Hi,

There are lots of hotkey mods available, but yet none that I'm completely satisfied with, so I have started to make my own, and wanted some opinions.

First, the hotkey mod I have been using, is Super Hotkeys. I really, really like the concept of several wheels, auto casting spell keys (where the bound spell is cast but not selected) and cycler keys (where each consecutive click changes between different items bound to the same key).

So my hotkey mod (tentatively named Enhanced Hotkeys) will have that, but I will do things a bit different :

* The scripting is very different using OBSE arrays, thereby eliminating Super Hotkey's bugs, hopefully without introducing too many new ones.
* Key 9 and 0 will work like fully native hotkeys - the wheel will now display 10 keys/items instead of 8!
* Interface is simplified, where there's no need to define hotkey type.
-- Ctrl-clicking on items will append the item to a key instead of replacing the old item, thereby making a cycler. No need to first select the cycler type and then selecting all items without letting go of the number key.
-- Alt-clicking on an item will remove that item from a hotkey
-- Clicking directly on an item in the wheel will switch between normal and auto-cast if the item is a single spell.
-- Hotkey type is displayed, with an "A" on the icon if an auto-cast key, a number if a cycler (the number of items), and a "G" if a gear key
* If having multiple items bound to one key (cycler or gear), you can click on the hotkey icon to cycle their icons, in order to see all the items - so you will be able to recall which items that are there.
* Auto cast spells will work slightly differently: The icon and name will be displayed as a message when cast (optional). If having too little mana, you just get the too-little mana sound - unlike Super Hotkeys where the auto-cast spell will then become your active spell, and be cast later when you gain enough mana. This was the single most irritating aspect of Super Hotkeys, IMHO.
* ...and a few other things


I have worked on this for a few days now, so the basics are working (increasing the wheel from 8 to 10 hotkeys took most of the time), but I am unsure of a few things.

Especially gear keys. I have never used gear hotkeys myself, but still consider adding it. If so, I plan to have a key becoming a gear key, simply by holding the key down (and displaying the wheel), and then pressing "G". All currently equipped clothing/armor will then be bound to that key. I also consider having different types of gear key modes, switchable by clicking on the icon (with some modifier key). I have seen that there are different types of gear modes implemented in other mods:

1. Unequip ALL clothing/armor, then equip bound gear.
2. Equip bound gear, but keep other equipped clothing/armor in non-conflicting slots.
3. Only equip bound gear that is not conflicting with currently equipped items.

So I guess what I should be asking is: If you would consider using this mod, are gear hotkeys important, and if so, what type?


I also want some opinions regarding the cycler key. What I envision is that a cycler key can either have multiple weapons (only), or multiple spells (only). When clicking on the cycler hotkey the mods look through the items to find the one you have equipped (weapon) or selected (spell), and then activates the item after that. If none are equpped/active, the first item will be activated. This is quite close to how Super Hotkeys' Dynamic Cycler works if you only have different spells or different weapons bound to one such key.

This was the only way I used cycler options in Super Hotkeys, so unless other potential users disagree (and have a good reason why), I will stick to that.


Also, do anyone use multiple keys as wheel modifiers for one wheel, e.g. alt+control? For now I stick to only allowing one key to select each wheel, so that wheel 0 is without keys, wheel 1: shift, wheel 2: ctrl, etc. Whether the wheel selector keys function as sticky keys or not, will be optional.


Finally, is there anything else I should consider?

http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=22143 - just to let you know.

In my main Oblivion game I use Superhotkeys and what I don't like about that is it seems that to truly clear a hotkey you need to drop all the items - I've had more than a few instances where I was certain I reprogrammed a hotkey to cycle through a set and then later it would skip items or even not equip them or even equip items twice.

With Nehrim (which is great) I'm using http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=30673 which has ini configuration and I'm liking it a lot more. I'd check that out if you haven't. I found learning superhotkeys kinda frustrating, while the ini of ST was more straightforward but not quite as many possibilities. I also like how the keys get assigned like with vanilla and whatever is assigned to them is cleared when doing it again.

with this:
Why not have an ini setting that allows either change to the next or start with what is equipped.

