This was a messy weekend. I ended up reverting many of the changes I did last week in an effort to prevent myself from getting lost in another pointless tangent. So for now, most of the old, ugly code I wanted to rewrite will remain the same, now a little uglier thanks to some additions.

Regardless, I managed to implement a bunch of shortcuts that will give the players the ability of switching through all the available overlays without having to go through the overlay menu. Given that there are way too many overlays (34 overlays without counting overlays sub-types for cultural properties), I decided to use a cycle system for a bunch of them. So, for example, all population related overlays (Density, Preferences, Skills, Activities, Discoveries, etc) are accessed using the ‘o‘ key. Pressing the key multiple times will cycle through each one of the overlays in the same set. The ‘p‘ key will cycle through the polity related overlays, ‘m‘ will do the same for overlays in the miscellaneous section, and ‘d‘ will do it for the debug-mode overlays (only available when debug mode is enabled, of course). The ‘general‘ overlay will be the only overlay with an exclusive shortcut, ‘g‘. Finally, ‘n‘ will be used to disable the active overlay.

In the same vein as with overlay sets, I rewrote the map views or draw modes to be accessible through a single shortcut key, ‘v‘, that will cycle trough all of them. The Views and Overlay menus will no longer be accessible through shortcuts, though that will be a minor inconvenience since players can now invoke each view and overlay more or less directly. All in all, now I have more keys to work with for the rest of the shortcuts I want to implement for this release and for future additions.

Next, I hope to add the remaining shortcuts which are to be used to access the rest of the game options (Save, Load, Export, etc). Also I want to add a shortcuts to cycle through cultural properties when a particular cultural overlay is active. With some luck I’ll be able to get all that done next weekend.