Spring RTS Engine

Pxtl: Well, no. Fog of War, for me is seperate to LOS. LOS (and this is my interpretation) is how far units can see. Spring has this. If an enemy tank is in my unit's LOS, that enemy tank will be spotted and appear on my screen.

Fog of war, atleast in this context, refers not to the fact that the units outside my vision cannot be seen, because that is an implication of LOS. Fog of war refers to the actual hiding of terrain (doesn't have to be pure opaque like in C&C, it can be just a different quality of terrain, slightly greyed, like in TA, etc), so that one can clearly tell at a glance, what your units are able to see, and what they cannot see. The mind immediately recognises that those units are being obscured by a 'fog' - not a literal fog, but it is nonetheless clear why those units cannot be seen, and entirely predictable and understandible.

Spring does not have this function (again, except for the L button, which brings up a rather ugly and slow to update screen, which you can't at all play with constantly), and as a direct result of this, I feel the basic LOS system doesn't work. It is entirely unituitive. Because there is no fog of war, there is no visual or otherwise confirmation as to why units will pop into and out of your field of vision, in what often seems a ludicrously short distance. This LOS design, therefore, intends to make the LOS system more dynamic, so instead of units popping in and out of some strange line which doesn't make sense (because there's no fog of war to explain it to you), you have larger units appearing quite a way off, with smaller units only appearing once they are much closer. Thus, LOS becomes somewhat more dynamic; that is, it becomes easier for the human mind to predict, and easier for the human mind to understand (which acts to maintain immersion. When something strange happens, your mind immediately steps back and says "hang on, this isn't a battle for life or death at all! It's a meaningless game!"). Without a Fog of War to explain the current LOS system, it becomes counter-intuitive.

The strategic benefits that result from having this value, both in large units being able to be spotted from far off, and smaller units slipping unnoticed (and of course, the balancing tools granted through playing with these values to make camouflaged sneaky units, or big super weapons that are visible for miles around), these are all fortunate side effects which occur through a more dynamic system, which I believe is ultimately better suited to the way Spring has approached LOS then TA. Spring simply doesn't have Fog of War, and isn't getting it any time soon. Therefore, the TA approach which it is using is inappropriate.

Zoombie: I still post here a bit, and I still check here every couple of days. But I have been posting less, and this is down to a couple of reasons:
- I am very interested in game design; and at this point in Spring, most of the major directional decisions have been made. The small arguments about minor details just don't interest me as much as the huge debates we had about major gameplay directions when Spring was very young.
- My views tend to come across as either purely Anti-AA or partisan OTA, which I don't at all intend, but such is the way they are often intepreted. Being branded an anti-AA partison OTA person on this forum is a pretty big black mark with a nasty stigma attached to it, which I don't like.
- Just a matter of time. I have less time, because I'm starting to get to the business end of uni, and I have to split myself between the TAU forums, the gaspowered games forums, the medieval 2 total war forums and these forums.
- Working hard on SWS! We have our own little private forum over at TAU, and there is actually quite a lot of balancing discussion that goes on over there. Though it may seem like nothing is happening, I can assure you we are hard at work.

All the units in ta are robots right? imo, the "robots" can only recognise enemy units once they are within a certain range- they might be able to see further, BUT the distance would be too far for them to be accurate in shooting or to be able to assess how damaged the enemy unit is, so i think instead of increasing the LOS for units, they should stay the same, however, a 2nd line of sight based on this new idea would be awesome.

In the 2nd line of sight, depending on the distance from the unit, the stealth value of the unit and the line of sight for that unit, you will either not be able to see a unit, or will see a unit of varying degrees of blurryness, also depending on how well you can see a unit, the accuracy of shots fired at that unit improve (something slightly blury would improve shots by about 50% compared to shooting at something manually with no los (which always seems to miss)).

Also in the 2nd line of sight, you cannot see the health of the unit you're attacking

Well, just remember that only some mods use robots. Some mods have no robots at all, and use humans and tanks, etc, such as Axis & Allies TA, or World Domination, and some have a few robots, but mostly humans and vehicles (Star Wars Spring).

Yes, it would be nice to have varying degrees of LOS, from a greyed out semi-spotted unit to a unit you have full LOS on, to help those sort of abrupt transitions from invisible to visible.

