Yeah that was kinda poorly explained wasn't it, course I end up doing this in the middle of the night.
Dynamic commands are for several ways to do one thing, what I want is more like one system for doing a lot of things.
I'm setting up VA for Arma III, in which you can order other units around, the units are reffered to by their number and all commands are given through keyboard shortcuts. So let's say I sent unit 6 away to go plant a bomb or something, and now I want him to rejoin the rest of the squad. The vanilla way of doing this would be (Keypresses in parenthesis): Select unit 6 (F6), Open move menu (1), Tell selected units to regroup (1).
With VA, this becomes a cool "Six, regroup" (With variations like, "return to formation" and such.)
But if I have several units that I want to doing the same thing I can assign them to teams.
Let's say unit 2 and 3 work together as driver/gunner providing support for the rest of my squad, I'll just add them both to team red so I don't have t control them individually.
The in-game commands to do this would be: Select unit 2 (F2), Select unit 3 (F3), Open assign menu (9), Assign selected units to team red (1).
I then tell them to enter the car; Select team red (Shift+F1), Get in that car (Point at car+Spacebar)
What I obviously want to do instead is say: "2, 3 join team red", "Team red, get in that car"
First problem, "Select unit X" can't be a prefix anymore, since I want to list select commands, I could make the select commands full commands but then I'd have to add pauses, at which point I might as well go back to keyboard shortcuts. I tried wildcards but then the speech recognition can no longer differentiate "two" from "too" and "to", and "four" from "for" etc.
This would be fixed if commands could act as full commands, prefixes, and suffixes at the same time but then we run into another problem; There are two commands called "Team red" , one for selecting team red to give them orders (Shift+F1) and one to select the "Team red" as an option in the "Assign" menu (9 -> 1). I can't use prefix/suffix groups because they would all need to be in the same one. (Although in this example I could just make "assign to team red" one command but what if I want to add to "Switch to team red", now I need to edit the commands for all the other colours as well.)
Now let's say that:
1. Commands can act as full commands, prefixes, and suffixes simultaneously.
2. Prefixes can be restriced to specific suffixes or groups of suffixes.
In the above example I would now have a group called "Selection", in which commands like "Two", "Three", "Team blue" etc. would be, they would be set as both prefixes and suffixes and linked to their own group (To allow for selections to be chained together.) and another group called "Orders".
The "Orders" group contain the different orders that can be given to units, like "regroup" and "assign to", all of these can work as suffixes to the commands in "Selection", some are also full commands, and some can work as prefixes to other groups of commands.
A bit long winded but hopefully that cleared things up.
EDIT: Really, the *fix system isn't very well suited for something like this to begin with, what we need is a system for chaining a sequence of commands/phrases into a sentence.
Topic: Make suffixes/prefixes link to groups rather than within them. (Read 3193 times)