Fog of war

Which is being worked on by the devs via mountains, plateaus, etc. in order to have natural obstructions.

Sometimes spawn choices aren't about balance, but about strategy. Do I want to spawn by the lake and go naval? Or spawn away from the lake?

Previous thread on the subject:
https://forums.uberent.com/threads/map-ballance.46262/

I think that the factors of luck should be as small as possible.
Unpredictability can come from your opponent. You don't know the exact actions of your opponent and that is a great source of unpredictability.
Any factor of luck should be diminished as much as possible or iterated enough times so that it becomes predictable. An inaccurate weapon might hit the enemy units or it might miss but if fired enough times during a game the factor of the randomness averages and the performance of the weapon becomes predictable.

This why I like that the players chose their positions themselves. It is a strategical choice and hopefully PA will have enough tools that players can adapt to a variety of playstyles while facing a multitude of enemy playstyles.

So if it was easy to put in an option to do this I would just for completeness. However, it's actually not easy to do with the way our fog of war is setup. I could go into details but that would take a lot of typing.

Ok, that's cool, thank you for the answer.

:-(

Ever seen a planet when the textures haven't loaded yet? It actually looks pretty close to a planet in a fog of war.

Though, that system already feels like it's held together by twine and duct tape on my computer. A 1GB video card is not enough! I can't imagine it would work any better if it did double duty as a fog of war implementation.

I know less than anybody on the internals of the engine, but what if it was a purely visual effect per player? For example, a layer of cloud on the planet, and whenever any unit on your team goes near a new vertex on the sphere, it fades to transparent.

The AI would still cheat as it would have full knowledge of the map, but it would be a visual nicety for human players that want it.

The AI might not always have that thought, One of Sorian's goals in regards to the AI is to create one that doesn't cheat if at all possible.

Mike

Map shrouding, at its simplest, is a 2d layer that blocks what you can see on a particular location. It's very easy to add it for flat maps, because you can only view them at one angle.

Making it work for a 3d map is a bit more tricky. Viewing the map sideways will still let you see mountains and such. You can't really avoid that unless you don't render shrouded map bits at all, but then you can have radar blips floating on nothing and it all gets awkward and why do we even care about map shroud? The Commander drops in from orbit. It's no issue for him to get a full planet scan.

Yeah, it would have to be like real volumetric fog to prevent the sideway view etc. I also like how people base their opinions on the commander actually being a real thing.. lol.