I have the Auto-Focus option working.

Fantastic.....Can't wait to download the beta.

Agreed, the auto-focus could be a real bother when trying to get my fleets into position.

Good work.

Sounds great, can't wait for the modding options.

Thank you for a great game.

I don't know about other players, but it is not auto-focus that creates problems for me ... it is auto-selection of the next ship. I would like to see an option to turn auto-selection on or off which you said you could do ... please do!

Regarding bugs, I have a saved game (v1.11) that was saved at a point when the only action left was to click on the turn button which was green at the time. When I load that saved game and click on the turn button all my fleets move towards an economy starbase of mine located in the upper right corner of the map. At the point of creating that save none of my ships had any destination selected or any moves left. That is, they were not supposed to move at all in the next turn until I gave them new orders to move somewhere. In order to stop this and continue the game after reloading it I had to select each fleet one by one and right click on it's present location before clicking on the turn button. You might be tempted to think that I actually had destinations already selected for these fleets before saving, but I did not. Should I email that saved game to you?

Overall v1.11 seems to have eliminated the CTDs I was having, but I have had a problem twice where the turn button seemed to lock up. I could move around to view the map, I could select ships, I could change economy, etc. settings, but the turn button would not work. I would click on it, and nothing would happen. I had to shut the game down, restart, and reload the latest save I had in order to continue. Of course, since there was no CTD there is no debug.err file to send you.

Disabling the auto-focus without the auto-select part doesn't really fix my problem with "auto-focus" and might make it worse. I suspect it's the same that most people who wanted the "auto-focus" disable want auto-select disable, and we just loosely used the term auto-focus as a catch-all description for the auto-focus/select behavior.

Anyway, my typical scenario:
- I click on a certain square, moving my currently selected ship to its new position.
- Expecting that I still have some movement left (or maybe just wanting to set its autopilot path for next turn), I immediately click on a nearby square to adjust the ship position *as soon as the ship completes its previous move*.
- Unfortunately, my selected ship had run out of move points, and the auto-focus/select has jumped to a new ship somewhere else. By the time I see and react to the selection/focus change, I've completed the right-click I had in progress.
- So the newly auto-focused/selected ship gets the move order intended for the old ship and moves off to some unintended spot.
-Result: With auto select and auto-focus (ie: current behavior), the screen is centered on the new ship, so unintended move order is usually nearby, so I might still have some move points left to use.
- With auto-select and without auto-focus (ie: proposed fix), the screen remains still, so my move order actually still goes to the intended square, but the ship getting the move order is potentially on the other side of the map.

So for auto-focus-disable to be useful for me, I'd like to be able to also turn off the auto-selection. (Or one unified button that does both together is fine for me).

Thanks!

So for auto-focus-disable to be useful for me, I'd like to be able to also turn off the auto-selection. (Or one unified button that does both together is fine for me).

I second that, but maybe things will turn out better if I tried Caris new behavior (well, not Caris behavior, but the behavior of her code ).
So for now I'm happy and can't wait to try 1.2, but maybe the auto-select would need to be adressed with some later patch, we will see.

As always, great game, good work and Stardock I love you!

Yes, the camera move is annoying, but it isnt fast enough most of the time to have you realize you just moved the wrong fleet/ship - please offer the option of no auto selection at all, would make life much easier on larger maps especially.

Me again
Lost another 12000 divisions because of auto-select a few minutes ago, so while auto-focus is killing my nerves, auto-select kills my troops

Nevertheless, even chief programmers need some free time, so have a nice weekend and enjoy the sunshine ...

Yes, unfortunately auto-focus is also a big part of the issues I have with the UI.

LintMan described it quite well and I would love it if you would be able to make an option for it also.

But enjoy your weekend, you can slave for us the other five days of the week.

When playing with the internal test build (with cari's changes), i beleive it will keep the ship selected until you go and physically click on the next ship you want to move. I'm not sure about a beta version, though with the Mods stuff it'll probably be necessary, but we'll see how you guys like the current implementation of "No Auto-Focus" and see if it's what you're looking for (but FYI, it fixed all my problems with the feature).

BB/CariElf would it be possible to change the F1 planet list slightly please so that if you have a colony ship (or any ship) currently highlighted you can right click on the planet in the planet list to send it there??

At present any decent scout ship uncovers more planets than you can keep track of and without paper and pencil it is impossible to keep track of them all (esp on gigantic maps). With this new feature you could easily keep track of things and simplify colonization as well.

Many thanks and keep up the good work.

PS Not sure about the fix as i have never really had a problem with the way the UI is now. However if you could please explain the issue people are having (in layman's terms) and what your fix will do, i would be grateful

DG

Grrmmlll... me needs some sleep. I'm writing uncomprehensable stuff which doesn't make sense.

(Should have been auto-select instead of autofocus, or else my post above doesn't make sense...)

Ah... but alas as it sounds like this won't be a problem (if it works like BoogieBac has described, it will be perfect )


As for a beta: Yayh!

dg: We've improved the selection code so that a ship will stay selected even if you click on a planet. So technicially, all you need to do (in your example) is select the colony ship, click on the planet from the list (which will move the camera there) and right click on the planet. THe game will now remember the last ship(s) selected and send them where you want

I try to move my ships in stages. Here is where autofocus and autoselection kills me.

Stage I. Logistic and Strategic moves

I have my long range strategic autopilot moves that I would like to execute (massing transport ships from my secure empire interior and moving my newly built warships to the front) some of which are moving to rally points. These are moves that I can be quick with and a bit off because there is little danger of being shot at.
So my right clicking to move can be a bit sloppy.

It would be nice to enable an " move all autopilot directed ships" button or 'move all rally point directed ships " button to move all these essential but non-precise moves.


Stage II Fleet Assembly and Staging Moves

When I get a bunch of ships together in a region for a mission , I move them kinda together and then assemble them into fleets or deselect and manage the fleets and upgrade certain ships etc. This is done near my front lines but during peacetime or out of bad guy shooting range. I try to do this after my strategic moves.

This is where autofocus or auto selection starts to drive me nuts. I can usually see all the ships I want to work with on the map screen at the same time. All I want to do is click on one ship to select it, right click to select a new location once and repeat movement to use all of it movement points. I then move other ships on top of it to create a fleet.


Stage III Tactical moves.

I then want to move one ship at a time very carefully, sometimes zooming in and switching Cntrl-G to turn the grid on for my ships about to engage in combat, or to move them to just outside an enemy fleets movement range to prepare for an attack.

I am concentrating on my immediate ships in this zoomed in map. It kills me when I have an autoselected transport on the other side of the universe that I get auto focused to that demands my attention. I then have to zoom out, see where the hell it is and take care of it and go back in to my tactical focus.

dg: We've improved... ...where you want

Thanks that is good to know. Sorry for sounding naive but i was not aware of the problem people have been reporting.
Thanks for clearing that up.
Oh and it is a good improvement