Feature: Transparency option for cost and income indicators

[zephyris]

Motivation / Problem

The cost and income indicators (the rising red and green text) from vehicle income, construction costs, vehicle purchase, etc. are always visible.

This can become problematic. All other signs/text/labels can be hidden, either by transparency options (invisible signs, vehicle loading indicators) or the settings dropdown (notably town names). As far as I could tell, there was no way to hide the cost and income indicators - therefore added it as a transparency option.

This option is particularly for players who want clean interfaces or beauty screenshots. It is also useful for late game construction where (especially on fast forward) you can end up building in a cloud of green vehicle income text.

Description

This feature adds a show/hide of cost and income indicators as a transparency option, as another transparency toggle button to the transparency control window. When transparent, no cost/income text. When not transparent, normal cost/income text. It toggles along with all other transparency with the normal X transparency hotkey. It can be locked, like the other transparency options, with Ctrl+click.

This implementation imitates handling of the loading/unloading indicators via a transparency button.

Now we can have beautiful screenshots and clean, text free, viewports!

Limitations

I believe this is a fully functional minimal feature, however:

There is no dedicated hotkey. Ctrl+<number> is used for transparency toggling of individual features, but 1-9 are already in use. Ctrl+0 could be used, but I thought was unintuitive.

x toggles transparency of all features including the cost and income indicators. This is a change in behaviour, which might be undesirable? eg. for a new player when building in transparent mode, no cost would be shown.

It is not addressed here, but a setting, similar to the loading/unloading indicators, could be added. Alternatively, cost and income indicator transparency could default to locked.

Checklist for review

Some things are not automated, and forgotten often. This list is a reminder for the reviewers.

• The bug fix is important enough to be backported? (label: 'backport requested')
• This PR touches english.txt or translations? Check the guidelines
• This PR affects the save game format? (label 'savegame upgrade')
• This PR affects the GS/AI API? (label 'needs review: Script API')
  • ai_changelog.hpp, gs_changelog.hpp need updating.
  • The compatibility wrappers (compat_*.nut) need updating.
• This PR affects the NewGRF API? (label 'needs review: NewGRF')
  • newgrf_debug_data.h may need updating.
  • PR must be added to API tracker

[llugo]

I like the motivation (having a clean scenery for screenshots), but I wonder if there'll be many players who want to hide income but not loading indicators and vice versa. What about putting these two together in a single setting?

[zephyris]

True... Easy to implement as an alternative.

[LordAro]

I agree with @llugo tbh, I don't think this deserves a new button/setting

[zephyris]

On digesting @llugo and @LordAro 's comments, I think I agree... a separate transparency button is overkill. Merge the loading/unloading indicator and cost/income transparency to both use the existing loading/unloading indicator transparency button? Do you think this demands a new icon?

Removing approval as everyone seems to agree this should be one button :)

[zephyris]

Simple revision, simplifies the change so that cost/income indicator visibility is toggled with the existing loading indicator visibility button. Changed the tooltip to indicate that it toggles both (and changed the name of the tooltip string and widget to reflect this new functionality). I think the icon of a vehicle is still OK, as cost/income and loading are all strongly vehicle-associated.

[2TallTyler]

Looks pretty good to me, just a few minor details for code readability. 😃

[2TallTyler]

Oof, I'm sorry, my suggestion for handling IsTransparencySet() wasn't quite right. It should return early before the for loop on line 121, rather than pointlessly continuing through the entire loop.

Change that, and I'll approve (as I was about to when I realized my error). 😳