Improve selection ring

[fabio]

Current selection rings texture-based have the following limits:

• using a low resolution texture make "jagged" borders at max zoom;
• resizing the ring on different objects leads to thikness change;

Ideally the texture should be replaced by a primitive, as it is actually with the rectangle selections. See also discussion at: http://www.wildfiregames.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=16170

[historic_bruno]

Replying to fabio:

Ideally the texture should be replaced by a primitive, as it is actually with the rectangle selections. See also discussion at: http://www.wildfiregames.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=16170

I disagree that this is ideal, as it prevents artists from tweaking the selection ring appearance. It was a primitive before and it was much uglier and less flexible.

[Pureon]

Closed. Texture-based selection rings were favored by the Art Department and are an improvement over the old primitive method.

[zoot]

I have to agree with fabio, this is bad:

If we used ​SVG, they would look much better, while retaining artistic control.

[fabio]

Another possible solution could be to use fixed-size texture and place the texture without resizing them, but place them in a proper way. Example with an image from the game Codename Panzers:

• draw a circle with fixed-size points and add more points depending on the circle size (the yellow points in the image);
• use fixed-size texture corners and just leave a space in between (or draw a continuity line, see the white corners in the image).

[elexis]

We already have that fixed size circular drawing thing seen in the last screenshot available in our code base, but it is only used for static building outlines. Movable units render a premade texture (maybe for some reasons I didn't grasp yet that relate to doing things only once instead of once per frame) and also in order to be able to show weird non-circular textures like the star-shape for heroes.

We can and likely should look into changing that of course.