EPTJuicebox's "Double Hotkey" Setup - Page 3
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meatpudding
Australia520 Posts
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Bippzy
United States1466 Posts
Ps sorry everyone on the first page is being stupid and claiming your work is pointless when its actually really useful | ||
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Azzur
Australia6259 Posts
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RyLai
United States477 Posts
His other guide was to improve your handspeed. Maybe a clearer title would've been how to improve your keyboard-based mechanics. Other than spending 8-10 hours a day playing SC2, how do you appropriately improve your mechanics? Even if you've been typing for decades, you'll be spending most of your time with your left hand hovering over the numbers instead of the ASDF home keys, so the standard concept of muscle memory gets thrown out the door because the key distance will be from the number keys and not from the home keys unless you want to lose efficiency by going up to the number keys then back down to another key. Then he talks about drilling in key sequences which is what really SC is all about. If you watch how pros play first person and wonder how they put in commands or do things so fast that you often don't even see some of the actions, a lot of it is because their key sequencing memory is top notch. They know that to build an SCV with a OC hotkeyed on 5 would be nothing more than 5s, then they move on to the next action like selecting an SCV to build a depot [BS]. So they quickly go 5s while moving the camera, box some SCVs, press BS while moving the mouse to an open location to build a depot, then click. TLO I feel can do this in a second or a second and a half. Every macro action in SC is nothing more than a sequence of 2-4 actions. Pros can do these sequences in a second or less each as well as switching between actions almost immediately, leaving no lag time between actions, allowing them to perform a lot of actions in a small amount of time because their ability to do the little things are as perfect as it gets and they do it with nothing more than the thought of getting the action done as "build supply depot", not "I need to build a supply depot, grab an SCV, b, s". Once you're good at the muscle memory for these small sequences to the point you don't even need to think about them, managing your money, refining your build, and thinking about strategy and timings all becomes so much easier because you're playing quicker and more efficiently. I'm currently trying to switch my hotkey (1-0) setup and it's really fucking with me because I used to have 3 Barracks 4 Factory/Starport (whichever was more important) 5-0 individual CCs. I would easily go though all the mini actions like 5s6s7s pretty quickly, 5b3a (make first OC and first Marine), but now that it's changed, I'm simply not used to it and the muscle memory is all screwed up because all the macro sequences I've had are totally different now in which keys to use and the relation of distance from my "home keys" to the keys themselves (basically losing all keyboard awareness). So practicing the little key sequences is far more important than people realize. Even before you play a serious game, it's good to warm up these little sequences in a custom game by yourself. Then for this guide, it's sheer brilliance. Like he said, ALL his hotkeys are designed with the design of being centered around the standard typing home keys. As a result, a normal typist can easily transition to playing SC2 at a pretty high speed (at least with his keyboard) instead of having to relearn his keyboard from the number keys setup. Mechanically, everything becomes significantly easier because you ALREADY have most of the muscle memory built in to type from the ASDF keys. Not only that, instead of going from up to down AND to the sides, you simple go either up or down which most people experienced with a keyboard are more than capable of doing. Are these hotkeys complicated as hell? You bet your ass they are. I'm still dizzy looking at the control group setup. But it still a great idea. And the added bonus of double hotkeys does speed up production from a Terran perspective quite a bit. Destiny does something similar (spamming something like zdzdzdzdzdzdzdzdzdzdzdzdzdzdzdzdzdzd or zfzfzfzfzfzfzfzfzfzf or dfdfdfdfdfdfdfdfddfdfdfdfdfdfdfdf) in order to evenly split production between Zerglings, Drones, and/or Infestors. It's a hell of a lot faster and easier than looking at your larvae count, cutting the number in half off the top of your head, spamming 1 key until you're hit they halfway mark, then spamming the other until you run out of Larvae. Is it going to ever become mainstream? I highly doubt it. With a lot of players not changing their hotkeys or even using them to begin with, this becomes pretty pointless since they basically won't use their keyboard anyway. Even among pros, they make relatively minor changes to their setup, or use Broodwar, SC2, or Grid preset settings. A minority of pros might switch to something like this if they catch on early enough and are willing to spend the time to relearn their hotkeys (like