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Comment by AnotherGoodName | Hacker News Reader

They exist purely to handle control pads imho and the article doesn't mention that. That's when they first started appearing, Secret of Mana, noted in the article was a SNES game.

They do not exist to benefit mouse+kb users. Mouse+kb users are absolutely better off imho with an always on and hotkeyed action bar down the bottom/side. If you don't know the hotkey you can still flick the mouse over and back faster than activating a radial menu.

When you see a radial menu in a PC game you can bet it's because the game had consoles in mind first and foremost.

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This isn't always true.

Fortnite's emote wheel is a good counter-example - it wouldn't be easy to implement in any other way. You don't want to dedicate 8 separate buttons just for emotes, and any form of a linear list of options would be hard for players to learn via muscle memory.

An emote wheel with 8 options makes it easy to remember - press some key to emote, then drag down to play emote X, or up for emote Y. As an added bonus, it works well with directional control pads, but that's not the primary benefit.

Maya's had radial menus as a major chunk of its UI for ages, and there are people who use them as a major chunk of their mouse-and-keyboard interaction with it. Blender's got 'em too.

Wacom's tablet drivers let you build radial menus for your programs. I've never bothered as I'm a "five thousand keyboard shortcuts" kind of artist but there are artists who love 'em.

Speaking as an aspiring solo gamedev: these extra menus in programs like Blender are super important.

Sure, you can map extra keybinds, but convenient keybinds are actually a scarce resource if you're essentially the "full stack" of the art pipeline (from sculpting, modeling, retopology, texture painting, to animating). This isn't even including keybinds for any custom tooling.

One thing I really appreciate about Blender specifically is that you can search through all the available operations with F3. This offers a nice trade-off between muscle memory, keybind consumption, and not needing to use the mouse.

Crysis 1 had a radial menu for suit modes that was pretty good. It was not designed with consoles in mind. The console ports of that game only released 4 years later.

It was actually a very good solution for minimizing binds. Yes, using direct hotkeys is better, but most players in a playerbase are pretty casual and usability is more important.

Squeak's Morphic has "halos" which look like an alternative to vertical context menus and indeed I always found it interesting but odd.

https://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/3546

Cad software uses radial menus for right click selections often (solid works, inventor). Apex legends uses radial menus for weapon selection with a mouse.

Neverwinter Nights was a PC game. I don't believe it ever had a console release. I thought the radial menu worked well in that game.

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