Using Spring

More Exaustive Decription of Contols, Interface and Features. For Basic information, check the most current README.html (should be mirrored here)or Getting_Started.

For more advanced/current information check the most recent changelog or the taspring/spring forums.

Selections/Groups/Group Commands/Group AI

The Selection Editor

SelectionEditor.exe is a program installed in your install directory, which is used for editing your selectkeys.txt configuration file, allowing you to make your own shortcut keys for selecting/filtering selection.

This forum topic that should be duplicated here, with cleaning up and additions made... and permission probably.

Default Selection Controls

Selecting/Deselecting Units

Unless you have issued a pending command, left-clicking(Mouse Button 1) a unit will clear the current selection and select the left-clicked unit, if a spot with no valid selection is clicked(empty space, ground, unowned units), the current selection will just be cleared. Left-clicking and dragging will draw a box, any units within this box will be selected when you release the mouse button.

Shift+Left-clicking(including dragging a select box), unless you have a pending command, will add units to the current selection.

CTRL+Left-clicking (including dragging a select box), unless you have a pending command, will remove units from the current selection.

Unless the unit is in a group Double-left-clicking will select all visible(camera bounds) units of the clicked type(Shift+Double-left-clicking will add all units of the double-clicked unit's type to the current selection).

CTRL+Z is a filter (which can be eddited in Selection Editor) to select all owned units of the current selected type. For example, if a peewee and a brawler are selected, all peewees and brawlers will be selected.

"Tooltips" are displayed in the bottom left of the current interface, if units are selected this information is the sum of all information about the selection (aka, select a bank of 5 solar collectors and it will show the total health and total energy being produced). If you mouse-over a "build-pic" in a units command list it will show you the costs and stats associated with the unit represented by the "build-pic". If you have no selection, the tooltip will show information about what your mouse is over at that time (unit stats if it's a unit, otherwise information about the terrain).

Basic Unit Groups

Spring supports what could be called quick control groups. Basically you can assign the currently selected units to a numbered group with CTRL+# (where # is a number key) which will put that number(#) above all selected units, then later, you can quickly select these units by pressing SHIFT+#.

If a factory is set to a group, all units built by this factory will also be automatically assigned to this group.

Units can only be in one group at a time, so assigning a new group number to a unit will remove it from it's current group.

Assigning a unit to a group overides normal double-clicking behaviour, if you double-click a member of a group, it's group is selected instead of the units of the same type in range.

Also note, when you CTRL+# a group of units, the old group with that number will no longer exist. Therefore if you intend to add aditional units to a group, you must first SHIFT+# the current members and then add (by holding SHIFT) the additional units to the selection group and the use CTRL+# to re-assign all the units to that group.