Liquid'Tyler). Also with traditionalists preferring to avoid changes or sticking with Broodwar setups or the standard settings will probably denounce this as outright heresy. A lot of good ideas will usually be picked out to be bad due to wanting to stay traditional and calling new ideas relatively gimmicky. To be honest, I dislike the backspace inject trick because of a few flaws I find it, the fact that I feel it might not be a fully mechanically sound way to inject, and it's not traditional. However, I would be beyond retarded to ever try and dispute the fact that it's the fastest way by far to Inject your Hatcheries. And I can be like a lot of you flamers and simply say "if only the guy who spent his time figuring out the backspace inject trick and its variants (before they got removed) just spent more time PLAYING the game instead of figuring out these stupid little gimmicks he'd be masters or grandmasters right now." Seriously who the fuck cares?! They spent a bit of free time screwing around and giving to the community. What have you assholes done for the community? I'm sure some of you have made small contributions but a majority of you probably do nothing but shoot down good ideas because you can't accept them or are jealous that you didn't think of it yourselves. JuiceBox, great posts! Keep it up! Now if you improved your mouse control, you could be master's.  But who cares. Keep enjoying the game bro! ^^ | ||
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XDJuicebox
United States593 Posts
On September 19 2011 13:35 RyLai wrote: People who are flaming this are way too narrow minded. Both of XDJuiceBox's posts have been pretty brilliant, yet few people are smart enough to understand the genius and purpose behind them. They're all for your mechanics. His other guide was to improve your handspeed. Maybe a clearer title would've been how to improve your keyboard-based mechanics. Other than spending 8-10 hours a day playing SC2, how do you appropriately improve your mechanics? Even if you've been typing for decades, you'll be spending most of your time with your left hand hovering over the numbers instead of the ASDF home keys, so the standard concept of muscle memory gets thrown out the door because the key distance will be from the number keys and not from the home keys unless you want to lose efficiency by going up to the number keys then back down to another key. Then he talks about drilling in key sequences which is what really SC is all about. If you watch how pros play first person and wonder how they put in commands or do things so fast that you often don't even see some of the actions, a lot of it is because their key sequencing memory is top notch. They know that to build an SCV with a OC hotkeyed on 5 would be nothing more than 5s, then they move on to the next action like selecting an SCV to build a depot [BS]. So they quickly go 5s while moving the camera, box some SCVs, press BS while moving the mouse to an open location to build a depot, then click. TLO I feel can do this in a second or a second and a half. Every macro action in SC is nothing more than a sequence of 2-4 actions. Pros can do these sequences in a second or less each as well as switching between actions almost immediately, leaving no lag time between actions, allowing them to perform a lot of actions in a small amount of time because their ability to do the little things are as perfect as it gets and they do it with nothing more than the thought of getting the action done as "build supply depot", not "I need to build a supply depot, grab an SCV, b, s". Once you're good at the muscle memory for these small sequences to the point you don't even need to think about them, managing your money, refining your build, and thinking about strategy and timings all becomes so much easier because you're playing quicker and more efficiently. I'm currently trying to switch my hotkey (1-0) setup and it's really fucking with me because I used to have 3 Barracks 4 Factory/Starport (whichever was more important) 5-0 individual CCs. I would easily go though all the mini actions like 5s6s7s pretty quickly, 5b3a (make first OC and first Marine), but now that it's changed, I'm simply not used to it and the muscle memory is all screwed up because all the macro sequences I've had are totally different now in which keys to use and the relation of distance from my "home keys" to the keys themselves (basically losing all keyboard awareness). So practicing the little key sequences is far more important than people realize. Even before you play a serious game, it's good to warm up these little sequences in a custom game by yourself. Then for this guide, it's sheer brilliance. Like he said, ALL his hotkeys are designed with the design of being centered around the standard typing home keys. As a result, a normal typist can easily transition to playing SC2 at a pretty high speed (at least with his keyboard) instead of having to relearn his keyboard from the number keys setup. Mechanically, everything becomes significantly easier because you ALREADY have most of the muscle memory built in to type from the ASDF keys. Not only that, instead of going from up to down AND to the sides, you simple go either