Fog of War

[colorblind]

Blacked out unexplored terrain does not encourage scouting, to the contrary it makes sending anything out of your base complicated, time consuming, hazardous, and inefficient.

Not if you use Peepers; that's what they're for. Imho it adds an extra challenge, but I can understand why some wouldn't like it. Therefore your suggestion of multiple FOW modes is a good idea. I don't think it'll be extremely much more work to code two different modes than a single one.

Edit: when using blackout terrain, it would be nice that have an 'explore' command for scouts that would force them to explore as much terrain as possible.

[zwzsg]

Peepers are plane. Having to build a plane factory and few peepers at the early begining of a game, when you can hardly afford a veh factory, slow down the game considerably.

Imo you should play blindfolded and hands tied. It adds an extra challenge too.

[colorblind]

Allright, hold your horses, you've made your point quite clear now. I've included your point of view in the startpost. Can we focus on the techical aspects again?

[GrOuNd_ZeRo]

Well, with the problems implenting a LOS covering terrain due to the shading on the terrain we will have to find a way to get around this.

At the very least, when pressing L, the following should happen:

-Terrain should be at normal color (like the outter edges of LOS), not lighter.
-Radar should not appear on the map, only on the minimap.

That's all I can think of right now.

But I guess it should be calculated when loading the map as suggested.

[FizWizz]

I like the "L" key LOS as it is right now. Even when Sight, Radar, and Jamming overlap I can make sense of it, and it's easy to turn on and off.
I do find it annoying though that LOS is only periodically calculated, it feels like a full second between updates.

On FoW: If a fog of war is implemented though, please don't make it black, grayscale makes it obvious enough to the player that he can't see somewhere!

On FoW heightmaps: It would be better to only update terrain when you're in view of it though, because looking for squares is easier than scouting on maps with gently sloping heightmaps like Flooded Desert, and makes counter-reconnassaince a little pointless.

[hrmph]

IMO there should be fog of war but it should not black out the terrain completely. There should be a semitransparent blackness around. This would help with scouting, it would make it easy to remember which parts of the map you've been ignoring; but the terrain would still be visible.

[PauloMorfeo]

IMO the view u get from pressing L is just ugly, somehow it has to be made clear where los starts and where it ends...

So, i supose people actually want the "L" to work diferently instead of a new feature? That is important to clarify...

[colorblind]

No. A FOW would be similar the 'L' feature, but would also go beyond it. It should at least fix the problems I mention in the first post.

[SwiftSpear]

A game side controllable turok style feild of veiw around units would be my preferance... If you make the fog of war 2d then people will exploit around it by just zooming down past it when they need to. Only a 3d FOW could really work on the spring engine.

[hrmph]

Swift: I don't think anyone would design a fog of war system that was so easily bypassed, it would defeat the purpose.

[FireCrack]

i just wish "L" would update more frequently.

[Kixxe]

i just wish "L" would update more frequently.

Ijust wish that ''L'' would not make it look like you have night vision googels on

[FizWizz]

Ijust wish that ''L'' would not make it look like you have night vision googels on

when LoS stacks with radar, the result is a really bright green. If the current ("L" key) LoS setup is kept, tone down the brightness of the radar and LoS layers so that they do not burn my retinae