Transport Tycoon Forums

Traditionally, the right click button was used in the original TTD to get "help" aka tool tips, but today OpenTTD just displays them after hovering over them for a couple of millisecs.

Outside of scrolling through the map/viewports, and possibly closing windows if the user has such config option selected, the RMB could potentially be used for more in-game actions, specifically on map objects, like:

• launch the New Vehicles window automatically after right-clicking on a depot
• open the details/info widget when right-clicking on a vehicle or tile
• combos like Ctrl+Right Click would display the rename field on a selected vehicle, station, town name, etc.
• display the Production Graph when right-clicking on an Industry
• get the vehicle lists when right-clicking on a station

These are merely examples.

Added value:

• These would be operations that replicate GUI actions that are only achievable with more than one left-click, thus providing some additional QoL to the game.
• Remains true to the TTD spirit and aligns with OpenTTD's improved usability.

Potential rebuttals/technical concerns I can think of:

• Solid consensus about what actions should be considered, as well as which ones would be more important, would be required. ("Production Graph? No, I want to see the Industry Chain instead"; "New Vehicles window? No, Clone Vehicle would be more useful.") Do we even have any means to measure this in some sort of semi-objective way, at least? How does the dev team approach this type of decision-making?
• "Close window" clashing if the user has this config setting enabled, especially on extra viewports.
• Viewport scrolling issues?
• The amount of work needed to modify the codebase to allow more RMB event bindings outweighs any possible added value.

Thoughts?

Yes, I've wondered why right-clicking does nothing. I didn't realize until recently that this game predates both additional mouse buttons.

Mice for PCs always had two or more buttons, Transport Tycoon was originally a PC-only game. It always used the right mouse button for three things: Panning around the world, showing help messages (tooltips) for the UI, and dismissing error messages. What it does predate is the convention that RMB opens a context menu.

Being used to the current behavior for the past 30 years makes me very much against changing it. It will completely ruin muscle memory for old players, and I think that new players will only be more confused about right-click doing seemingly arbitrary actions (no obvious pattern) on things.

Alternate suggestion: Context-sensitive action wheel. Different objects might have different actions available, but you will see them before you activate them, and pressing and releasing the action wheel button without moving the mouse will dismiss it without doing anything. If you know the position of the action you want in the action wheel, you can do a press-flick-release movement very fast to activate it. The action wheel would only work on world viewport objects.
Now, allow using either the middle mouse button to activate the action wheel, and right mouse button keeps doing what it has always done, or swap their function so middle mouse button pans the world view etc. instead.