up or down which most people experienced with a keyboard are more than capable of doing. Are these hotkeys complicated as hell? You bet your ass they are. I'm still dizzy looking at the control group setup. But it still a great idea. And the added bonus of double hotkeys does speed up production from a Terran perspective quite a bit. Destiny does something similar (spamming something like zdzdzdzdzdzdzdzdzdzdzdzdzdzdzdzdzdzd or zfzfzfzfzfzfzfzfzfzf or dfdfdfdfdfdfdfdfddfdfdfdfdfdfdfdf) in order to evenly split production between Zerglings, Drones, and/or Infestors. It's a hell of a lot faster and easier than looking at your larvae count, cutting the number in half off the top of your head, spamming 1 key until you're hit they halfway mark, then spamming the other until you run out of Larvae. Is it going to ever become mainstream? I highly doubt it. With a lot of players not changing their hotkeys or even using them to begin with, this becomes pretty pointless since they basically won't use their keyboard anyway. Even among pros, they make relatively minor changes to their setup, or use Broodwar, SC2, or Grid preset settings. A minority of pros might switch to something like this if they catch on early enough and are willing to spend the time to relearn their hotkeys (like Liquid'Tyler). Also with traditionalists preferring to avoid changes or sticking with Broodwar setups or the standard settings will probably denounce this as outright heresy. A lot of good ideas will usually be picked out to be bad due to wanting to stay traditional and calling new ideas relatively gimmicky. To be honest, I dislike the backspace inject trick because of a few flaws I find it, the fact that I feel it might not be a fully mechanically sound way to inject, and it's not traditional. However, I would be beyond retarded to ever try and dispute the fact that it's the fastest way by far to Inject your Hatcheries. And I can be like a lot of you flamers and simply say "if only the guy who spent his time figuring out the backspace inject trick and its variants (before they got removed) just spent more time PLAYING the game instead of figuring out these stupid little gimmicks he'd be masters or grandmasters right now." Seriously who the fuck cares?! They spent a bit of free time screwing around and giving to the community. What have you assholes done for the community? I'm sure some of you have made small contributions but a majority of you probably do nothing but shoot down good ideas because you can't accept them or are jealous that you didn't think of it yourselves. JuiceBox, great posts! Keep it up! Now if you improved your mouse control, you could be master's. But who cares. Keep enjoying the game bro! ^^<3 Thanks man :D Means a lot to me Especially with all the flamers haha | ||
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Ryuu314
United States12679 Posts
Kudos for trying to share what works for you with the community. It's an interesting concept; I'll probably stick to traditional hotkeys, but it sounds like you put a lot of time into thinking this idea through. | ||
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Kaitlin
United States2958 Posts
On September 19 2011 12:11 XDJuicebox wrote: Lol no problem You changed my life ^_^ You should update it :D In that case, I think I will. Look for something forthcoming soon... | ||
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RyLai
United States477 Posts
On September 19 2011 10:38 Demonace34 wrote: No I didn't talk about his advice. Cecil said that the OP's other thread was just showing off. This is a new thread about his more efficient hotkey setup. Read Cecil's quote again. "This whole thing more just looks like a list of things you like to do since you think you have fast apm. aka you're just showing off. It would be more helpful if you provided a means to increase handspeed in a game of sc2, and better yet how to convert that apm potential into meaningful actions. I didn't come here to plug, but honestly the thread I wrote on improving in general [I believe] is a much more effective means of becoming a balanced player, and being a balanced and skilled player includes playing quickly and utilizing high apm, rather than just spamming it with a few fingers. I can't stress enough the difference between spamming some keys mid-game and actually using those actions in a useful manner" -Cecil Sunkure The thread isn't about spamming keys, it is about using alternate keys along with a hotkey setup that is less tasking on how much you have to stretch to get to certain keys. This allows for better overall use of hotkeys and control groups throughout the game. I do agree with Cecil, that the other thread about increasing hand speed was more about showing off that he had fast hands then actually learning how to put that to good use. Wow... This is exactly what I mean about people trying to be traditional and work on the game for hundreds of thousands of games before they can get things to fall into place. Even sports have sports specific workouts in the gym. Tennis for example has footwork drills in order to help coordination of your feet, foot speed, foot activity, and so on. You can simply argue that play thousands of