Duck and Cover

Well, they aren't really useful as far as I've seen, I tried to fiddle with them... If only you could turn a damn group off, that might be a really awesome option, but well, you can't.

What are "Manual groups"? They're groups of tiles on a map that's all

So um, who cares? Dunno really.

The only idea I came up with is that you could create a group on a map for "Easy reference". Create a new group, select a bunch of tiles, hit "Add selected tiles to group.

Next time you "need" those tiles, go back to the manual group screen, select the group you need and use the "Select group tiles" and it'll highlight them automagically, so you can now easyly move them, or copy them to the clipboard.

So well, 2 questions to Section8:
1: Is there any way to turn a group off? It'd be really awesome if we could make a group of tiles and just turn it "off" to see what's underneath it...

2: Can/are the groups in any way "hints" for the Auto groups? And if so, could we tweak the occlusion calculations that way?

I only use manual groups mainly for ladders and staircases- they're a pain in the ass to select 1-by-1 - especially double ladders (that is, a ladder that's 24 wrings high, rather than 12). Sometimes, I use 'em for something (i.e. a ladder) that's behind a wall or other tall object (i.e. Junk Walls -> Car Piles).

I agree - being able to turn 'em "off" would be pretty useful - one could see what's under or (more usefully) behind something without having to fiddle with "only show tiles on this level" and/or the "right-click on the height marker bar thingy" trick.

Well, there's also the "Reveal cursor" option (which I prefere to use WITHOUT the stripple reveal option), but all these threee options wouldn't beat being able to just remove an entire part with a "Switch"...

I've never played with the Manual Groups, and as far as I know, the answer to both of those questions is an emphatic "No." I don't know what purpose Manual Groups were intended to serve, but I don't seem to recall anyone ever using them during dev.

My thought is that before they made the auto groups you had to make the groups manually... Dunno why they didn't remove the option enterily, I guess selecting some stuff automagically still seemed useful to the developer and he simply left the feature...