse visible to players, it could be used to make clear what "here" and "there" mean and provide general guideance. let it turn red for attack, yellow for guard and green or just white as default. also, to reduce annoyance have it fade out the closer it is to a player (per player). building ghost could also close the gap between rts and fps - same concept as for the cursor.
That's all well and good, but the number of times I see a commander die because team didn't listen is staggering. I rather something much more easy to implement then something that will take ton of time. Seriously, for me at least the issue with commanding is not people doing thing a or thing b, that stuff can be dealt with with simple use of buildings most of the time. It's the number of times people get soooooooooooo focused on their personal goal right in front of them they lose either everything else or the cv due to the usual suspects. A team that lost should not be saying "what happened?" at the end of a match.
That's why you need to incentivise people. Of you don't hear or can't understand the commander is one problem that visual cues fix best, as for taking no notice of the commander - people who don't are bad, or know better, that is best solved by giving them personal reasons to do so. Would also add a good depth to the commander role to manage said mechanics. Commander role is the least fleshed out of the game, theres very little to do besides yell/plead with the team to hold rather than push, etc
If the commander presses shift+enter when sending a message, it appears underneath the bar at the top of the screen, making sure fucking server handy hints don't inmediately push it away. Would be a good solution, wonder how easy it would be to implement though
Doesn't look too hard. In this file and location: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/source-sdk-2013/blob/master/mp/src/game/client/hud_basechat.h#L361 Code: const bool bShiftDown = g_pInputSystem->IsButtonDown( KEY_RSHIFT ) || g_pInputSystem->IsButtonDown( KEY_LSHIFT ); KeyValues* pKV = new KeyValues( "ChatEntrySend" ); pKV->SetInt( "shiftDown", bShiftDown ? 1 : 0 ); PostMessage( m_pHudChat, pKV ); Change Code: MESSAGE_FUNC( OnChatEntrySend, "ChatEntrySend"); to Code: MESSAGE_FUNC_INT( OnChatEntrySend, "ChatEntrySend", shiftDown ); Then change Code: void CBaseHudChat::OnChatEntrySend( void ) { Send(); } to Code: void CBaseHudChat::OnChatEntrySend( int shiftDown ) { Send(); } It goes on like that. Eventually the code that inserts the line has to check shiftDown to see if it should insert at the normal place or elsewhere. You'll probably have to send a bit in front of the SayText user message to pass the shiftDown parameter along. Note that this would break backwards compatibility for say, say_team and the SayText network message. If you have third party mods (SourceMod) that rely on it, add new messages instead.
