Few questions about game control involving camera and chat, also forum question

General Discussion
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I’ve been watching some replays of high level players like TY, Serral, and Innovation, and noticed a lot of camera control that I’m not familiar with. I’ve noticed what looks like both drag scrolling and camera follow but I’m really not sure how the camera follow effect is happening. Also, I can’t see their cursor so I’m unsure how often sliding occurs.

The camera behavior I’m most confused about is the smooth camera follow behavior I notice in the middle of battles where a lot of micro is taking place. I see it happening in base management early on in matches too. It seems like smart camera pan but obviously these players aren’t spending any time clicking on portraits.

I’ve been trying to minimize sliding and unnecessary clicking through location hotkeys and control groups, which has been great, but when I watch top players control their camera, I feel like I’m missing something and I can’t find anything beyond control groups and location hotkeys on google or even here, the official SC2 forums.

I really hate how drag scrolling feels and how my hand always ends up in a weird position in relation to my cursor unless I pick up my mouse. Regardless, I’ll get used to it if it makes playing the game easier.

So my question is what is there beyond hotkeys and location keys for camera control?

My next question involves the camera follow command which I’ve tried binding and using. It seems like the potential answer to my first question but it’s weird to use and there’s one annoying issue with it. Every time you turn it on or off, a message displays on the screen. There’s no way to turn off system messages or hide chat in-game altogether afaik. Is there anything that can be done about this? Any way to hide chat or disable system messages in-game? I like the camera follow function but having several lines of system messages in my face is gross.

My last question is, why isn’t there a forum category dedicated purely to learning how to control this game? A lot about it is straight-forward but I’ve been playing since before Brood War and I feel like I can safely say simply controlling the game effectively is a gigantic challenge. This game is very hard to play effectively and I never even would’ve known about location hotkeys if I hadn’t seen a streamer talking about it years ago. I even used the forum search to look for tips and found nothing significant. Did I miss something or is there really nothing in the official SC2 forums for understanding how to control the game?

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Hi :slight_smile:

Replays can be misleading as the camera movements on replays are smoother. For example, when a player jumps between bases it may look like they are scrolling even though they are not. On replays it looks like they are using drag scroll and camera follow even when they don’t.

If I am not mistaken no one uses camera follow and few people use drag scrolling. There are some who use it but most just use the regular scroll by moving their cursor to the edges of the screen. So you should scroll with whichever is comfortable to you.

I recommend you watching streams of these pros(Serral,TY,Innovation etc.). I don’t know how often they stream(TY streams more regularly) but you can search for “Serral stream” or “TY stream” etc. on youtube and there are some videos. There you can see better how they control the camera and everything else. There isn’t much beyond the camera keys and control groups to controlling the camera. Maybe occasional zooming in and out(usually with the mouse wheel) or turning the angle of the camera to see a cloaked unit better.

If you are searching for something specific or just trying to learn the game better I suggest you search for it on the forum’s search bar and also on google. The reason for that is that these forums got changed recently and the old forums( Blizzard Forums ) is now in read only mode. So if you search for things on google not only you can find older posts but also find information on other websites. You can also try youtube as there are videos about so many things Starcraft 2 related.

As for the categories in this forum, most people choose to just write in the general discussion section because that is where most people check and write to. So if you have any questions you can ask here and people will help. At least I know that I will :slight_smile:

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Thanks for the in-depth response. I never considered the possibility of replays looking different.