Why not terrain that interacts?

Plantes are cool and I love the scenery but one thing I learned from Starcraft is that you can make units that interact with certain things others can't. I think that there should be units that can climb mountains or units that can hide or go through ravines, if they hide they can pop out and get the jump on them. That would be cool.

This was possible in 1997 upon release of TA but for some reason this is not possible in 2015 months after release of the game.

Everybody wants more interesting terrain but I think the devs worry that pathfinding isn't up to it and so they haven't done any work on it in months.

I'd go all out and have conveyor belts, gulf streams, impassable forests, mountains, bridges, and anything else that would make the game more complex than battling on a flat sphere as we do now.

You completely missed the topic of this thread.

He's not asking for better terrain, he's asking for units that interact with the terrain.

squishy, to both of them it means the same thing. so I don't think the way you go about increasing unit-terrain interaction (semantics) is the problem but the lack therof.

1. He likes the look of planets now.
2. He wants units that interact with areas differently than other units.
3. He'd like units that can hop over mountains or cross ravines, both brushes that currently exist in the game. And infact can change a match drastically (ravines anyway.)

He never said that he wants cooler terrain, which already exists anyway with the implementation of custom made maps which look awesome by the way.

well look at the second guy's post again.

All you have as reproaches are absent from his post as well.

I'm really reather confused as to what the problem is.

neither want the terrain to change looks both want more unit-terrain interaction

In TA you had hills that only spiders could climb. You had a lot of multi level stuff going on actually on a lot of the maps. The maps were a lot better and resulted in interesting games because the units did interact with the terrain. Even in SupCom and SupCom 2 you had things like islands that ships couldn't shoot you on because they were too high. What do we have now? Nothing much more than completely flat maps with a few obstacles in the way.

I wonder if people would have accepted a 2D version of PA.

That would be vastly inferior to TA in every regard except for maybe the improved graphics and multiplayer services.

Well all money and time saved on the fancy 3d planets stuff could have been spent on other things...

Obviously I doubt that many people would have bought a 2D version, but still it's a thought.

I do think the planet side of things is a great step forwards... I just think that so many tricks are being missed with the terrain. You can point to 'custom maps' all you like but until they are added to the standard game so that every lobby you join has an interesting map then it's just side stepping the problem.

TA was 2D, why would it be vastly inferior? O . o

Because PA is nowhere near TA when it comes to style, immersion and "soul" as people like to call it.

Yes, but maybe PA would have been if it was 2d? As that means WAY less work on the engine and such.

Quite possible. That CSG approach came at a cost.

The actual resolution of the terrain geometry is ridiculously low. You can see on water maps, at the coast lines, where blending with the water caused the phong shading to fail.

The polygons which build the terrain are much, much bigger than about every mobile unit. No tesselation with vertex displacement, no bump or parallel mapping, nothing to hide that.

Yes, certain CSG features are much more detailed than that, e.g. mountains, and these procedurally projected pebbles and alike also add more detail, but you can't hide that the terrain actually lost a lot of detail due to being pure geometry.

3D has also made pathing, range checks etc. much more difficult. Not only from a technical aspect, but also from a point of comprehension.

just curious : which other alternative as soon as you have to display spheres ? I mean what do you mean exactly by CSG ? I do not really understand how terrain could have been generated without 3D elements (Voxels ?)

3D elements are inevitable, that's for sure. CSG means constructed solid geometry - the name for the system which PA uses to build terrain from a combination of subtractive and additive brushes, rather than just intersecting ready made 3D objects.

But what I'm mostly concerned with is the base structure of the terrain. It's a fully baked 3D mesh, and there is no more nor less to the terrain than what's included in the 3D model.

The model itself is very limited in resolution, it could actually have used a few more vertices.

But on top of that, it's missing additional features which are not backed into the model - because baking stuff right away into the model is always costly. And not even required, ever since tesselation became widely available, the combination of tesselation + vertex displacement mapping allows you to define arbitrary geometry details on top of the actual 3D mesh, and that happens only while you look at the geometry, respectively while you could recognize the additional details.

These additional details - while not part of the geometry - could still have been used for path finding and alike, it's as as simple as sampling against the texture. You don't actually need to "see" a slope as a geometry object on the server, all you need is to see the slope noted in the texture, and the navigation mesh needs to have the same topology as the fully fleshed mesh the client sees. If you feel like it, you can even pin units not to space coordinates, but actually to positions on the nav mesh, and have the client then compute their actual 3D position for them based on the elevation determined by the vertex displacement map.

As it is right now, units are not only not reacting to terrain. There is also nothing they could even react to. There is no notion of slopes, more difficult terrain, cliffs, or anything. There is only a simple distinction between passable, and impassable terrain. A boolean flag. With no notion towards the engine WHY certain terrain is impassable.
It could be a cliff, a chasm, a wall, or something else. Pathing doesn't know, same as it doesn't know about slopes, impact on movement speed from swamps or anything alike.

The system used is powerful, that's true. It would in theory allow to craft arbitrarily complex maps from only a small number of brush instances applied onto a simple geometric structure, whereby every single piece of geometry has significance for pathing. That's all nice and stuff, and it certainly allows interesting contructions on planets which require steep 90° corners such as the metal planet, but it's not sufficient or actually even inefficient for planets with smoother outlines. You don't want to encode every single detail of fractal enviromental patterns in the geometry, your GPU is great at reconstructing that for you when you actually need it. On the contrary you actually do rather want to be able to annotate special properties of the terrain, such as various movement penalties.

Was using CSG the right choice?
Yes, I still think so, otherwise certain topologies would have been rather difficult to achieve without other compromises. But the CSG brushes should have been limited to expressing the basic geometry. Details should not have been included, only what has significance for the topology of the surface. Details should have been encoded in vertex displacement map, with the use of dynamic tesselation. In addition to vertex displacement map, additional maps to annotate penalties for movement to get better interaction with terrain. Not on a per-vertex base, but actually encoded in a texture.

Thanks a lot, you excel in explaining complex things and in addition, your statements really make sense.

I won't pretend I followed all of that, but I'm sure it wouldn't be too difficult for example to introduce a swamp area which slows down bots by 50% but not tanks. You could then have a rocky area which slows down tanks but not bots. I know the devs seemed to struggle with the difference between bots and tanks, well no ****! The only different is legs vs wheels and that aspect was never even considered.

Bridges... In and you can path under and over them. tunnels... In and again units can go over or through. Messas you can build on, in. Forrest affecting gameplay in (seriously attack tanks in a forest using dox, and compare to attacking the tanks in the open. Hint the dox own when in woodland, simulated projectiles ftw)....

There aren't as many terrain interactions than there were in TA, but it's not fair to say there aren't any. Note all the stuff I mention is in the community map pack. Also you can build yourself with the system editor.

Edit I think if anything what's needed are some additional units like the all terrain spider, or hovercraft. We have all the essentials, though still lots of room for more. Removing standard bombers ability to hit underwater targets and adding in a powerful torpedo bomber would be good too.