Consolidating Information While Driving

[ironcross32]

The problem

There's plenty of information that can be gathered through various hotkeys while driving. This information is needed to plan a successful trip as well as to know where you are along the way. Most pieces of info are useful; however, the problem I see is that we're starting to accumulate too much information on certain keys.

'C' is the worst offender here. It has a lot going on, and often, the SAPI voice will announce something as I'm listening to the information from 'C', which means now I have to start over and hope it doesn't happen again. Too much of this becomes an irritant. Granted, the alternative exists. Use tab to open the menu, go into the relevant page and look, but that has its issues as well.

The problem here is organization. We have certain elements repeated on multiple pages, and there's no unified way to get what 'C' gives me all in one go. Given these limitations, it's just not a great fit.

My proposals

Method 1: Cycle through element at a time

One way to solve this would be to separate all of the pieces of info a status key gives into logical items. When pressed, one logical item would be announced. Subsequent presses would cycle through and wrap back around to the start. I mainly put this here for completeness, as I don't like this idea much.

It doesn't fit well with the existing keyboard layout since we'd want a reverse modifier. We can't use SHIFT, as that acts as the clutch when in manual transmission mode. We can't use CTRL, because it stops SAPI speech. The only other option would be ALT, and that just doesn't make sense in my opinion. It would also be tricky to implement for controller users for similar reasons.

Method 2: Live status interface

It needs a better name of course, but the idea is that we'd provide a dynamic status system that updates quietly whenever something changes. We'd assign two sets of keys: forward and backward by category, and forward and backward by element. We'd split information into logical items the same as in method 1, and assign them to appropriate categories. This isn't that different from chat buffers we've seen in other audio games, it updates items in place. That said, this is much simpler to implement for controller users even though it needs more buttons, because we can replace the existing D-pad mapping with the new one.

This would also allow folding of another idea I had directly into this system. That of providing a buffer for SAPI announcements. Put simply, while 'A' is fine for repeating a message, sometimes they come so fast that by the time you press it, another one landed and that's the one you get. Sometimes I like to know how a place name is spelled, and then I end up missing it because I got another announcement. An announcements category would fit naturally, and could be made not to update in place. It would also allow for copying of messages easily enough.

I was thinking left and right brackets for categories and < and > for element traversal within the selected category. These are pretty standard in audio games, and we're not using them at the moment. Allow copying from every category with CTRL+C. Yes, that does stop SAPI speech, but as the expectation for that keystroke to work is very ingrained, changing it to something else would probably be worse than the few cases where someone copied something at the same time an announcement came through.

Conclusion

I think we need a way to consolidate the information that certain keys provide. I've laid out two paths for achieving this. My preference would be for method 2, because it's more manageable and fits better for both keyboard as well as gamepad users. All thoughts, ideas, addendums, and critiques are welcome.