LOS

[Jools]

What do you mean? LOS is LOS and sonar is sonar. Why must sonar even be included in the thing? radar isnt either, or is it?

Just forget about sonar, it's LOS that we want really.

[smoth]

Sonar should not be LOS unless of course you want to tell me sonar is how you see when scuba...

I am with jools on this.

[smoth]

I was gonna mention something about that, that's another big flaw in spring. Sonar should be treated like underwater radar and not like LOS.

+9001

[Beherith]

I didnt say why: The sonar map is not written to infotex. No free channels left for it anyway (los, airlos, radar, jammer)

What I want is both LOS and radar/sonar to be shown properly.

[Pxtl]

Yes, Spring has an idiosyncratic concept where "sonar" is just "underwater sight"... this actually breaks OTA compat pretty bad too.

But regardless, there's a challenge for the LOS system - regardless if underwater sight is changed or not, we're going to have a system where underwater units are *not* seen the same way as surface units, since subs and hovers/boats is never going to be an acceptable balance change.

So skip the arguments over gameplay and terminology:

How do you show the two separate LOS layers (presently LOS and Sonar)? The one that's underwater and the one that's on the surface?

[Jools]

Maybe with static that moves in opposite directions?

[Google_Frog]

Sonar is not underwater LOS.

• LOS + Sonar = unit visible
• Sonar = radar dot
• Otherwise no detection

If I were you I would do what the current renderer does, ignore sonar. All 8 combinations of LOS, radar and sonar are important to a sea game. Air, hovercraft and ships can be seen in radar while ships and subs can be seen in sonar. For this reason it is bad to add sonar map to radar map for the purposes of visualisation. It is better to not draw sonar at all because then the radar map is known to accurately show radar.

Also sonar visualisation makes this shader even more game specific. There are probably games that just use sonar range = LOS range for underwater detection.

[Pxtl]

So for the implementation shown in the video, the noLOS blackness projected onto the surface of the water, or the seafloor?

[Pako]

Yes, Spring has an idiosyncratic concept where "sonar" is just "underwater sight"... this actually breaks OTA compat pretty bad too.

Maybe check again who is the idiosyncratic here...

No free channels left for it anyway (los, airlos, radar, jammer)

Los and airlos could easily share a channel and radar/jammer too. My LOS widget can generate the infotex however it could be wanted.

So is this a go in v89?

Both LOS systems have been made possbile already weeks ago now, and will be possible in 89.
Kloot added did the terrain shader and jK added infotexure binding for Lua widget way.

What I have done for the GPU generated infotex is just drank beer and do nothing. It is still stuck at the same point as my last post and now that the terrain shader support is added the GPU generated infotex creation should be moved to C++. LOS texture is very easy to generate with GPU but other infotextures might not be.