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selected.png (66,159 bytes) unselected.png (39,740 bytes) |
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This is the expected behavior. Essentially, the selection bubbles can't be partially-transparent like they were before while still having any degree of performance. That breaks GPU instancing pretty badly. Prior to July 25th of 2020, we were using the geometry queue (no partial transparency, in other words), and this should have been more or less what folks were seeing. From what I can see in that screenshot, essentially it looks like the ships that were drawn closer to you are fully visible (which is correct), while ones behind their selection circle are blocked by the selection circle (annoying to a respect, but also correct in the new style). In the screenshots here, I can't really tell what the heck the ships in the back are even when they aren't selected. They're mostly too tightly clustered, and I'd zoom in a bit to actually make them out. Doing that should make them equally visible when they are selected. Is this report based on a usability issue (having trouble seeing what is going on), or is it just because it seems incorrect? I ask because I could provide an alternative selection visibility option like lightening or darkening your ship icons colors to denote which ones are selected, which would get rid of the circle opacity issue from being a factor. But it would take something along those lines to solve the problem (a double border around individuals ships would not really be feasible, probably, although I do have some ideas in that area; but it would be super duper time-consuming and might look poor). If this isn't a major issue, though, then I'd rather leave it as it is. I'm running a bit behind at the moment, since a number of technical performance things have reared their heads that are taking longer than I was expecting and that I didn't have on my roadmap in the first place. 0024309 is proving to be kind of a nightmare, blah. |
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Just knowing that this is the intended behavior is enough to sate me. Thanks for the in-depth response, and good luck with the DLC rollout! |
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Would it not be possible to simply change the faction border color of the icons of selected ships instead of just darkening the entire icon? Instead of drawing circles or darkening the whole icon, just invert the faction border hue by 180 degrees. Clean, elegant, doesn't melt the computer with circle math. It's just a matter of if the colors can be dynamically changed in real time like that. I think I'd like that more than the circles. However it's a rather minor thing, if you have important technical things to do, focus on those first. |
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Okay, that's good context to know, thanks guys. In terms of the visual circles you are seeing above, one thing to note is that these are really separate from the computer-melting circles. The circles as drawn here are actually prerendered sprite images that are drawn from a dictionary and they are highly efficient. They're essentially "free" aside from pixel fill rate on your GPU. Given their small size, that basically means they are almost never an issue. I know it gets confusing because there are a lot of different things that are similar but using wildly different techniques, but there's a logic to it. The other circles are in game-space around ships or whatnot, whereas these circles are in billboarded icon space. Inverting ship colors could be rather dramatic to the point of making it hard to tell what is going on, is something I worry about. If you are playing as black and I am playing as white, or you are playing as red-white and I am playing as red-white, more likely, then me selecting my ships would make them look like your ships, etc. That's only going to hit but so many people, but it will hit someone. By converting RGB to HSV, we are able to adjust brightness (Value in HSV), and there are some other things we do sometimes where we make sure there's a minimum brightness, or where we brighten if we can, or in the case of perfect white colors (or close) we darken instead. There are a lot of edge cases when you start messing with color and you've given players theoretically perfect flexibility to choose said colors. We have at least one player who does in fact make his ships black on black, partly to mess with his multiplayer group. So things get... interesting. Right now, the icons are highly performant and the only reason to change them at all would be to get a different visual effect if the current one bugs someone. The circles around actual ships are a separate thing, and I'm thankfully making good progress finally. |
- Anonymous