I find it frustrating with a cycler key when using spells. For instance I usually set key 3 to be healing spells 4 buffing spells 5 attack spells. So then in combat press 4 a couple of times to get the right buff spell then 5 for attack spell - run, hide heal then back to 5 and have to cycle through to find the spell or cycle to get the right buff or heal. Yuck. I'd prefer being able to have it always start back to where you left it if going to another hotkey then back again.

As far as gear equipping http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=34613 is pretty amazing. I can't imagine more comprehensive.

nehrim compatibility?

Sounds good.

Gear Hotkeys: Never really a big seller for me. Nice I guess, but I never really felt the need for them myself.

Modifier keys: I like what I have now, ST Hotkeys, which is a number (four in this case) of keys set to different wheels (I use keys G,H,J & K, so the ability to set ones own would be most helpful - and almost vital given the number of mods that use their own keys for various things.) Simply click on the key for that wheel. For instance I currently use one for weapons, one for arrow/bolt types and another for spells.

Really the only thing I look for in such a mod is more hotkey slots, in a "reasonable" configuration - i.e. easy and quick to use, to select desired object (spell, weapon...) and switch between wheels if multiple used.

And the main problem I have found with all of them (although less frequent in my current one, at least it seems so thus far) is that the number of arrows attached to a hotkey switch from the whole stack (as originally attached) to just one! If you can avoid that, then that would be fantastic. Very annoying when playing a character with a preference for archery.

Wow, I am very happy that you will do "yet another hotkey mod" TheNiceOne, :celebration: I will immediately switch to yours once you finish it since I know your mods are great in general .

I also use Super Hotkeys, and I love that I can select a lot of shortcuts for my spells. In fact that is the only thing I want and love most about a hotkey mod, a lot of hotkeys and a easy way to select them. In fact in battle sometimes if I'm outside I get a FPS drop and its very hard to select some of the hotkeys from super hotkeys (for example shift+alt+a number) and maybe a possibility to change the hotkey selector easily to a simple letter, or even add more selectors would be great!

That alone will make me want to use your hotkey mod. Personally I don't need that many hotkeys, two wheels with 10 hotkeys each are more than enough for me. Don't think I'll be able to remember more than that anyway.

I've never used gear keys either, but I think having one 'town' set (with fortify mercantile, fortify speechcraft etc stuff and clothing instead of armor) and one 'adventuring' set will be useful. I would prefer option 2 for that (keep items in slots that aren't used by the bound gear).

No idea about the cycler keys as I've never used them and with 20 hotkeys and possibly gear keys I don't need them.

Didn't see that, so not a good thread title then. But as said, the mod is tentatively named "Enhanced Hotkeys", which I think is unused.

I think I will fully avoid that. Partly because you can see all the items equipped to a cycler or gear key by clicking on the icon, and partly because you can alt-click on items to remove them from a cycler/gear key.

I haven't really checked out this, though I guess I should. I will work hard to make it clear and straightforward to see/change what's bound to a key though.

Partly because I never saw any use for the former. Assume I have 4 spells bound to a cycler (flame, ice, lightning, posion) and click once to activate the flame spell. Later I activate a restore health spell. Later again I get attacked and want to activate one of the attack spells again. To me it is much more intuitive that since I don't have any of them active, clicking on the key once will activate the 1st, etc. and not the second since I have previously clicked on that key once (maybe in an earlier game session).

But if anyone can give me a reason for why it is useful that the mod remembers which item you last activated and will now activate the next in the cycle, even if the former is no longer active, then I will consider doing that.

Let me see - you want a third spell cyceler option, where if none of the spells bound to the key is active, you activate the same as you last activated with that key? Not the first, and not the one after the one you last activated, but the same as last... I can actually see a good use for that.

So i guess I make it so that when you have spells in a cycler, you can some-modifier-click on the key icon to set cycler mode. You will then see a small icon/letter overlaying the key icon, telling which cycler mode that is in use for that key. That should be user friendly and simple, no?

