Squad visualization

[MadeByGabe]

I think there are many options and almost certainly it should be configurable to some extent.

Colored convex hulls

yyyy already implemented colored convex hulls around squads in his version which looks like this:

• Too much visual noise with large groups of units especially with air units that fly around a lot.
• It's possible to have overlapping hulls which can make it unintuitive to select the right squad.
• But I like it very much and maybe could be used for example only on the squad we are actively using, or maybe it could be tweaked to have only an outline instead of a filled shape, or maybe it could be visible only for a very short time after let's say a squad selection happens, etc.

Metaballs (wikipedia)

• Probably too computationally expensive
• Probably would have some of the same issues as convex hulls just less severe
• This is more like a "wouldn't it be cool" idea not a real candidate for implementation

Colored labels

This is what I implemented but to be honest by accident.

I had the squad creation method implemented first and I needed a way to debug it visually so I pretty much copy-pasted the code from the control group widget which draws numbers for the groups.
Then I decided I like it and tweaked it to use symbols and colors.

It's not perfect at all, the colors aren't even distinct enough on some maps but it's simple and working and can still be tweaked of course.

Colored shapes under the units

This is what I would have implemented if I didn't do the labels first by accident.

We could have shapes (circle, triangle, square, half circle, etc.) and colors and assign them to squads to draw under the units.
These shapes could even be procedurally generated kiki and bouba shapes to make them more distinct.

Note: I'm using colors plus something because colors or shapes alone aren't enough to distinguish squads. Using both allows for more combinations.

[bbbccd]

i don't see a fundamental roadblock here. players can select their perfered visualization from a dropdown menu in the game settings. having more options to that dropdown doesn't clutter the settings ui or inconvenience the player.

[MadeByGabe]

Yes there is no roadblock.
This issue was made mainly to have a place to discuss squad visualization. I should have used github's Discussions feature I was just lazy to set that up.

We can include multiple visualizations and a setting to change them or I could even set up hooks to allow other widgets to change the visualization (I think), I have no issue with this.

My preference would be to include only visualizations that are working well enough but still we can have your convex hull visualization with like an "experimental" tag, that's fine with me.