matches and hit billions of balls and you'll have footwork that's just as good. For some people, you could be right. For most, you'd be severely wrong. There's absolutely nothing wrong for someone to take time off the court to specifically work on their footwork. That's basically what XDJuiceBox's post was about. It's about spending time off the ladder in order to practice your mechanics, your macro sequences, which is essentially the "footwork" of SC. If you look at Cecil's post, he talks NOTHING about keyboard-based mechanics aside from the fact that he does 1a2a3a using his 3 main fingers (non-pinky) for 123 and his thumb for A (which I find severely uncomfortable). In SC:BW, pros had specific ways to hit the keys with specific fingers in order to improve efficiency, which lead to specific hotkey setups. The 90 Nexus setup (Nexus on 9 and 0) was a result of the hotkey for Probes (P) being so far off to the side that 9p0p was so much easier than anything else really. At the same time, they do 3d4d or something for Dragoons. But some players like Tyler advocated just having the Nexus on 3 and 4 then using the mouse to click on the Probe instead, arguing that if you cycled through 3 and 4, you didn't have to move your mouse anyway and just click twice. JuiceBox might not know it, but the stuff he's talking bout is directly related to mechanics, very high level mechanics that very few people think about. One reason Sean Day[9] Plott talks about mouse-based mechanics so often is because he himself is significantly less confident in his mouse control than his keyboard control (he has stated this himself). His keyboard control is pretty darn good, probably a result of Sean and his brother Nick Tasteless Plot constantly bouncing these ideas off of each other and looking up and learning mechanic tricks growing up as they got better at Starcraft. There's a video of Nick showing someone how he makes Dragoons and positioning the guys fingers. You can press the buttons with whatever you feel is most comfortable, but sometimes learning something a little different makes a small difference in increasing the speed by which you do something, which drastically increases your overall efficiency throughout the entire game the more you use it. But the bottom line, you want to be pressing buttons in the proper sequences as quickly as you can to free up time to either do other sequences or other actions. Like if it takes you 3-5 seconds to build something because you are new and are either clicking buttons or looking for the hotkeys, that's time that could've been spent making that building, giving a move command to a scout, producing more units and workers, moving your army, and run though that cycle yet again. Some people might think 3-5 seconds is an exaggeration, but it's not. If you're new to the game (and likely RTS in general), you take 3-5 real life seconds in order to issue a simple macro sequence (like [BS] for build supply depot). And that's EXCLUDING the inherent lag time that most intermediate and lower level players have where they're basically doing nothing but look at the action they just did or spamming the exact same action. A very experienced player with top level mechanics does that sequence in literally maybe half a second (I'm guessing real time, but game time could also be possible for some of the faster players). And a very experienced player has 0 lag time. So quick that watching them from a first person point of view you might not even see some of the actions that they did (because a mid level player will do the action, have a half a second to a full second of lag, then move on to the next action; which is a half a second to a full second during which you can see the action that they just made). If you practice pressing buttons in macro sequences as quickly as you can without effort, your mechanics WILL be faster (I won't say better because I feel the most difficult thing to remove is the lag time between actions, and that could be more important than anything else and is associated with how quickly you can think of a sequence of actions you need to do and thinking ahead of what you're actually doing; in other words, following a very strict build order or having a very good and refined mental checklist). Putting all of this together allows macro to become something in the back of your mind and just HAPPENS in your fingers, freeing up a lot of time in order to micro your units. | ||
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Deezl
United States355 Posts
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madestro
Costa Rica108 Posts
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AmericanUmlaut
Germany2577 Posts
