priorities for Caretaker

quote: 1) it is possible to choose action priorities for Caretaker? for example in primarily repaired damaged units, then has utilized the wreckage and only then helped build. with changing the sequence of priority by wish.

As far as I am aware the priories change depending on things hardcoded in the engine. This priority may depend on your current economy and the nearby units. I have noticed that nano turrets like repairing commanders. You could look into opening up the engine behaviour for this priority.

Alternatively you could reimplement the behaviour using widgets and commands. This would be quite messy as units may leave worker range. Widgets to do this probably already exist.

quote: 2) it is possible to visually unify the field shields / grid without crossing areas? because when a lot of them it is difficult to see what is happening there.

I don't know what a "field shields / grid" is. You could be talking about up to 3 things: Area Shields, Cloaking Fields or Overdrive Grid.

Area Shields - We can draw whatever we want but I won't let it misrepresent the game mechanics. So to draw the shields merged they would actually have to be merged. It is currently possible but quite resource intensive to make projectiles behave as if shields are merged. It is currently impossible to make BeamLasers act as if shields are merged because they don't have shield hit callins. This would require at least a feature request for BeamLaser shield hit callins. The best thing would be ability engine side to take negative spheres out of shields.

Cloaking Fields - Possible. All you have to do is change the drawing here: https://github.com/ZeroK-RTS/Zero-K/blob/master/LuaRules/Gadgets/unit_cloak_shield.lua

Overdrive Grid - The overdrive grid overlaps by design. The sliver of higher intensity colour makes it clear that two circles are overlapping.

1) Imperfect solution but you can micro your caretakers a little to tell them repair area or reclaim area (click drag). You've also got repeat orders button to help. It won't prioritise but will make sure they reclaim instead of repairing something for example. In chickens coop caretaker micro is important.
2) I agree shield groups are hard to see through especially in coop crazy shield spam. A slow spinning animation of the shield texture, and a transparency value based on number of nearby shields might help, but might be tricky to implement. I sometimes think that groups of area cloaks look more like how shields should.

See:

quote: Area Shields - We can draw whatever we want but I won't let it misrepresent the game mechanics. So to draw the shields merged they would actually have to be merged. It is currently possible but quite resource intensive to make projectiles behave as if shields are merged. It is currently impossible to make BeamLasers act as if shields are merged because they don't have shield hit callins. This would require at least a feature request for BeamLaser shield hit callins. The best thing would be ability engine side to take negative spheres out of shields.

It is not a question of what sort of graphics Spring supports.

Blob-internal shield barriers still exist. You should not make them invisible, thus.

They exist in physical sense. You go into the blob, shoot a projectile, and it can be destroyed by inner walls inside the blob.

So hiding them by creating a blob-mesh is bad.

it should be be by default simplified.

I can hardly remember any instances where seeing the overlapping shields was relevant, since by the time a army rolls all up inside the shields are usually drained.

I think supcom2 did shield visuals very well. The full graphic were only really seen when absorbing damage, and thus not visualy distracting while building deh base.