Suggestion: transparent nanoframe icons

[Sgathec]

Everything looks the same in the zoomed-out view regardless of construction progress. However, nanoframes don't function at all in the same way as complete things. Would nanoframe icons being about 50% transparent cause any unwanted side effects?

[sprunk]

Icons (as currently used) are drawn by the engine so one path to do this is to patch the engine.

The other path is to draw them by Lua. This has two problems:

• replicate the engine behaviour - draw them in the same place, from the same distance etc. This is not entirely trivial, see Icon zoom transition issues #2523
• using the engine is usually better performance-wise, especially if you have to poll for all visible units all the time. This is a fairly minor problem (the feature could always be optional and disabled by default if it's too expensive) but is something to keep in mind.

[ArchShaman]

How about drawing a red X over the constructing units? Just have widget render X over the construction icons. This would be less performance demanding, but still has the problem of Sprunk's first point.