On September 19 2011 20:55 madestro wrote: I do agree that this is just some interesting setup he got from playing and there's nothing wrong with sharing it however I would ask the OP and the community in general, does anyone uses the GRID layout ?? I'm a zerg player and I use that layout since the beginning and have only changed the base camera hotkey to caps lock to help with my injections but for everything else I feel it helps me visualize better what I want to do, the travel distance is short and also helps if I want to play a different race, mind you I didn't play BW so I have no memory of SC hotkeys from before and I'm also not a good player but what do you guys think ? Anyone comfortable with the GRID layout ? I use a modified Grid layout (I've got groups bound to h, n and a mouse button and a location hotkey on space) and like it a lot, but it's really just a matter of what you're used to more than anything. I got used to grid layout because I played with it in WC3, but I think that very few of us are at a level of skill where focusing on keyboard mechanics is going to have as great an impact on our game as more basic skills like constant production, keeping money low, and having good unit positioning. I'm diamond, and I know for a fact that there are such massive flaws in my gameplay that the idea of spending the time learning a new keyboard layout that would help me shave an extra quarter second off of the time it takes me to perform some action is just not very well invested. That being said, I think this sort of idea is very, very good and would be beneficial to a player of a much higher skill level whose play is such that that fraction of a second would make a significant difference. I don't understand the urge of so many people to flame innovative keyboard layout ideas - it's obviously an area where some optimization is possible and beneficial at the highest levels of play, and since TL is a community focused on elite play, I'd think this sort of idea would be welcome here. | ||
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HaXXspetten
Sweden15718 Posts
, other than that I think this is a good concept... just, like I said, it is so insanely different from the usual setup that it's gonna take a lot of time before this would be worth it in any way. | ||
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BossPlaya
United States141 Posts
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XDJuicebox
United States593 Posts
On September 19 2011 22:26 BossPlaya wrote: I feel like instead of remapping your entire hotkey setup and then getting used to it, you could just...use the default ones and be faster? Like your barracks example really isn't any faster than 5aadddd. How much time in-game did you really save and was it worth it in the long run? Maybe once you get used to it, but how many custom games does it take to get used to a remapped setup like this? The GRID and custom hotkey setup features seem like a great tool but I really have a hard time deviating from the default. It seems narrow- minded but I have a hard time changing my hotkey setup unless I see something significantly faster like Mr. Bitter's inject method for example. If you read closely, it says "some people shouldn't even change their setup if they're not comfortable with it" And the idea of double hotkeys is instead of hitting aadddd which requires 6 taps, you hit 2 keys a total of 3 times. And I switch on and off with this seeing as I still play Brood War once in a while. It takes about 10 minutes to switch for me. | ||
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NtroP
United States174 Posts
At both MLGs I made it to, I simply spent a lot of time watching foreign/korean hands as they play the game. For example, I spent a goodly amount of time watching Moon who has massive massive apm/handspeed. Many many times per minute, he had to move his hand from one side of the keyboard to the other. Each time it took a fraction of a second delaying whatever action he was reaching for for x milliseconds. From that I concluded that even the fastest players that use grid/standard could speed up their play concentrating their hotkeys to one side of the keyboard. | ||
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whoopingchow
United States293 Posts
The only problem with this I see is that it'll take you a longer-than normal time to get used to this--keeping all the regular hotkeys in mind in addition to the alternate hotkeys means I'm going to make some stupid units in a lot of games before getting the hang of it. Great post about an underused feature! Screw the flamers *edit* quick question: I'm trying to understand why your hotkeys for production buildings are (s,g), and (d,f), instead of, maybe, (s,d) and (f,g) (see: Barracks, Factory). Is it because you want a strong finger on both units instead of both strong fingers on a single unit? | ||
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maskseller
96 Posts
4aqaqaqaqaqaqaqaqaqaqaqaq gogo marines! Incredibly useful when you are at 5+ reactored barracks :D | ||
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Existor
Russian Federation4295 Posts
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frdrk
Denmark17 Posts
Basically what I'm also saying here is that OP's example might be a bit extreme. But there are slight nudges and tweaks you can do to speed up your gameplay if you are willing to think about it for a little bit. | ||
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Azerbaijan
United States660 Posts
I would love to give this a try but I can hardly find time to play the game let alone completely relearn the hotkeys. i'll keep it bookmarked, maybe someday. | ||
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