ok, so we all know that when we press f4 we can see enemy metal spots, and make cloaked metal spots well..pointless.
However, what if when you press f4, only metal inside the extractor radius will go red, and everything else stays black. The idea is that
1. If you have a cloaked mex, on maps with metal patches (most maps), you will be able to see that an enemy has a mex on a spot, however, you wont quite know where.
2. You generally won't get LOS of the erm..red colour (or at least not much) before you get LOS of the extractor.
3. It makes it easier to find un-used metal spots on a map with lots of spots.
Metal Map slight redesign
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Tobi wrote:What exactly is different from how it works currently?
Sorry, I didn't explain it well.
Currently, everything within the extractor radius is overlayed with a red colour onto the metal map. The idea is that instead, the actual metal colour on the map has its green value turned into a red value, so on a map that uses metal patches, used patches would be red, unused would stay green.
e.g. If you put an extrator on somewhere with no metal- there is no change on the metal map (it stays black). If you put it on a metal patch, the metal within the radius is turned red, but nothing else.
EDIT: did a quick paint job showing what i mean
Last edited by BoredJoe on 14 Jan 2007, 21:08, edited 1 time in total.
Strategia wrote:-1.
With the current system, you can see extractor radii at a glance in the metalmap, which is good. Also, with SmallDivide-type metal distribution, you'd still have a large portion of the radius shown, so it wouldn't really be functional there.
When placing a mex you see the extraction radius, so why do you need to see the radius of other mexes?
On smalldivide type maps yes it wouldn't be effective, but it would fix a borked part of the gameplay on 90% of maps.
I think this idea has potential.
It wouldn't affect spread-metal distributions like on Small Divide at all! However, on point-metal maps, (basically all of them nowadays, i'd wager), it would help eliminate some of the problems that arise from enemy units being able to see your metalradii. And when placing, you could still have extractor radius be displayed as in the current system, after all...
It wouldn't affect spread-metal distributions like on Small Divide at all! However, on point-metal maps, (basically all of them nowadays, i'd wager), it would help eliminate some of the problems that arise from enemy units being able to see your metalradii. And when placing, you could still have extractor radius be displayed as in the current system, after all...
I think that the metal overlay should just show metal distribution then extraction radii can be shown via range circles filled with a circular polygon deformed to the terrain. This would simplify the problem of squashing the cloaked mex bug, and at the same time allow modders to change the clours or even allow it to be changed from red to blue as has been requested by some colour blind people.
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1v0ry_k1ng
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Warlord Zsinj
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To quote Tobi from a thread on that subjectNOiZE wrote:How about this.
Just make it so you can't see enemy extraction... solves the problem better IMO.
"It's a problem in the underlying design, making it hard to fix, unless the code is made either 1) much slower 2) much more memory hungry or 3) the metalmap view is disabled totally."
So I thought this could be a good alternative- though i don't know how easy it would be to code.
On maps with a radius larger than the actual metal patch (see forboding angel maps) you would be able to place a cloaked metal extractor or even regular metal extractor off center of the metal patch, and all the enemy could tell using f4 with LOS to the patch is that there is a mex on it, but unless they have spotted the mex itself (not possible with covert mexs) they would not know exactly where it was from afar and thus could not bombard it with pinpoint accuracy..
This also would not be very memory intensive, though it would not completely solve the problem only make it less of one, it would not really alter much on maps that dont use patches. Its not something that is OMG do it now important but if it can help without slowing down the game speed at all due to calculations, the actual solution would apparently, then I dont see what the deal would be..
This also would not be very memory intensive, though it would not completely solve the problem only make it less of one, it would not really alter much on maps that dont use patches. Its not something that is OMG do it now important but if it can help without slowing down the game speed at all due to calculations, the actual solution would apparently, then I dont see what the deal would be..
thats the huge gigantic blocking map bug I've been going on about for the last year. The one that allowed me to build ten autofacs in the same place, build turrets and mexes in factory doorways, and makes units try to walk through the middle of kbot factories. It also breaks a number of OTA cob scripts, and messes up a lot of OTA yardmaps.