It’s kinda a bug. The opacity feature isn’t really working as intended I believe. The bug appears when moving a stack as you can see in the pic. I moved 3 units from left to right in pic shown. First the stack was moved. Line should appear at 100% black. Then I move the middle unit. It’s line should now be 100% and the stack to the left should be at 50% since it’s now unselected. Last unit to the right is moved and middle stack now switches to 50% opacity and is working correctly. So the issue with the first stack is that the opacity trigger doesn’t appear to trigger when you leave off stacks. If you look close there is a half and half effect going on with the 50% opacity. Some of the line over the unit gets some opacity applied, then once it’s outside of the unit no more opacity is applied. I feel there should be no difference in how opacity is applied from a single unit to a stack.
I suspect this is a refresh issue that may be addressed By fix 12971 in 3.7.8. Try the most recent master build from Builds of vassalengine/vassal
I’ll wait until 3.7.8 is officially released and then I’ll report back to let the forum members know if this is fixed or not.
I’ve not been able to reproduce this. Which module is this? Thanks. I suspect it has to do with the Area grid and the pieces being moved within a region.
This is from Black Swan 3.2 which is being worked on now. The 3.1 version had movement lines set at 1 thickness. I changed it to 5 and then I noticed this effect. I have just checked Julius Caesar 3.2 also a work in progress and it does the same.
In JC regions are setup but not in Black Swan. I don’t think that has anything to do with it. What I’m thinking is that the opacity is additive. When 2 or more units stack the effect gets close to 1 line at 100%. My setting was 50% for unselected units. The default. So 2 at 50% overlapping looks nearly the same as 100% opacity.
Also look close at the ring of the far left one. See how it looks like it’s half and half. And when you follow the line to the origin it gets lighter and lighter. That effect is coming from when it crosses into another unit in the stack. I see a total of 3 variations in the opacity of the line which really makes my hunch that opacity is being additive a sound guess.
Ah, Haha! Thanks, you just saved me hours of fruitless work.
Unfortunately, I’m not sure there is much we can do about this. Movement trails are maintained and drawn individually by each piece. There is no concept of a stack based or combined movement trails and no simple way to implement them.
The only thing I can suggest with the thicker lines is to reduce the transparency of the unselected piece even further, 20% seems to work well with a line width of 5.
Regards,
Brent.
“There is no concept of a stack based or combined movement trails and no simple way to implement them.”
Yeah I kinda figured. Too much work to get stacks to draw one master line. I’ll try out that 20% you suggested.