Temporary make trees invisible / ghosty

[Bizz Keryear]

Foreword, unnecessary rambling

I ran in that problem because my starting area is a huge forest ... there are some advantages to it ... like absorbing huge amounts of pollution and therefore I haven'd had and attack so far and am mid game. And because of that I wanna avoid to destroy any more trees than really necessary ... but it happens that because of all the upgrades I researched (mainly power grid and e-furnaces) I was rebuilding my complete base ...

Anyway I placed stuff behind trees and I can access the tree but not what I placed there. (I want to mine the stuff of mine) .... and the trees are blocking my view.

It would be really cool to have this:

• to have a toggle button that turns the function on and off
  and if turned on
  • (first the coller option)the trees would become invisible or ghosty (see through, which would be even cooler) if you are near them
  • or does this to all trees. (which is probably less work)
• when a tree is ghosty you click right through and mine what is behind instead of the tree itself.

I had a look in the API ... or tried (don't think I found the right resources anyway) ... and understood jack shit. Well I could make an item now (I think) but that isn't really solving my problem.

[Adil]

or does this to all trees. (which is probably less work)

That's actually more work, because "all trees" is more numerous than "trees near player".
You see, there's not much lua can do directly to rendering.
There's that alfa_channel (a) value in definition of entity picture.
Yet you cannot change that during runtime.

Solution would be creating a copy of each type of tree which you want to make transparent and change selection box of that copy to zero, along with setting alfa channel of all its layers to something like 0.1.
Then on some trigger you can have script to replace real trees with their transparent copies and reverse of that.

It difficult to find wrong modding source as there's currently one.

I was going to only post code snippets here, but it was difficult to stop. The mod is here.