[Suggestion] Orbital View: Toggle depth of field

If this has been posted already, I plead the third. Or fifth. Nineteenth? We're not that up on the US constitution here in Australia.

There's a lot of talk about the orbital UI and how to solve the visual confusion when there's an armada of units in orbit and on surface. Regarding this, my idea is to have a UI toggle for depth of field which effectively blurs out the surface and leaves orbital units crisp and clear. Likewise, this would mean that in standard view, orbital units would be blurred to prevent visual interference with things on the ground. The button or hotkey would simply switch between these two views.

Here are some quick mock-ups of how it may appear:

Standard View



Orbital View



Realistically, I have no idea how a feature like this would be implemented, whether it's plausible/possible, or whether people would just get double vision after a while. Just a thought, really.

Very good suggestion

There's already a view for this. Except all icons go away when you're zoomed out except for... commanders, Umbrellas, and orbital factories.

I believe the view is... modal for the Orbital view.

Can't remember what the setting is exactly called.

Wasn't aware of that. I need to mess around with things more. :/

As far as I know Depth of Field is planned (mostly to make it look pretty, though).
If it is a proper (non-hacky) implementation, it should be quite easy to blur the planet so you can see the orbital layer mor clearly (simply set the focal point to the orbital layer..would be a problem selecting units that are far from the center of the screen, though).

As brian said orbital view can be changed to just show orbital range dependant. The only problem with it is that you're still able to select ground units while on this orbital only view.

I don't know how to program shaders, but I wonder if this is something that is already feasible to mod in (at least the blurring of far away things; the opposite - blurring the orbital when looking at the planet - may require interaction with the UI to determine what mode it's in).

I like this idea. But let's have them fix show terrestrial icons first, with transparent (or blurry) icons depending on your view level.

Btw 'show terrestrial' was the option Brian mentioned. The other one is called 'orbital shell' I believe.

It's weird how I kinda like that but the pixel perfectionist (for icons) in me says :"no!"

so I have to draw a line : how about it applies for everything but the icons, making it really clear what you are trying to focus on. perhaps the other icons could go dim or even desaturate, either one wouldn't harm the pixel perfection (that I wish they had!) whilst making focus clear.

we blurred the living hell out of the icons while trying to un-blur them (if only a bit) because of the multiple-pass rescaling go check it out: https://forums.uberent.com/threads/scaling-strategic-icons.57659/

That's a global setting though; a shader could presumably do it based on distance from the camera.

ah sure