However, this has been wanted for a long time, and very little movements have been made towards it. I think if you would like to bring up such a discussion again, you should start a topic for it, because I feel it is a very different suggestion to what I am suggesting (both could be implemented concurrently), and I'd rather this discussion not be derailed.

Technically the ARM units are men in suites, like Battlemechs...or Gundams.

Zoombie wrote:Technically the ARM units are men in suites, like Battlemechs...or Gundams.

No n00b... they had their brains extracted and inserted into machines. Whereas the Core had their conciousenesses transfered to sillicon.

no, YOUR the noob.

This is DIRECTLY from the Cavedog site.

They fled to the outer edges of the galaxy, forming a resistance movement that became known as the Arm. War began, though it was never officially declared by either side.

The Arm developed high-powered combat suits for its armies, while the Core transferred the minds of its soldiers directly into similarly deadly machines. The Core duplicated its finest warriors thousands of times over. The Arm countered with a massive cloning program. The war raged on for more than 4,000 years, consuming the resources of an entire galaxy and leaving it a scorched wasteland.

And when you take into fact that the ARM started the war to NOT transfer their brains into machines, it makes no sence for them to START transfering their brains into machines.

But its all a moot point anyway...beacuse <gasp> its a game!

Zoombie wrote:no, YOUR the noob.

This is DIRECTLY from the Cavedog site.

They fled to the outer edges of the galaxy, forming a resistance movement that became known as the Arm. War began, though it was never officially declared by either side.

The Arm developed high-powered combat suits for its armies, while the Core transferred the minds of its soldiers directly into similarly deadly machines. The Core duplicated its finest warriors thousands of times over. The Arm countered with a massive cloning program. The war raged on for more than 4,000 years, consuming the resources of an entire galaxy and leaving it a scorched wasteland.

And when you take into fact that the ARM started the war to NOT transfer their brains into machines, it makes no sence for them to START transfering their brains into machines.

But its all a moot point anyway...beacuse <gasp> its a game!

My understanding was that over time the Arm had been using heavy cybernetics, to the point that many Arm people were "brains in a jar" - which they rationalized as somehow better than actual intellectual transfer into a computer.

But I could be wrong. Not that it matters.

really cool!

but I see that nobody is taking the issue from the abstract realm to the game real.

those are some things to consider, before a complete "realistic los" is considered:

- in construction unit: how are represented? you could have their visibility value proprotional to the build status. BUT the current build status is the healt of a unit, this means that If a unit is half build and quarter damaged, will be only at 1/4 of nominal visibility value while the model will already be half constructed.

- amphibious unit: you should set the visibility proportional on how much the unit is underwater for see-only land unit, and a mixed value for see-undervater-unit, to cope with the fact that undervater visibility is much shorter

- terrain: note that at this point (for the waer) you've already introduced a map tag - water_los_multiplier (in range 0 - 1)... at this point you could also extend this feature to have a sort of multiplicator-map, telling what is the multiplier for ani given point on the map ... but this is just an extension

- moving unit: having implemented the multiplication system, you could use it to add unit moltiplicators to cope whit moving, shooting and more. BUT notice that having this tag will give a lot of problem as if a unit stops will immidiatly become stealth... wich is quite ugli and impact with the realistic los idea (imagine a sniper which shots and then disappears - at least the current cloacking sistem kinda justify this sort of glitches)


- fliing unit: those fly high in the sky so should have a "bonus" on sightseing the other units... wich will be difficult to implement as you need to consider the different altitude of fligth for different planes AND the unit own los radius in a different way from other tags (which are multiplied to the unit stealthness) also at this point having a los sound kinda strange... lets call it sightseing or something

- radar: a cool thing a là supcom will be to have radar blip proportional to the unit visibility. Also blip "variation" has to be made proportional to unit visibility. And the unit should have a tag "doesnt_blip", to cope with stealth units (as in WD cloackable unit with high uncloack radius)

- cravling bomb: yeee!! those will be finally useful!! can't wait for them!!! (sorry =D no pun intended )

Pssst... I know a secret...

The TA storyline was filled in after the fact to make it more plausable to have the situation of giant robots building bases and blowing eachother up. You're arguing semantics on a gameplay based game that would take no qualms in doing whatever needed to be done to make the game work even if it didn't suit the story.

It would also be good if units faded in and out of view with an alpha mask rather than just popping out of thin air