Giving marines visible gestures for coordination

[Sailor Dave]

Summary (a quick, 2-3 sentence summary): Currently, coordinating marines in the heat of battle can be very difficult, as their focus is on the screen rather than chat most of the time. I propose that marines have a set of simple "gestures", or icons, that would indicate simple commands like "move forward", "stop", "retreat", "on me", and so on.

Benefits (How this will benefit the server and game as a whole): Trying to keep marines organized is pretty much a nightmare. In reality, it's easier to give orders because we can actually hear them. Unfortunately, we don't have the benefit of voice chat; we have to make do with other, more visual methods.
Having simple icons that indicate orders means that marines can easily communicate to each other their intentions, as there is often no time to type in orders during a fight and things like gunfire clutter up the chat far too much to even read them.

Details (Description of how you think this would work, the benefits, etc): More or less explained above and below. As a side note, I realize that perhaps immersion might be an issue, having icons appearing like this. I'm not sure how else it could be implemented without having actual voiced orders which I'm sure would be quite time consuming to put together. I would hope the benefit would outweigh the cost, in this case.

Implementation (Optional, if you have an idea how to implement it): The "gestures" would actually be icons, perhaps over the head of the marine, that indicate their order alongside a message in chat. The mechanic for actually DOING the gestures is something I'm not 100% on. Preferably it would be something that can be done immediately, without having to stop and look through a list in a window. I thought about having it perhaps be something like macroable emotes, but there's only so many keys on a keyboard, and it wouldn't be ideal to override keybinds that other people may have already set.
Another concern is marines spamming them. I'm not sure a cooldown is ideal, as that would make it difficult to communicate orders if you've already given that order just a moment ago and need to do so again. Still mulling over that.

[TopHatPenguin]

Honestly I think we really need this as generally everything goes to shit when you enter combat atleast with this you can attempt to organise players in combat.

[Whistle]

Give a gold trim around SL hand gestures.

Hotkeys would be handy, I can see the two primaries being, hold, move.

Making the move icon an arrow in the desired direction may help but may just over complicate the hotkeys.

Putting them in place of the hud emblems may work, marines are default to a custom hud, not sec or medical that allows them to interpret these hand signals.

[Sarah_U.]

What next, xenos having visible gestures and executions?!...

Joke, but I'm neutral on the matter. Visual's not the first thing I want to have when we got tons of gameplay changes available and little 'personal' to perform the changes.
PS: Add a '!' over the person to prompt people to look.

[MrJJJ]

Semi-Implemented i guess, although those commands could be PROBABLY usefull

[TopHatPenguin]

Still could be really useful for those combat scenarios where chat just scrolls way too fast to keep up and you need to get orders out.

[Jakers457]

There's the *signal-# (1,2,3,5 etc.) gesture. But that's only good if you want to flip the xenos a birdy.

[ShaunT]

+1 Right, I agree with this entirely. I used to play SL a ton, but I couldn't get my squads to listen to me becaude they're either not looking at chat, can't read chat due to a fight, or are too busy hunting xenos/valids to care, which made me abandon the SL role. I really think this would help

[Bigchilly]

+1 Sounds great, and since SL to squad coordination is limited to a slightly larger and bolder text, it would nice very useful to have during a combat situation.

[Snypehunter007]

Old, lack of continued interest.

Locking.