Suggestion: More terrain/gameplay interactions...

[Warlord Zsinj]

Seeing as it went unnoticed in the other thread, I thought I'd post it here:

I think that terrain elements, including terrain type (snow, lush, desert, etc), some features (trees, rocks, buildings, etc) and weather conditions (fog, blizzards, sandstorms...), should have a direct effect on units, ultimately impacting on the way people play the game.

Basically, the following points summarise what I think would be a great addition to strategic depth in Spring:

• I think units should be slowed on some terrain (eg: snow, sand, blizzards), while sped up in other terrain (roads, grassland).
• At the same time, I think it should be possible for units to have special speeds set for various terrains, so that a designer can make a particular unit perform better in snow, or or better in desert, but worse in snow, etc.
• Some conditions should reduce LOS. Particularly weather effects such as fogs, blizzards and sandstorms.
• (This is a fundamental tenets of what I think should be included in the terrain interaction)
  I think that some terrain should extend radar jamming effects to units.
  For example, I think that radar should have difficulty detecting units moving through trees. Thus, a player would be able to all but conceal an army by travelling it through a forest (assuming they aren't kicking down all the trees ), allowing them to lay ambushes, or sneak attacks.
• Not only trees should offer radar jamming, but also other features, such as buildings and swamp features, as well as terrain conditions such as fog, blizzards and sandstorms.
• Of course, larger units would be unable to cloak in some conditions, but this can be easily simulated with a simple "cannothide=true" tag, or even by the simple fact that units so big that they can't hide in forests will kick down any of the trees that would hide them anyway...
• You could even go further, allowing some units to cloak in certain conditions/terrain/features. Of course, this is a further step from everything else I've suggested, and is quite debateable (whereas the other suggestions are fairly straight forward). Units could be allowed to cloak, irregardless of any inherent cloaking ability, when they are immobile in certain terrain. The idea being that a player could hide forces within a forest, or in a blizzard, or whatever, and be able to lay ambush, or lure enemy units into a trap.

The main idea with all those suggestions is to change TA's map interaction with strategy from a simple "take the high ground" and "use the choke points" to a far more advanced system of combat. Adding further terrain interactions adds millions (literally) of new levels of strategic and tactical options that open up to TA commanders. For example, it is practically impossible to perform an ambush in TA, and yet it is one of the most essential, and lethal forms of attack in the real world.
It also means that the gameworld becomes unpredictable, with blizzards and sandstorms able to crop up around the place and change the map strategies completely...

[aGorm]

I agrre and Disagree..

Weather is cool, having it hinder line of sight is a nice idea. Units being slowed by certain terrain types is also good. However

I dont think units should be able to cloak in in certain conditions. Nor should units become compleaty radar invisible. However, how about making units semi transparent in certain conditions when still. In a blisard / snowstarom youd be hard pushed to spot them. And at the same time, maybe you should just get a glitched radar? IE, in the area the units are in blips will randomly apper and dissaper, sometimes they will be a unit other times jus ta glitch. This would still add statagie as you would never know how many units they were sending or even if there were any atall (they could just have one pee wee in the woods but it would look like 5...)

Of course, the neare they get to a radar or closein into visible range the less these effects would happen.

aGorm

[the kitchen sink]

We don't want to forget about the possible effect meteor showers would have on units, obviously damage, but radar jamming, and/or preventing planes from flying would be nice. same applies for blizzards

[aGorm]

We don't want to forget about the possible effect meteor showers would have on units, obviously damage, but radar jamming, and/or preventing planes from flying would be nice. same applies for blizzards

Huummm, Thats cool, but i dont see why it would stop planes flying, Its just if they flew into it theyed be sitting ducks for it (well flying ducks acctully...)

[sparkyhodgo]

I like your ideas. How difficult would they be to implement?

One thing I thought TA should have done the relationship between height and sight better. In OTA, putting a unit on high ground lets it see farther, but at the same time it's usually so far back from the base of the mountain/hill/plateau that it doesn't matter. It would be great if high units got a real, noticable LOS improvement.

[Warlord Zsinj]

Sparky: It was discussed a while ago, with the SY's saying that they definitely would give height a more obvious impact on gameplay.

Agorm: To a point I agree that the cloak might be a bit unbalanced, but I think that if you only gave it to smaller units, and carefully tested it, the advantages of including it would greatly outweigh the disadvantages.
It is important to remember that I intended that only immobile units should be able to cloak when in forests (etc.), so that after staying motionless for a few seconds, small units are able to obscure themselves from sight.

... And what you say with the blips flashing on to the radar is more or less what would happen. Because trees would only offer a small radar jamming range, units would constantly be moving into and out of the enemy radar.

[Syffer Bidan]

Warlord Zsinj, you are a genius. Please enter the "list of requests" topic and post whatever the Hell you want.

[[K.B.] Napalm Cobra]

That whole terrain speed thing sounds good. And have weather variability able to be set with the map as a default or overridden in the lobby.

[AF]

How about footsteps and tracks? Simple thing but it gives a good effect, perhaps just trampled grass or snow or whatever it is our ground is

[the kitchen sink]

another idea for a changes in a blizzard, make kbots or any other walking units move far slower, its a lot harder to move in a snowdrift.

[aGorm]

Just a though. I know this would probablie take another Texture layer for teh land but, could you make it so you can make ground shiny? So as swamps look wet. And also so that when a unit goes over that area it sinks slightly. You could gauge the sinking by unit type, so walkers sink most, tanks next, hovers obviosly dont sink, nither should planes. And building built there can be lower to... and maybe make it so the are has reeds around it insted of grass...

aGorm

[the kitchen sink]

How about making planes which land in swamp be unable to take off again?

