Re: Assigning tasks to multiple units?

[Eric McDonald <mcdonald at phy dot cmich dot edu>]

Lincoln Peters wrote:

> Semi-automatic AI control, of course, has already been discussed at
> length, but simply being able to manually assign the same plan/goal/task
> to multiple units would help significantly as well.  This would be most
> easily accomplished if there was an easy way to select multiple units
> and give them orders simultaneously. 

I've been thinking along similar lines. And, indeed, if you look at some 
of the code in the new prerelease that I'm making available this 
afternoon, you will find that I have already added partial support for 
this in some of the functions that determine which unit action buttons 
appear in the bottom panel. However, I am not quite ready to implement 
multiple selection as far as clicking goes just yet. It is most 
definitely on my agenda, and may be appearing in the fairly near future.

> 1. A "lasso" tool comparable to the tool of the same name in Photoshop
> and the GIMP, so that you could draw a marquee around an area and select
> all units within it.

That's one I hadn't thought of. I was thinking more about being able to 
do rectangular or circular selections.

A prefix arg could supply the radius of a circular selection, or the 
maximum number of units to be contained in either a rectangular or 
circular selection. I am still thinking about this aspect.

> 2. A method of selecting and deselecting units based on various
> criteria.  Perhaps a dialog that looks something like:

We could go for something fancier like the dialog at some point. But, 
for starters, I think it would be easier and still quite handy just to 
be able to control-click to select/deselect individual units, and be 
able to do a rectangular selection just by holding down on the shift key 
and click-dragging.

Of course, we need to think about whether things should be the same in 
move mode and in survey mode. As it currently stands, movement/combat 
can be done by left-clicking in move mode, and by right-clicking in 
survey mode. Before doing anything wrt multiple selection, we need to 
decide whether this convention (apparently decided by Stan) should kept.

> It would also help to have a better mechanism for creating formations,

I mentioned this on the list fairly recently. Maybe it got lost in the 
debate that I was having with Hans at the time.... What I suggested (and 
intend to implement) is that the current unit should be regarded as the 
potential formation leader, and when "F" is pressed the user should be 
prompted for follower units to click on. Pressing 'enter' would accept 
the list, and pressing 'escape' would cancel the command (per usual).

There is an additional question as to how formation-setting should work 
in the case when multiple units are selected. In that case, I think it 
might be better to ask for a leader instead (as is done now in the 
Tcl/Tk interface for a single selected unit), under the assumption that 
the selected units are intended to be followers.

And there is the kernel-level issue of how a formation should behave if 
its leader is destroyed. I think it would be nice for an unit of the 
same type as the leader to inherit the role of leading the formation, if 
such an unit can be found and is a member of the formation, and is no 
more than one cell farther away than the nearest formation member. 
Otherwise, the formation member (without regard to type) nearest from 
the destroyed leader should perhaps inherit leadership of the formation. 
This could, in some cases, be the wrecked version of the leader.

> and for adding and removing units from those formations as needed, 

I suppose a formation editor dialog could be implemented at some point. 
However, I would probably be content to just be able to more efficiently 
setup formations; it would make adding or dropping a few units a less 
arduous, though not ideally easy, task.

Eric