I saw that one, which is one of the reasons I still am not sure whether to add gear sets as an option.

So far the mod is without any master at all, and will therefore automatically work just as well with Nehrim as Oblivion, and I think I can keep that.

First let my try to give my take on the gear modes.
1. I personally was never very fond of this as an idea even though it is the most commonly accepted and most easily understandable. The whole "switch clothes with a key" is somewhat anathema to me so that is probably it
2. Sounds good in the way that you might have a helmet+gloves you want to use but the other gear is dependent on situation, so that they will be kept.
3. Makes more sense from a minimalistic point and can make it more fun for the player thinking about how the character actually is dressed (or more frustrating for some :aah: )


I did use Super hot keys when it came out but am now using vanilla hot keys.
Suggestions:
Well, you know me - I am not a casual player and the reason I stopped using Super hot keys was that it did not impose any difficulty for me. Let me expound on that by giving my suggestions - and you others mark that this is never going to be default settings, of that I am sure, and ofcourse they might not even be considered as proper to include in this mod.
1. Delay. I would prob just go in and set the script update to something lower but that might affect the mod to be twitchy and unreliable.
What I mean is, now as I use ROM drop lit torch I found that I liked having to hold down the torch botton to get it to lit up - it is not a flash light. Switching items, remembering spells could take a second to switch/remember. Makes for a harder game.
2. In Phitts fighing fixes he forces the Player to walk when casting spells or sheathing a weapon. What about being a setting doing something similar when switching gear/spell. Could even be that the more gear you are switching too the longer you have to walk.
3. Some way to break the above if you made a mistake and want to stop changing clothes so you can run again.
4. Remembering a new spell costs 10% of the spell cost in magica. Preferable it would be the active cost and not the basic spell casting cost. (or 5% or 1%...0%) all settable in the ini.
5. Changing gear while running have a chance of dropping it....
6. Okay :flamethrower:

Ninja'd by a few... :ninja:


My idea is to have up to 5 freely configurable wheel modifier keys, for up to 6 different wheels (wheel 0 is the default with no modifier key). Hold down the modifier key (or tap it if you enable sticky wheel keys) to select the wheel. And each wheel is the normal wheel, except that it has been increased to 10 slots.

I know of the problem, and think/hope I will be able to fix that.


Thanks. As explained above, I think that one key to select a specific wheel is enough, especially since you can select between sticky and non-sticky keys. But do you really want to have more than one key modifier for a wheel?


Thanks

You should try cycler keys. I have my main sword and main bow attached as a cycler for key "1". It means that if I tap "1" once, the following happens:
* If neither is equipped, will equip the sword.
* If sword is equipped, will change to bow
* If bow is equipped, will change to sword.

I find that simpler and faster to use than having the sword as key 1 and bow as key 2 - and it saves one slot

No, I think it will be enough , I hope .

I love the fact that we will be able to use 9 and 0, I noticed this later.

Oehhhhh, very excited about this one. You've pretty much summed up everything I liked and disliked about SuperHotkeys. Better yet, you're fixing them (of sorts)!

Oh and can we get a screenshot of the 10-slots-menu?

Well for the cycling I'd welcome this feature with weapons and spells - I mayve all my melee tied to just key one, but I'd still have a favorite sword I'd like to go right back to or a favorite bow or staff on key two.

Yay about the no master for Nehrim use!

@Locksley: Thanks for the input. It seems like you want (hardcoe) immersive hotkey mod. I like that kind of thinking, so I may possibly go back and look at it after I get the "standard" to work well.

Yes, I can post this evening I will probably try to shine up the graphics a bit before release (or after), but it looks OK already...


OK, since I then need to store the last activated item for each key, I might as well make three cycler modes:
1. Auto cycle: Will look through the list and see if any is currently active. If so, activate the next on the list. If not, activate the first.
2. Cycle last: Will check if the last activated is still active. If so, activate the next on the list. If not, activate the last activated. (Psymon's preferred mode)
3. Cycle next: Will activate the one after the last activated regardless of current active.

