Boff space ability bar: Keyboard shortcuts/Method to the madness?

void

Greetings,

I am a new player and am curious about bridge officer space abilities. I have switched ships as well as officers a few times, and now my ability bar's keybord shortcuts (the ones that are "pre-made" by the game and appear in subscript within the ability icon) are all out of sequence...for example withing my first engineer's skills, one uses shift, another uses alt etc..

To better illustrate, here is an example for one BOFF the way I would like it
Engineer
Skill Keyboard Key

Skill1 -> 1
Skill2 -> 2
Skill3 -> 3

etc ...

However right now I'm stuck with something similar to

Skill1-> 8
Skill2-> Alt+2
Skill3-> Ctrl+6

etc ... Essentially making it impossible to use them by keyboard without redoing my captain's action bar which also seems to reset every so often.

Is this 'by design' ?

I understand there is a complex key binding system (just tried reading through a page describing code and script to do keybinds) but might there be a simple reset that would make the skills sequential as they were at the start of the game? IE: Using numbers 1-9 THEN alt+1-2 THEN ctrl 1-9 etc..

I also seem to have trouble with my abilities moving around and sometimes seemingly changing by themselves. I read other threads that talk about this as well but from last year, is this still a ongoing and well known issue?

Thank you for your patience if this question seems silly to veterans.

Cheers


edit: to hopefully better explain the issue

reverandclint

Whenever you add a new ship (or dismiss an old ship) your bridge officer layouts can get borked. It's tied to the way the tray layouts (even the default one) are saved ... by roster slot vs by ship name iirc. There isn't a quick solution for you ... but ...
1) Hit the 'P' key & unlock you powers trays and then set your trays up as you want them (don't forget that you can have a total of 6 visible trays - 3 horizontal + 3 vertical ... but only trays 1 -> 4 have short-cut keys.)
2) Remember to re-lock your powers trays (the little check box at the bottom of the powers window.)
3) Hit the 'U' key and under the Status tab for your ship ... under Loadouts ... save your loadout (make/save loadout button at the bottom.)

For the most part, you'll now be able to just click the button next to the new loadouts name to set your trays back to the way you saved them. But ... adding a new ship or dismissing an old ship can still break the saved loadouts.

void

Thanks ReverendClint,

I think that should help lots, I never did re-lock the tray. I'll log in now and give it all a spin with the saved Loadout.

edit/follwup question: So, I gather this makes the BOFF bar slightly useless? I mean, do most people just create their own bars from dragging the various abilities into them and hide the BOFF bar itself? That could be handy as I struggle to make the UI more compact without loosing reading ability during episodes/quests.

Thanks again!

vorwoda

void#4532 wrote: »

edit/follwup question: So, I gather this makes the BOFF bar slightly useless? I mean, do most people just create their own bars from dragging the various abilities into them and hide the BOFF bar itself?

I do. I ditch the Weapon bar, too. Hotkeys > clicking on the screen.

void

Thank you, I think I wrapped my mind around it all last night. As I only ever used one user hotbar, I didn't see that my Boff abilities were automatically filling up the other 'offscreen' bars in an odd sequence as i trained my BOFFs and switched their default abilities which explains why they showed up with odd shortcuts in the BOFF bar itself.

Now that I've focused on the user hotbars and increased those to three everything seems much better thank you both!


Cheers