UI Mod request - Feature from BAR: move-line-drag
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Recently, I played few BAR games and a feature that stood up for me and I immedetially thought if it's possible to implement that in FAF is this drag-line move order, I'm talking about:
https://www.beyondallreason.info/commands/move-line-drag
I Improved lines visibility, because it can't be seen clearly from .gif:
Not really sure if it was suggested before, but I would like to have that in FAF, it has a good feel about it, it's like combined custom formation and auto spread move. You can even draw a circle around enemy unit and your units will surround it (spread evenly), it's easy to draw any shape.Is it possible to do? How many hours do we need to implement it? Are there any volunteers? Or is it not useful for supreme commander setting/environment?
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Perhaps the best new feature since strategic zoom, if we can get this in faf it would be epic.
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Right? It would make an already amazing game even more amazing!
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I dont think its possible with how the game is code as i think ive spoken to jip about it before. i have made him aware of this post he should be able to have a better understanding if it is possible or not
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I asked jip right after I posted he said not able to
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Why would something like this not be possible, such as via the following behind-the-scenes steps?
- Track the mouse position after the relevant keybind is pressed until an end condition is reached
- Divide the length of the tracked mouse location's path by the number of selected units
- Get the evenly spaced target locations from along the mouse's path
- Get each selected unit to move to a target location (with no repeats)
I think the implementation of the 4th step would have a trade-off between optimizing which units get matched to which target locations vs processing time, with better matching taking longer than more abritrary matching, but it seems to me like even arbitrary matching would be better than not having this feature at all...
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@penguin_ to reduce performance concerns re point 4 a hybrid approach could be used - precisely match the first say 25 units based on straight line distance, then do arbitrary matching for any remaining units. 25 units would mean up to 325 distance calculations for this step as an example. Further optimisations could be adding a delay on use of the command per player, and spreading out the calculations over a few ticks
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I really like this suggestion. I wouldn't even mind if no distance calculations were done, and units just picked random points to go to. But judging by spread move, even that might be too taxing
My alternate suggestion would be to add more formation-move templates, if possible, and maybe the ability to select a template based on a mouse gesture. I don't know the nuts and bolts of how formation move works, but it doesn't seem to suffer from the same performance issues as spread move.
Concave templates, for starters, would finally make formation move useful, right now all of them are worse than the default move order. Is that a viable substitute if the original suggestion is too costly?
