yeah, a selection box is obviously needed and that's definitely in the cards for a future update. But the problem is more like, suppose you don't want to select a bunch of things together, you need to access a single particular instance so you can either select it or add a connection to it. Take the frigate target practice buttons for example. There are three different button actors that are swapped out depending on the state the button is in (black, red, blue). The models are identical except for the materials and they are all in the exact same spot. The net effect of that is basically that one of them ends up "on top" and its impossible to select any of the other ones without hiding the top one.
Some 3D tools handle this so if you click multiple times on a spot that has multiple overlapping objects, it cycles through all the objects in that spot so you can get the one you want. That might be a solution, but I'm worried about cases where you're trying to set up a connection and you can't really cycle-click because you're either holding onto an existing selection, or clicking again will cause the link dialog to pop up.
It can be done by making the user hide the instances they don't want to select until the one they -do- want becomes visible, then they can click on it and do whatever with it, but this seems like an annoying workflow to me, especially if you want to work with the other instances after (overlapping instances are probably related to each other in some way), so you have to hide stuff and then immediately unhide it after.
it might be a situation that's better handled by an improved layer setup and an improved instance view, so like if you're working on the buttons, you can just click somewhere and pull up the layer that has the button in it, and then from that you have a short list of only the actors related to the frigate button and you can easily configure whatever from there. But that goes back to needing a good layer system and being able to auto-generate layers somehow.
to some extent you can find actors that are related to each other by crawling connections, but the issue just comes down to at some point most stuff is connected to some other entity like a trigger or a relay that isn't part of the prefab or layer, and there's more connections that go out from there to tons of other completely unrelated stuff in the room. so the problem is really just distinguishing when an object has nothing to do with the one you're focused on, and excluding it from there.
Some 3D tools handle this so if you click multiple times on a spot that has multiple overlapping objects, it cycles through all the objects in that spot so you can get the one you want. That might be a solution, but I'm worried about cases where you're trying to set up a connection and you can't really cycle-click because you're either holding onto an existing selection, or clicking again will cause the link dialog to pop up.
It can be done by making the user hide the instances they don't want to select until the one they -do- want becomes visible, then they can click on it and do whatever with it, but this seems like an annoying workflow to me, especially if you want to work with the other instances after (overlapping instances are probably related to each other in some way), so you have to hide stuff and then immediately unhide it after.
it might be a situation that's better handled by an improved layer setup and an improved instance view, so like if you're working on the buttons, you can just click somewhere and pull up the layer that has the button in it, and then from that you have a short list of only the actors related to the frigate button and you can easily configure whatever from there. But that goes back to needing a good layer system and being able to auto-generate layers somehow.
to some extent you can find actors that are related to each other by crawling connections, but the issue just comes down to at some point most stuff is connected to some other entity like a trigger or a relay that isn't part of the prefab or layer, and there's more connections that go out from there to tons of other completely unrelated stuff in the room. so the problem is really just distinguishing when an object has nothing to do with the one you're focused on, and excluding it from there.
