Layer Groups/Colligation With Names and Individual Item Selection

[Langy]

The current 'group' mechanism isn't all that useful - it makes it so multiple items are selected when one member of the group is selected, but that's about it. Colligating items has issues because it actually alters how they work - making it so you can't even see the name of the individual items that have been colligated, for example (it also has bugs associated with it, which I've posted about in the bug forum).

What I'd like is kind of a mixture between a group and colligating items. I'd like to be able to group items together so that they are visually grouped in the layer window, and be able to give this group a name (similar to colligated items). I'd also still like to be able to see the individual components of the colligated item in the layer window and to be able to add/subtract things from this combined group, and I'd like to be able to select the components either individually or as the whole group at once. Ideally, I'd also be able to transform the entire group at once (moving and scaling all items in the group as a multiple of the size they were at creation of the group, etc), or (and I realize this is more of a pie-in-the-sky wish) switching features from one category to the equivalent object in another category (eg, the 'brown' basic terrain categories to the equivalent 'gray' basic terrain categories).

Essentially, I'd like them to function like Photoshop layer groups.

If you replaced the current colligation method with something like this, I don't believe you'd lose any user-focused features (though you may lose some performance or back-end features if you're doing anything to optimize the objects when you colligate them rather than just associating them together).

[Kanchou]

Thank you for the feedback and sorry for the late reply! We are right now entering regression testing for the upcoming release candidate

1) The colligate functionality is intended only for features and as you suspected it does help with performance. It's equivalent to Photoshop's Merge Layers - but it retains the original info so you can "un merge." If you create an entire forest with 200 individual trees, it makes sense to merge all of them into one.

2) The functionality you are described is something we have planned, but it will be after the first release (so for a 1.1 patch/update). It would basically create a new "parent" on the layers and act like you described, and also altering the Z-order as a side effect (Photoshop I believe only lets you group layers that are contiguous in the z-order).

We're are behind schedule for delivering the promised KS functionality so we are waiting to add functionality that could create significant issues until V1.0 is out.

Regarding changing between color categories, that's a good point and was suggested before as well. It's on the wish list for V1.1 so we'll try to make it happen.

Thank you again!!

- Alejandro