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Single unit selection is bad in Zero-K

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With the introduction of micro intensive units that are supposed to be selected in clumps of units like Lobsters, I've realized how bad single unit selection can be in Zero-K.

1. Impossibility of selecting single visible units with a single mouse click when clumped up.

In this picture I can't select the Lobster even though all units are standing idle without pushing eachother.

2. Overlapping icons selection size.
Because of the above issue, it is sometimes necessary or easier to select a unit from icon view than zooming in.
Icons probably have a circular size. I suppose selecting the icon being layered highest makes sense, but something that is not intuitive, is the size of the selection circle and where it ends, and if a unit is even selectable from icon view.


3. In my opinion, it should always be possible to select a single unit in a group from straight above both in icon view and model view at some zoom level.

4. Icon view does not have selection feedback

With ordinary selection, you get halo highlighting when hovering over a unit or when drawing a selection box. It would be nice to have something similar in icon view.

5. One possible change to make single unit selection easier could be: Instead of always getting the unit on top, you select the unit that is close to a ray casted from the screen to the mouse cursor position in some combination of the size of the unit or icon, and the unit distance to the camera.
+1 / -0
3 years ago
I don't know if its caused by hitboxes, but there are indeed some situations in which unit selection works a little weird, as if the "selection box" of units is slightly bigger than the actual visible unit.
+1 / -0
The current single-unit selection technology is twofold:
  • Every unit has a selection hitvolume that exists just to be hit by mouse raytraces.
  • There is a widget that turns tiny selection boxes into mouse raytraces so that moving the mouse a little while selecting a unit still works.

I have set the selection hitvolumes to be larger than the normal hitvolumes to make individual units easier to select, as well as to make it easier to issue attack or set target commands. There is a toggle in unitdefs_posts that replaces normal hitvolumes with selection hitvolumes for the purposes of visualisation. Perhaps the large units don't need selection hitvolumes that are much larger than their normal hitvolumes. Anyone is free to do some notepad deving and mess around with the selection hitvolumes to configure them better.

https://zero-k.info/mediawiki/index.php?title=Zero-K:Developing#Getting_sources

The relevant files are gamedata/unitdefs_posts.lua (where some programmatic selection volume calculation is carried out) as well as individual overrides in units/<name>.lua.

Changing how raytraces are done is an engine change or a complete reimplementation of selection. Making the icons highlight is either an engine change or a complete reimplementation of icon view.
+1 / -0