Dev3008 Recoloring - Sounds great, but pain in practice

Community Feedback
#1

I like to do intricate patterns for my roads and building floors, since it’s a part we see a lot of and one of the few elements we can fully customize while still using the Building tool (rather than Slab-everything). The 3008 coloring change /sounded/ great - getting to correct errors or choices that didn’t work out, without having to deconstruct the building (or now, revert to earlier save)? Terrific!

But in practice, it makes it so very, very easy to destroy any custom color design. If you have the surface ‘selected’ when you change color, the entire surface changes to that color. It was fine when it did that for walls, since we can’t manually pattern them. But that same behavior is now in foundations, roads, and (non-slab) floors. If you forget to de-select the surface before changing colors (or even just switching to that type tab), you lose it all :frowning: . At least 3008’s blue-rimmed highlighting of the element makes it easier to see if you still have it selected. But oi … keep having to redo roads and foundations over and over and over because at some point I seem to inevitably forget (or not realize what I have selected) and nuke whatever patterns I’ve made.

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#2

Hey @Vyrasa, thanks so much for the feedback! We were weighing this exact use case last week–the tradeoff between drawing patterns with different colored blocks, and the ease of recoloring the whole floor if you picked the wrong tool the first time. Do you have any suggestions as to how we might manage both functionalities? Adding @yshan.

#3

A setting or toggle in the build editor, maybe?

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#4

Not sure if this is doable, but could you set it so you place blocks as normal, but when you hold a key (shift or ctrl) you can recolor an entire area?

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#5

Akin to what those two said, some extra flag or action required to do a “full recolor” would be my initial preference. Whether it’s click-based (click paintcan, then click color to recolor your selection; or click paintcan, then click thing to recolor; or just a one button option, “click to set the current selection to the current color”), or modifier based (hold shift /alt/ctrl when you click the color to recolor the object, or shift-click on an object to set it to your current color). Any of those variations would sound good to me - preserve the useful recolor-all feature, but avoid making it the ‘default’ outcome for any ‘normal’ action; since recoloring the whole surface will only be an occasional action, having a small extra step involved may be a reasonable trade.

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#6

Thanks for your feedback! @yshan has a tweak in the latest building editor UI that hopefully will work out for you: in order to change the color of the whole floor, you must now select the floor explicitly. It is not selected by default. It’s a bit hard to explain so give it a try and let us know how it goes. :slight_smile:

http://stonehearth.net/steam-latest-updated-to-develop-3010/

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#7

Played around with it a bit, and quite happy with this change. Thank you!

Nicely resolves my frustrations, without adding new GUI elements or esoteric keybinds. Good solution :slight_smile:

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#8

All kudos go to @yshan for finding this unexpected but awesome solution. :smiley:

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#9

just used alot of time on a special pattern for a floor…one click and its gone! funny enough (insert sarcastic laughter: ahahahaha) the undobutton dont work… this just makes me close down the game with a very bad feeling inside. I guess thats not the point with the buildingtool right?

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