Topic: fast forwards until next notification

Hi,

I only played the tutorials and one campaign, and this suggestion is obviously only for single player mode, but what I missed (or did not find) was:

A possibility to fast forward until the next notification. The speed of the fast forward does not necessarily need to be "maximum", but could maybe even be configurable. The nice thing come now: once a new message comes in (or I deactivate it by hand), the speed should automatically revert to whatever it was beforehand. One possibility to get that into the GUI would be inside the notification window. Another would be a configurable hot key.

What I currently do when I do find myself waiting for something is turning up the speed using Page+Up, but once a/the message arrives, it takes me some time to turn down the speed again, and during that time the game still blazes away much too fast.

What do you think?

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Thanks for your response. I fear I did not quite explain well enough. Consider this: You are in the middle of a game that at the moment is quite slow because nothing much happens: you wait for things to complete or whatever. So typically you speed up by increasing the speed. This I think (hope) has nothing to do with the AI, as this speeds up as well. Now something happens, so typically you want to go to normal speed again, and do so quickly, as you want to react quickly. Also, often this is connected to a notification. Thus, it would be nice to tell the game in some quick way (one key or button press) to speed up until either a notification comes in, and then to automatically go back to normal speed, in an instant. Equally nice would it be to stop this fast speed by one action as well (could be the same key/button as when starting it).

Assuming you could do all that, it would additionally be nice to be able to set the value of this 'speedup', as different people and/or games likely require different 'fast forward speeds', ideally next to the button to start this, to be able to adapt without going through menus. As this would be tied to notifications, I could imagine this inside that menu (but it could be someplace else as well).

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I was indeed not aware of Ctrl+PageUp/Down, nor of the Pause key - probably because my (laptop) keyboard does not have that key. Thanks for the hint, I will just use another key for that. While this does not quite solve my issue (reset speed at new notification), it goes lengths towards more comfortable fast forward.

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I wish for the same thing.

At the start of a map, and when exploring round a continent, I sometimes want a "Just keep doing what you're all doing, until something interesting happens" function. That is, run at a high speed until there is a message, then either go to 1x speed or Paused (I'm undecided which would be better, probably Paused).

Benefits: I don't get bored waiting. I do not waste time when suddenly finding other tribes. I can address "Out of rocks / wood" issues straight away.

I would not want this to replace any existing speed-related functionality, but be in addition to existing functionality.

So, if I press <something>, the game goes to 10x or 50x or some such until a message appears, then it goes to Paused or 1x speed (depending on consensus, or a config option?)

I want to do this many times in a game, so it is not an unusual requirement.

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I have uploaded a simple plugin add-on "notify-speed.wad" that does what you request. If the plugin is enabled, the arrival of a new inbox message reduces the game speed to 1× if the game was running faster than that, within half a second realtime after the message arrives. This can be temporarily disabled via an entry in the main toolbar's plugins dropdown.

No need for C++ changes here. The only thing is that plugins currently can't have keyboard shortcuts, but that's on my to-do list for when the backlog of other plugin-related PR branches clears up.

This is the cheap work of half an hour of scripting. Comments and suggestions welcome.

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