1. eukanuba

    eukanuba Well-Known Member

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    Assuming that the procedural generation will include hills and valleys, I'd like to raise a couple of points.

    In TA, hilly areas could be traversed by some units but not others, and the steepness of a given hill was a factor. This is a really good feature that I would like to see make it into PA.

    In Supcom, it is often hard to see where smaller hills actually are without zooming in close and moving the camera (e.g. There are a number of hills on Seton's Clutch that are good for hiding behind or putting turrets on, but they are not obvious and can cause problems if you don't realise they are there). Please use some sort of consistent art style so that hills are easily noticeable. Also TA had small hills block unit vision, but this was abandoned in Supcom. Please bing it back! :)

    Lastly, and possibly most difficultly in terms of programming and CPU load, please make elevation increase unit range. Both TA and Supcom have artificially limited weapon ranges, so elevation makes no difference. I would love to see range rings that expand on higher ground and fit the contours of the terrain. If projectile weapons are calculated on a parabolic arc rather than being artificially limited this seems possible to me.
    Last edited: August 18, 2012
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  2. BulletMagnet

    BulletMagnet Post Master General

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    +1 for realistic dynamics!
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  3. theseeker2

    theseeker2 Well-Known Member

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    le necro face
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  4. Twinstar

    Twinstar Active Member

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    Nice thoughts, and a unit downscaling, will greatly increase the terrain diversity :)
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  5. bluestrike01

    bluestrike01 Active Member

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    Huh?
    Units on hills did shoot further in TA and SupCom.
    It was one of the cool things about having real simulated trajectory's.
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  6. igncom1

    igncom1 Post Master General

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    The thing with TA hills and slopes is that the designers took steps to make sure that such inclines and high rises actually looked different to the rest of the floor.

    SupCom mostly didn't, especially when it was up to the map makers, making such hills difficult to see from above unless they were very, very prominent.
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  7. theseeker2

    theseeker2 Well-Known Member

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    should have had a feature that is bound to a key that overlays a topographical map over the map while it's being pressed
  8. igncom1

    igncom1 Post Master General

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    But if your map generator is designed to make inclines naturally visible, then a overlay is unnecessary.
  9. theseeker2

    theseeker2 Well-Known Member

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    It has nothing to do with the map generator, it's a problem with lighting, the game needed better shadows.
  10. igncom1

    igncom1 Post Master General

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    You mean supcom? Or PA, because PA uses a star, but yeah in supcom it could have been a lighting issue, but that still doesn't cover the more subtitle hills.

    Textures on slops fix that by indicating such inclines as map features rather then as extra flat ground space.
  11. theseeker2

    theseeker2 Well-Known Member

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    supcom needed better lighting... I'm assuming they figured it was unnecessary because you can zoom in and look around. In any case, the best way to find small hills in supcom is to place cybran t2 PDs everywhere
  12. eukanuba

    eukanuba Well-Known Member

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    They *could* shoot further than their ranges, but only by accident. Their range rings stayed the same regardless and they would only fire at units that came within the range ring, even though some shots would acccidentally miss and hit things much further away.
    Last edited: December 21, 2014
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  13. cdrkf

    cdrkf Post Master General

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    TA:Spring took the capability a bit further. Units specifically do get a range advantage with height in Spring :) Even in TA though, if you had 2 equal forces, one up a hill, the other at the bottom- the one up the hill would win. Mainly because it was difficult for the units at the bottom to hit the ones at the top (as their fire would hit the hill instead).

    TA was the first game that really made 'holding the high ground' a thing with was excellent. Spring just takes that and pushes it a bit further.

    I think similar things are possible in PA as well given it's a simulated projectiles game :)
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  14. crizmess

    crizmess Well-Known Member

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    I'm not so sure about this. The first step would be to define what is higher ground. This is pretty easy when you have a flat surface, like TA or Sup Com. It is still easy when it comes to spheres, but it will get very absurd when you look at some planets made by guest1 (for example ZaphodX1 video #389).

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