Freehand lasso selection

[typecasto]

TL;DR

Allow the player to switch between freehand lasso and rectangular lasso for the selection tools.

What ?

I suggest adding a way (probably a keybind) to switch between the rectangular lasso (that currently exists) and a freehand lasso, for all the existing "selection tools", e.g. deconstruction/upgrade planners, blueprints, and modded selection tools.

factorio lasso.png (1.64 MiB) Viewed 559 times

The shape is made closed by connecting the start and endpoints, for instance if the player drew the red line below, the blue line would be used to complete the shape.

2024-05-04_02-17.png (194.7 KiB) Viewed 559 times

This would also make it so that drawing just a single line would deconstruct just entities in that line, which is often useful with the rectangular selection tool (for belts) and would now be usable for diagonals as well (rails).
The selection should exist in the world space, so the player can walk around while making it in case it doesn't fit on one screen (though this would make zooming in do unexpected things if you weren't in the map view, maybe disallow zooming in this case).
It might also be a good idea to shade this region so that it's more clear what it's going to affect.

Why ?

• Selecting things near diagonal rails (or diagonal rails themselves)

  

  2024-05-04_02-26.png (497.72 KiB) Viewed 559 times

• Copying part of a build that isn't rectangular

  

  2024-05-04_02-35.png (536.73 KiB) Viewed 559 times

  

  2024-05-04_02-38.png (341.83 KiB) Viewed 559 times

Screenshots from the mod Krastorio 2

[Illiander42]

Unrelated, but which loader mod is that? (looks really cool, wanting to grab)

[BrainGamer_]

Unrelated, but which loader mod is that? (looks really cool, wanting to grab)

that looks like AAI Loaders

[ChefOfRamen]

Add this one to "why don't we have this yet". This looks like an extremely useful tool.