Icons get locked in place while using ship class designer

[Vigor]

This bug is causing me to have to reload the game frequently while designing ships. I bet I have had to reload the game more than 10 times today to fix this bug.

Lets say I grab hybrid armor from the panel at the top to drag it to the front armor slot. If I drop it before I get there (let up on the mouse button) the icon for alien armor is likely to just stick in place right where I dropped it. Then I can't grab it again. It is no longer shown in the panel at the top.

But Even if I don't drop it, lots of times it will stick almost in the slot. I have tried everything. I make sure my mouse is actually lined up over the slot. I make sure the left edge of the icon and top fall within the slot. I wait before releasing until I see the tooltip which shows me it is registering as on the slot. Yet still, sometimes with all of these conditions met, it still just sticks. (the reason I do all of these things is because I believe it thinks it was dropped outside the slot. I suspect the mouse cursor location is not what it is using to test to see if the icon is actually in the slot)

A REMEDY: If the bugged icon is a weapon, I can fix it myself by switching to the laser panel or magnetic panel and it will return the icon to the top panel. If it is anything else, I have to reload the game.

The station/outpost designer does something similar but different. For those designers, it uses the mouse cursor loc to test if the item was placed in a valid slot. Since the cursor carries an image of the item you are placing, one might think that the location of that icon is the actual test point. It is not. But if you drop it outside a valid slot, the icon gets stuck there, it no longer appears in the panel on the right or at least, if it appears you can't pick it up.

I think the ship designer is much more difficult to place an item safely. I can simply be careful to avoid the bug in the station/outpost designer. In the ship designer it can happen no matter how carefully I try to place the item.

I THINK I KNOW WHY. In many of the screens in terra invicta, you can register mouse clicks on whatever is behind the screen you are looking at. I.e. if I am in ship designer, and click, it might select the ship fleet from the screen behind it. In other words, I'm trying to use the designer but behind the designer screen is a Dreadnought and if I click in the designer while over the image of the dreadnought, it selects the dreadnought fleet. I don't remember exactly what happened at that point when this actually happened. So, I suspect the bug is happening in some cases where something behind the screen is registering the click and the ship designer fails right there. There doesn't seem to be any safe place to design ships. Even jupiter can be clicked and cause something to happen besides what you want. Outposts and habs don't suffer this problem because there is nothing behind the hab that could be clicked.

MY PROPOSED SOLUTION. 1. when some screen is up, i think any other mouse input function should not receive mouse click calls. If you click outside the currently active screen it should just shut the screen down but not call the function of whatever you clicked on. So the screen would have ownership of all mouse clicks until it closes. 2. If you drop something outside a valid area or even try to place something outside a valid area, the icon should return to its rest location.

[Vigor]

On further examination, I found a place where there is nothing you can click on behind the ship designer screen. I went to where i think the wormhole is and clicked on a ship that had just come out of it. Then I zoomed out as far as possible so there would be nothing behind the ship design. I still got the bug.

[corisai]

Originally posted by Vigor:

A REMEDY: If the bugged icon is a weapon, I can fix it myself by switching to the laser panel or magnetic panel and it will return the icon to the top panel. If it is anything else, I have to reload the game.

Right mouse click to place or remove armor/weapon/etc instead of drag&drop.

[Vigor]

good tip. I do that sometimes on the colony designers but hadn't thought to try it on ships.

I have a new theory. I have still been trying occasionally to figure out why exactly the OP bug is happening. I have yet to get the bug if I precisely eclipse the icon being dragged and the target icon. That tells me it probably is using the mouse cursor and not the top left corner of the icon as its test value (as I suspected previously) However, any deviation from eclipsed can result in the bug. So, maybe the issue involves scaling. Maybe the mouse cursor and target loc aren't being scaled the same way which could cause the target area to be very small. For example, if the mouse coordinate and target loc are both being tranlated (glTranslate function in OpenGL) to 0,0 but then the target loc boundaries are being scaled (glScale function in OpenGL) based off the window behind rather than the designer window's world coordinates it might cause the target area to be very small.

I also tested the mouse click registering on objects behind the designer window. If I click on a dreadnought behind the window it causes its fleet screen to pop up. If I zoom out from the dreadnought before opening the designer and double click it zooms on the dreadnought. Neither of these things prevent the designer from continuing to function but I think clicking or double clicking on some other thing behind the designer window causes it to close. I also tested this on the fleets screen, rather than the ship designer, which did the same.

[Vigor]

I found something I can click on, through the class designer, that closes the class designer down. I just clicked on mercury while trying to design a new ship. The class designer shut down and I zoomed in on mercury.