[AF]

Or have reeds and stuff stuck to them instead when they free themselves

[aGorm]

Next thing your goona suggest haveing Yoda come and Free them from the swamp...

aGorm

[Gabba]

I think that terrain elements, including terrain type (snow, lush, desert, etc), some features (trees, rocks, buildings, etc) and weather conditions (fog, blizzards, sandstorms...), should have a direct effect on units, ultimately impacting on the way people play the game.

Great post WZ, I wanted to start a discussion about that for a long time but I didn't get to it.

I think that these terrain/gameplay interactions should be implemented as a fundamental feature in Spring. The way I see it, we should add another bitmap to the map format (in addition to the texture, heightmap and metal map). In this bitmap you would define color zones, and then, through a textfile you would then be able to assign (basically script) effects to a color or a range of colors.

Examples:
1/ In your bitmap, you paint the zone that corresponds with the road texture on your map in blue; then in your textfile you define "R:0 G:0 B:255-->speed+5". All units' speed will be increased when they are in that zone.
2/In your bitmap, you paint the zone that corresponds to lava in your map with a reddish color. You use a gradient so that the color is more red where the lava is deeper/hotter. Then you put a definition in you textfile for the range "R:200-255", so that that zone damages units passing through it, and does more damage for higher values of Red.

The major advantage of this method is that it separates the graphics of the map and their effects. You can create any new type of terrain you want and assign any effect to it, even if the SYs never thought of it.

This would also be incredibly useful for scripting missions or maps with special events: just allow a zone of X color to trigger an event: some units appearing, a meteor shower, a story element, whatever.

[Warlord Zsinj]

It depends on how maps are created or planned to be created in Spring. I don't really know much about it; but your system seems based around the old TA engine (both with your idea of a flat bitmap, and a 256 colour limitation). In Spring, there wouldn't be such limitations, and because of its 3D shape, one wouldn't be able to use a flat bitmap to represent varying terrain types.

What I'm suggesting would likely require the ability to apply code to features and tiles (if, indeed, Spring even works on a tile system). The game would be able to detect variating terrain types, just like it can detect what is ground and what is water, and then apply the appropriate unit limitations.

The weather effects are something which would be quite difficult; It would have to involve having a random weather pattern algorithm to decide weather effects, with certain weather conditions more likely to follow into other ones. The effects themselves would likely be pretty easy, just overlaying a "rain" or "snow" layer on the player's screen. The most difficult part, as I see it, is with the "transition" maps in TA, where there are a number of different terrain types in a single map. Certainly you wouldn't expect it to be snowing on a green tile, or raining on a desert one. The difficulty there would be having centralised weather patterns, rather than a blanket weather pattern (which would be significantly easier).

I think in general the way the Total War games approach weather effects seems to the be the simplest and best looking way to do it (much of which has been adopted into my suggestions above).

[Gabba]

It depends on how maps are created or planned to be created in Spring. I don't really know much about it; but your system seems based around the old TA engine (both with your idea of a flat bitmap, and a 256 colour limitation). In Spring, there wouldn't be such limitations, and because of its 3D shape, one wouldn't be able to use a flat bitmap to represent varying terrain types.

Well, my idea is rather based on a current feature of Spring: a bitmap that defines metal concentrations for the map. I believe it's a grayscale one, but in-game you can show the concentrations with a color overlay. See the following screenshot: http://spring.clan-sy.com/screenshots/screen56.jpg

A 256 color limitation is not necessary, but would reduce the size of my bitmap. But I wasn't suggesting that: from working with Photoshop, I thought that the maximum value for RGB notation was 255. Since each of these three colors (Red, Green, Blue) has 256 possible variations, that makes for 255*255*255=16581375 colors? As for not being able to use a "flat bitmap"... well from what I understand, current Spring maps are made from a flat texture map, and a flat grayscale heightmap of an inferior resolution. What makes them 3d is the applying of the flat texture map on the 3d shape defined by the flat heightmap (darker=higher I believe). Please, someone correct me if I'm wrong. (Too bad the posts were erased.) Anyways my idea is obviously possible: just do it the same way as the metal concentration map in the screenshot I linked.

With my solution, then, weather doesn't need to be assigned to tiles: you just paint a zone (which can encompass several tiles or part of tiles), and assign "snow" to it, for instance.

I really like your idea of units being more stealth in some terrain, and even cloaking after some time of immobility. Actually it would work better if each unit had a stealth and hiding value from the start. Small units would have a very high hiding value, so the increase in hiding given by the terrain would cloak them; big units would become less visible in the same terrain, but their hiding value wouldn't go so high as to be able to cloak them.
Stealth and hiding would have a value from 0 to 100%; other units trying to see a unit with 60% stealth and 20% hiding would have only 40% of their radar range and 80% of their sight range available to detect the unit. The same unit in dense forest would have, say, 70% stealth and 40% hiding. The same unit immobile in forest would have 70% stealth and 50% hiding.
Obviously, 100% hiding = cloak. Cloaking devices would set units to 100% hiding when activated.

[Gabba]

A little more input from other people would be appreciated...

[aGorm]

I think your idea rules and would work well. Theres a lot of colours to chose from but youd have to let the engin genralies things a bit. And im all for the terrain palying a bigger role in the stratagie front with stealth and partial cloaking.

aGorm

[Warlord Zsinj]

It'd be nice to hear from one of the SY's to see whether they are even considering it...