stupid left-clicking @#$*&

Can't answer you question but as a suggestion you could turn the anomaly POP up message off.
It is one of the options on the left hand side menu

Also, most of the popups will close with ESC. 

Pardon my vociferousness, but WHY IN *&^ WOULD SOMEBODY BIND THAT TO THE ESC KEY?? It's a "Done" button, it's the ONLY button on the dialog box, and every other Windows program in the world uses the Enter key to click the default button in a dialog box.

Okay, I'm done venting.

So. Feature request: Could you make the ENTER key dismiss popups too?

I was thinking the same thing, or perhaps if the DONE button would appear in the same screen position for all events (still have events and details screens sometimes overlaping so you can't see what you have to click on) . . . I know I'm lazy

Oh stop complaining. I would rather not miss an important message because I pressed the Enter key once too many.

I am much more careful with the esc.

Or it would be nice to have a option to turn off ALL pop-ups, and let the game 'auto-turn' ...just to speed up those times when all you can do is wait.

ooohhhkaaay! Glad to know I'm not the only one who is frustrated by this. Thanks for the ESC tip though.

Because the other Windows default is to bind Esc to Close and/or Cancel. Almost all Windows dialogs with a 'do nothing' option, or with no options at all, can be closed just as easily with Esc, and that's actually the key I usually use to do so.

~SDC~

Yes, but the Windows default is to bind Enter to the default dialogue button. As a result, GalCiv should support the closing of the dialogue box when pressing Enter.

When people see those dialogue boxes, they see the word "Done" which is immediatly associated with "OK", and triggers the intuitive response to press Enter. They become a bit confused when Enter doesn't dismiss the dialogue.

Not only that, but adding in Enter would speed up the dialogue response time as well. When people press "Enter" to go to the next turn, they'll have to move their hand to the "Esc" key to dismiss a dialogue box. This process can be a bit slow, especially when they don't know whether a dialogue box is going to open or not.
[Message Edited]

Why is the Esc key problematic? It's a pretty standard GUI convention.

Enter, on the other hand, can make the next turn occur so if you accidentaly hit Enter twice you could end up losing a turn.

Well, then switch them! Make Esc go to the next turn (which is a far rarer occurence, relatively, then all the dialogue boxes that show up in the game), and have Enter close the dialogue boxes!

Alternatively, allow us to remap the keys for all hotkey functions to do whatever we want, instead of what they default to. If ancient DOS-based shareware games from decades ago can have key remapping, I doubt that would require a serious gui rewrite.

I'm willing to take that risk, because I don't rapidly hit enter to close a single dialogue box.

Besides, there have been a lot more complaints about the dialogue boxes not closing on enter, as opposed to replies stating that it should remain at the "ESC" key. Perhaps the users are also willing to take the risk - if they don't like the results, they can just add in "EnterCloseDialogue=0" to "Galciv.ini" and revert to hitting the other key.

I take it customizable keybinds are out of the question? Otherwise, why have one vociferous group's solutions imposed on the silent majority?

Frogboy:

It's problematic because it's completely non-obvious and it causes a lot of unnecessary mousing. And if you're that concerned about people ending their turn by accident, the Turn button shouldn't have been bound to the Enter key.


DuoDecimal:

You presume that the silent majority disagrees with the vociferous group, which is not at all evident.

Let me ask you key-binding experts another question...
What keys do you use to move between fields in the BCs-for-Turns dialog box of the trade screen? And does (or should) the Esc key hit "Done" or "Cancel" in that box?

The silent majority is playing the game and not reading the forums. They are used to how it is now and will be very confused when they have to switch the keys they instinctually hit to do what they expect it to do.

I use neither enter nor escape in Gal Civ, always the mouse, since it wasn't intuitively set up as far as I was concerned. For games like Thief and Jumpgate, my keybinds are completely different from the default and unplayable by anyone else except me.

As far as expected behavoir, based on prior game experience, Escape should always be cancel, and enter 'OK' or the default option. Next turn, in games like MOO2, was neither ("T" in MOO2's case). I still hit "T" occasionally, out of instinct inertia.

There have been reports of GalCiv players found wondering along a deserted New Mexico roadside after their families reported them missing. When found, they reportedly kept muttering something about the "enter key" and a "dialog box".

The truth is out there...

It occurs to me on re-reading my recent message that I may have sounded rather obnoxious, snide, and/or otherwise unpleasant. If it was interpreted thusly, I do apologize. But user interface design is one of my little pet peeves and I can tend to rant a bit.

At any rate, I expect that the silent majority, much like DuoDecimal and myself, never even thought of trying the ESC key when the Enter key didn't click the "Done" button. I'm surprised it didn't come up in beta testing; I would have thought that more people would have mentioned it or would have suggested that the "Turn" action be the "T" key instead of Enter so that Enter can be the default button clicker.

One thing I don't like about the current arrangement is that ESC is "Done" in some boxes and "Cancel" in others.

The other thing I don't like, now that I know what ESC does, is that it's still not a convenient key to hit. Most of the time my keyboarding hand is on the keypad, a foot or more away from the ESC key. (Being extremely left-handed, I mouse with my left hand and keyboard with my right. I also dislike having to move a hand from mouse to keyboard and back repeatedly. And I dislike having to regularly move the mouse long distances, especially up and down. I hope that at least one of these issues also applies to most right-handers.)

And IS there a key to move from the BC field to the TURNS field and back when you're asking another race for money?

The simplest solution is to provide key-binding, then we can set our own keys... It's not that hard.

since I started this thread (though obviously not the first to notice this "problem" or even post about it) I guess I'll chime in and say that it never occured to me to use ESC to close the dialogue boxes. ESC seems intuitively to mean "quit" or "stop game" or at least it seems so to me. BTW I wasn't aware that ENTER was a turn button, I've always used SPACE 'cause...well, it seemed intuitive. As for confusing people by changing it, I'm not asking to change it for everyone. But if desired,as some of us obviously do, you should be able to customize the keyboard. I'd say it can't be that hard, but I barely got the game installed on my own. Thank God for the "Finish" button on the installwizard.

The ESC key to me has always been the key to go to the menu screen with. That's what it does in a ton of games. It's not a "done" key. But again, the developers don't have to change it on people that are for some weird reason used to it, they can just give us a keymap option and then we can set the keys to a more logical choice as we desire.

The space button just sets the currently selected ship's moves to zero.  If you have autoturn on, and there are no more ships left, that would move you to the next turn, but if you have no ships selected, and AutoTurn was not on, then it wouldn't work.

Even key-remapping would require significant changes to Gal Civ.

I find it hard to believe that key-remapping would be a big deal, unless the game was horribly coded and has no commenting anywhere. If ancient DOS games from ages ago with file sizes hundreds of times smaller than Gal Civ can have key mapping, it can't possibly be that hard. You don't have to create new art for it, just use the menu screen - or hell, even just use an .INI file in the directory with no GUI at all. Instead of a static definition of getkey(Enter) calling NextTurn() or however it's done, it would simply be the reference key from the INI calling the next turn.

Let's not presume to tell the code maintainer how to do her job.... especially with an uncalled-for jibe about code quality. It may well be conceptually simple to add a layer of indirection for keymapping, but that certainly doesn't mean that the implementation will be quick, painless, and free from the need for significant QA testing.

The fact that CariElf used the word "significant" is, well... significant. In my opinion, this word does not mean that the code is not up to the task, but that it will require enough effort to do it that it will take away from other updates that might be condidered more important by the majority of customers.