When you create a cycler (made automatic if you add more than one item to a key), it will become type 1. But you can cycle between the three modes by clicking on the key icon (with a configurable mode key held down). The key's mode icon will then change between (tentatively): C#, L# and N#, where # is the number of items bound to the cycler key.

Clicking on the key icon (with a configurable icon cycler key held down) will cycle between the different items' icon in the key icon, and display that item's name above the wheel. So it will be very easy to check all items bound to the key.


:)

While I appreciated Quick Wardrobe when using it - I haven't bothered installing it for a long time so I guess the answer is that I don't find gear hotkeys that important. I mainly used it to be able to strip my char quickly, in order to check damaged attributes - and then quickly reequip everything. I've been meaning to check out Fast Equipping but haven't yet. In short, I'd appreciate and use gear hotkeys if available - but I can apparently live without them.

Anyway, looking forward to this.

http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/images/34735-1-1284996228.jpg of the (still-WIP) hotkey wheel

I also use SuperHotkeys, and use the gear and cycler hotkeys part of it mostly. SuperHotkeys is buggy in its implementation of that, and I am glad to know that you are planning to work on something better! Here are some thoughts:

I find that I like to tag my fighter gear, mage gear, archer/thief gear, and in-town gear separately, so gear hotkeys are nice to have. Also, as Arkngt pointed out, I also use it to be able to strip my char quickly, in order to check damaged attributes. I use the shift-modifier key for the gear hotkeys, and find that they get activated even when I use plain hotkeys without using the shift modifier...

I also use spells as cycler hotkeys, but find that sometimes when I press a hotkey button, I get the modifier key hotkey activated (for no reason at all), making the hotkeys a hit-or-miss affair most of the time...

I have never understood the concept of dynamic hotkeys that Super Hotkeys has..

I would request a feature where if I press a hotkey button, multiple spells should be activated in succession. E.g., I have 5 spells for fortify strength, endurance, luck, agility, speed etc., and I cast them in succession always. It would be good to allow to cast them all (in succession) with one key press.

Also, another feature of superhotkey that I dislike: say I have spells A and B selected as cycler hotkey 1, and spells C and D selected as cycler hotkey 2. when I press 1, I get spell A, when I press 2, I get spell C. Pressing 1 again will auto cycle to spell B, but I want to keep the spell as 'A', not B, i.e., not cycle at this time. This gets tiresome when I have 5-6 spells cycler in a hotkey, and I have to cycle through them again just to get back to the last-cast spell of that hotkey when changing hotkeys...

I use Super Hotkeys too - I tried a few others before it and found it to be the best of the bunch. The bug you mention (presumably the one where it suddenly refuses to switch wheels) was fixed in OBSE 19 - I reported it to scruggs and he fixed it. I've been using it for 25-30 hours or so with no problems.


Sweet! Only problem is, someone will have to make a DarkUI version for those of us using differently-colored UIs.


Very nice. I hate having to drop an item to remove it from the hotkey. Can you also add a "bind" function whereby if the item is dropped (say, your weapon is disarmed), it won't be removed (or let us set it in the ini)? It's really irritating that every time I get disarmed, stripped of my gear, etc., I have to rebind everything.


Now that is nice. The thing I didn't like about YAKM was the cycling wheels - having the extra hotkeys was great, but having to cycle through them was a big PITA, and I couldn't remember what was where.


Me neither. I just wear the same outfit all the time.


I never used the Dynamic Cycler (I could never figure out how it worked) but this sounds good to me.


Ugh, god no. Keep one modifier key - I don't want to be contorting my fingers all over the keyboard trying to hit multiple keys to activate a wheel.


