Unexplored map fog of war

Unexplored map fog of war

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gajop
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Joined: 05 Aug 2009, 20:42

Unexplored map fog of war

Post by gajop »

I want to see engine get support for displaying black parts of the map that have never been explored. I believe this should be a part of the engine for performance reasons. If possible I'd like to have some shader access/control (as a texture I guess?) over how it's rendered, but that's not the primary request.

The furthest that was ever achieved was as a widget written by knorke and slightly adjusted by myself: viewtopic.php?f=1&t=28342&p=524291#p524340 . Besides the single example, it contains artifacts and a number of issues, and is extremely resource heavy. I believe it needs to be done by the engine if these issues are to be resolved. It was mentioned that behe was making a shader for it but I forgot what happened to it, presumably got abandoned.

Probably obvious, but this would be used mainly for single player scenarios and/or procedurally generated maps.

The request therefore includes the following:
- Ability to turn on/off showing unexplored regions blackened out for all teams. They must use gradients when rendering (no crisp blocks), and generally look decent. The update rate should also be configurable by the game. Default mode should be "off" (like it is now), and I'm fine with it not being toggle-able during the game for performance reasons (basically make it only settable at the start, or allow the display toggle-able with a conscious performance hit).
- Ability to mark areas (rectangles and/or circles) as explored/unexplored for a given team using the Lua SyncedCtrl.
- Ability to query if area was explored using Lua SyncedRead.
- (Optional) Shader control over how it's rendered. Some games use clouds and stuff for that : http://well-of-souls.com/civ/images/CIV ... Screen.jpg so it would be nice to have control over it.
- (Optional) Have related heightmap functions return nil if queries are done in unsynced for teams that have no access to a particular part of the area.
- (Optional) Make pathfinder assume all unexplored areas to be passable (this might be a huge task and I'm completely OK with it not being done in this iteration).

I'd like to get a bounty estimate for this (time and resources), as well as any feedback on the feature request itself from both the engine and game devs. Please give different estimates for primary and optional requests.

PS: Sorry if anything's unclear in this request, I didn't spend that much time writing it.
hokomoko
Spring Developer
Posts: 593
Joined: 02 Jun 2014, 00:46

Re: Unexplored map fog of war

Post by hokomoko »

As at the moment jK is revamping los code, I'd wait with this a bit.
The scope will be easier to estimate afterwards (my guess is that it will be significantly easier to implement).
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Silentwings
Posts: 3720
Joined: 25 Oct 2008, 00:23

Re: Unexplored map fog of war

Post by Silentwings »

We had an attempt at making a widget to do this for the BAR campaign, but the performance issues and occasionally tearing were too much. So +1 to engine help with this.
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PepeAmpere
Posts: 589
Joined: 03 Jun 2010, 01:28

Re: Unexplored map fog of war

Post by PepeAmpere »

+400 $ from notAlab to have some kick-off. Sure its not full cost, but I hope some others will join us ;)
gajop
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Joined: 05 Aug 2009, 20:42

Re: Unexplored map fog of war

Post by gajop »

Would probably be best to wait until after new engine goes out. Then again, there's always going to be something :) (see hoko's post above)
gajop
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Posts: 3051
Joined: 05 Aug 2009, 20:42

Re: Unexplored map fog of war

Post by gajop »

Posting here for future reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXtyeZE ... e=youtu.be
With relevant code: https://github.com/Spring-SpringBoard/S ... it/cb4a32e - this was created using map shaders and $info_los. Very basic solution suggested by Pako.

I recommend we wait for 105 + Custom Map Shader Framework so we can get a clean, high quality implementation.

PS: I won't be accepting any $ for this as it was my bounty proposal to begin with :P
Google_Frog
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Joined: 12 Oct 2007, 09:24

Re: Unexplored map fog of war

Post by Google_Frog »

The visuals are only half the solution. How are you going to prevent players from probing the default UI to explore the black area? Things like waypoint location, structure blueprint placement and camera hight will reveal the terrain. This may all be solvable by initializing the unsynced heightmap to a flat plane. Lua has no ability to edit the UHM though.
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