Survey Tool Tweaks

[Blaquetooth]

I love this tool. I would wish for a few additions. Nothing else really needs changing.

A way to expand or contract the size, maybe similar to claim sizing.
Slopes. Tilting on one axis or the other.
Multiple users per marker.

[Granger]

Multiple users per marker.

Close the marker and another one can use it while you're leveling.

[Maiden]

Multiple users per marker.

Close the marker and another one can use it while you're leveling.

That's not what he was asking for and you know it

[Sevenless]

+1 on the slope for sure. I want to make an expansion in my hilly area and without survey tool it's essentially impossible due to it needing a gentle slope for palisades.

[jorb]

Yeah that might be cute, but also a fair amount of work. I doubt we can make this a priority.

[Granger]

42 months later and most bases still look like designed by architects without depth perception... flat, bland and ugly.

Thus, please:

Add a button to the survey window that allows to add smaller control flags to the survey area that allow height deformation of the target plane.

Placing/clicking one of these control flags would open an additional window with:
- 'remove' button to get rid of that control flag
- a slider to set the offset of this control point relative to the main survey level
- a slider to tune the control point between hard (absolute height, straight slopes) and bezier mode (smooth the height changes)

Bezier mode would, instead of forcing the height at the control point to a certain offset, just pull the grid toward the offset slider setting - resulting in a more natural look.

Add a toggle to the main survey window that exchanges the main (currently flat) survey plane with a copy of the current height map of the survey area (remembered until toggled back to flat mode) which would give us the ability to use control flags to modify a part of a survey without changing the rest of it, like flattening a hilltop without destroying the lower areas by filling them up.

Finally add button that removes all control flags to the main survey window.

Control flags certainly only shown with the main survey active (to not repeat the flag littering issue that lead to limiting the amount of surveys a character can place). Amount of them could be limited by survey size, I would recommend (tiles)^(1/3) and rounded up (would result in 10 for maximum size survey).

Interface (UI) work shouldn't be that complicated (window with one button and two sliders, should be a matter of minutes), the control flag object itself could be a client-side resized survey flag (like growing trees) and I'm confident that loftar is able to whip up the math (and the code implementing it) needed to deform a flat survey plane into a target height map in an afternoon.

Please?

[Hrenli]

Making nice slopes is painful right now. It should be possible to make it easier.

Also, the current survey seems bug-bordering when it comes to multiple users, If one player drops a survey flag and another deletes it the first player ends up with 1 less flag for this week available for him (at least according to the error message).

[mvgulik]

Just some idea that popped up.

Toggle:
* Ignore border points.

Which, when active, would exclude the border points from being processed when leveling.
* Would allow selecting the surrounding tiles of the intended target area to be leveled. Allowing to display additional level info of surrounding tiles while not having to worry that there accidentally changed.
* Would allow having adjoining active surveys that span a level-change (Survey A + B). (no unintended changes to the shared points between the adjoining surveys)
* ... (just some logical side effect) Would allow single-line changing of ground ... in both NS+EW directions. ... (Although, might already be possible)



Would be superseded (kinda) by: "A way to expand or contract the survey size, maybe similar to claim sizing."

[mvgulik]

* Some absolute terrain height data.
** if need be only if a single tile is selected.
*** if need be only if the single selected tile is flat.

Would allow general level compare between distant tiles (no need to use multiple surveys to do a quick survey of the general height changes ... GPS mode so to speek)

[mvgulik]

When it comes to adjusting ground-tile-points that lie on a claim-border (of someone else). The ground leveling feature comes across as highly inconsistent.
Sometimes your allowed to change those tile-points, and other times your prevented from changing them.

I'm sure there is a logical code-related reason (like perhaps "lets only check one side of the tile-border, and not both")
... but from a general game-behavior point of view it makes no sense. (its inconsistent => system fighting user => generally always annoying.)