That could be handy. I only use two wheels now - about 13 keys total - so 20 would be more than enough, but it would be nice for the mages.

why this wasnt in vanilla escape me.

looks great already! :tops:

This mod is sounding great already, especially the part about fixing the bugs/annoyances of Super Hotkeys, which I am currently using. All of the previous posts cover all of the annoyances of Super Hotkeys except for one: long OnEquip messages when using item cyclers and especially gear-style hotkeys. This gets bothersome when they crowd out more important messages, due to the imperfect way Oblivion handles messages. It would be great if cyclers can be renamed, have very short names, or even removed entirely.

I found with Super Hotkeys, If I tried to assign a group of arrows to a hot key, while I had them equipped, I would only get one. If it was just a stack of arrows, NOT equipped, when I poked the hotkey, I would get the full stack.

I am also in agreement with the idea of, if you have a cycler hotkey, hit a different hotkey, so an item NOT on that list is selected, and then revert back to it, it goes back to the last item equipped with that hotkey.

This sounds truly awesome. When this one comes out, I will certainly use it.

I love the idea of expanding the basic selection to 10 hotkeys, so I'd be very keen on this mod. I never use gear keys. The only hotkey mod I've ever managed to get working is http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=27156. I've tried all the others, except Yet Another Hotkey Mod that was referred to earlier. I think one of the problems for me is that I have a gaming keyboard that has a second set of several keys on a special gaming pad. With one of the hotkey mods, it was trying to use the ctrl key and that didn't work at all. For some reason, shift and alt work fine, but ctrl seems to behave differently, so that might be something to consider. I have no problem with the basic game - I use ctrl for sneaking. I think it's because ctrl is normally a toggle, but shift and alt are held down.

So I like your idea of providing 10 keys. I'd only use three wheels altogether. The basic 10 keys, another set that's accessed while holding shift and the third set that's accessed while holding alt. If you do provide another set that's accessed by holding ctrl, then hopefully I can just leave that out. I assign spells, weapons and potions to my hotkeys and that's it. No gear, as I said earlier. I don't like the idea of cycler keys - it's too slow during battle. My hotkeys are mostly used for spells and I will quickly switch them during battle, so I need to know exactly which spell is accessed by a specific key combination. I don't want to keep clicking on a key to cycle through them.

Hope this helps!

Gear keys: I'd prefer unequip all, then equip all the bound items. For me it's the most intuitive and guaranteed to give me the exact set of gear that I want to be using.

A very ambitious project, to be sure. Atm I'm using a very old mod called http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=13443 for a single feature; the ability to bind hotkey to anything on the keyboard, not just 1-8. This allows me to use the number pad for both cast keys and gear-equip. If you can add this feature to a modern hotkey mod (all the other cool stuff you listed from Super Hotkeys), then you will totally have my love :celebrate:

It all sounds good so far.
And I see you went with the traditional wheel extended - looks good.

One other thing that I just remembered, and liked, was from Hovs Hotkeys, which added hotkeys to the number pad (leaving the original hotkey system alone.) I think, especially as you are utilising all the number keys, that I would like it if I could assign hotkeys to the number pad instead of the normal number keys. Just an idea though, and either as an option (assignable keys) or the default.
Just an idea while we have you in the pre-release
Ah I see that I was ninja'd while writing this.

Hi, i use http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=12244 , i like it very much.
It has no cycling keys and no wheels. However you can also bind any key you like to this mod.
It has 18 key slots plus two modifier keys, a bind key, a delete key, a showbind key, and a menukey.
You can bind all those to whatever key you like. I got 1-8 and the numpad keys bound to it.
In effect it provides 3x18 keys via the two modifier keys. I use about 20 keys for spells and 10 for equipment.

I very much like the idea of a 1 to 10 wheel that we can see while binding keys!
Because binding keys with HotkeyCasting can be a pain in the butt.
One can only see the bound spell while holding the showbindkey + nothing or modifier1 or modifier2 + the actual key.
It then displays a text line that says SpellXY bound to modifier1 key5 or something like that, can get very confusing XD.

So if you include the ablility to bind to any key plus a visible binding process where one can see what one actually does,
that would be very much appreciated, i think.
As for cycling keys or spell queuing - would be nice indeed, even better with a visible process to bind these also.

Godspeed