It's so desirable that I wonder why the suggestions are not full of this request, it's also so standard in other games that happen to have ships or vehicles with turrets: A single keystroke to access them, same stroke again to toggle to the next one etc. It is lame slow to access them via control panel, that's not enough. If you think that introducing this would give a too big advantage to the player, then simply make a weapon loading delay when hitting this command, but introduce it please. BTW, it's also hard to be ok with the fact that you cannot simply access a turret from outside the ship with F key, changing this would also be fine, I mean, if there's no power or ammo it will/should not work anyway... Thank you,
I posted this thread about a month ago. Item number 5 in there is designed partially to resolve this issue. Unfortunately I think my wall of text is too long for most people. Nobody ever responded to it. *_*
Of course it is a good idea. I hope someone will bring this to their attention. It also should not be very difficult to inplement. I propose adding a keybind selection right near the big "Access" button. Once you have bound the hotkey, you can access this device from anywhere. It could be universal for other devices too. Wow, that is a pity I missed that post, I like reading walls of text and replying with my own walls lol
Considered that during combat in single player mode you need to also move your vehicle or ship which I thnk you cannot do while operating a turret, the advantage for the player - if taken as a counter-argument - would not be that great.
Imho better than a key stroke would be using the combination left shift + mouse wheel to cycle next / prev turret. Mouse wheel alone is zoom.
So if you want one specific turret in a group of 6, provided the target is "static", you have to press the key up to 5 times to get to it. With control panel set on the devices page, you press "p" and access any turret in one or two clicks. If another player is already using it, then it's one wasted key bind for the whole combat. Not saying it's a bad idea : it may need some refinements.
In the control panel you first need to go in the Device section and find the turret you want to access, you need to expand the section, figure out which turret to access...all that takes longer, in the meantime the tactical situation has changed, the enemy has moved etc., the current mode is not very handy. Besides, if you want to access it from the panel you can still do so, everyone to his leasure, I didn't say to remove that possibility. Then, if you have a vehicle with say 3-4 turrets you are mainly 'out of trouble' where your weapons will do the job for you, whereas with a smaller vehicle with only 1-2 turrets it's essential to access them QUICKLY to not take too much damage, just in case they don't target the right enemy.
I was talking about vehicles that have dozens of turrets, like a CV. But even in small ships, by the time the players accesses the "turret view" he will of course get hit, because ranges match most of the time, apart for some drones or enemies on foot. If enemies have rockets, most small ships being quite frail, and if ship only has 1 turret, for example, and there are 2 enemies, then it's much safer to simply move the ship than "losing sight" by entering turret mode. Front guns still allow to see while turret view has a very limited FOV (and ship is a sitting duck). That's where the automated modes come in handy, so players are not caught off-guard (when turrets do react, of course...). But all these are just tactical considerations. I would not mind being able to assign a specific turret to the toolbar, but I think it would be far more practical to be able to assign any device we want in there, simply. If the devs are going to work on such a feature as "turret-to-toolbar" then at least they could make the feature available for any device (drag and drop style, why not) to avoid being asked later to extend the feature to other devices.
I agree that while being more comfortable to use, my suggestion would not change the gameplay to be much more immersive, and certainly not a critical needed addition. But first thing I did was looking in the Controls to know wether there was a shortcut for it, as many other newbies would do I guess.
