In Total Annihilation buildings were only visible when in the line of sight, just like mobile units. But in Supreme Commander buildings were always visible on the map after you had seen them once. I think the Supreme Commander way gave way too much intel for free. You could even see if your enemy's buildings were destroyed or upgraded afterwards (darker colored icons = destroyed/upgraded) through the fog. There were also other problems with Fog of War in Supreme Commander. You were able to see some particle effects through the fog. For example, Seraphim buildings flashed bright light once after they were built. Sometimes this blew the cover of stealth bases. You were also able to see ground shaking (experimental walking) and see wreckages of your enemy's units through the fog. So much information for free. Your units could follow and attack units even if you didn't see them on the radar or on the LoS. How do they know where they are if they can't even see them in any way? Just pointing out some problems so things could be improved in PA. Also, answer the poll.
Most of the problems you mentioned were caused by the way information was distributed in SC, every client had every information and every part of the engine interpreted fog of war in a different way - if at all as you noticed on particle effects and alike. In PA you are only going to have the information you are supposed to get from the server. You won't be accidentally able to see units you are not supposed to see. Your client might still be able to track previously seen units, but you won't get any new intelligence on those units until the server sends you new data so you won't run into the problem where the client shows updated data you should not have in the first place.
What the guy above said. It's silly to think that the blip you spotted as a type of building, when not moving in any way, would suddenly turn into something else. It'll remain that type of building. Any unit you have continuous tracking information on should show up on your radar with that information attached to it, that includes buildings and units. You shouldn't see anything else, but once you have spotted something and you can maintain radar visual on it, you should be able to have the game remind you what it was you saw.
Only if you had radar coverage on it, if I remember correctly. That was a problem, yeah. But I'm sure PA's Fog of War will be far better and not give anything like that away (for reasons exterminans pointed out). No they can't. If a unit attacks another unit and it goes out of LoS and radar coverage, your unit will go to the last known place of the enemy and if the enemy comes into LoS or radar coverage again (anywhere), your unit will resume the attack. Otherwise it will stop. There were some more issues with the FoW in SupCom though. For instance, the unit AI was able to distinguish between Hovercrafts and Ships only via radar information (even though, without having had LoS at least once on the units, they both appear as Ships on the radar).
I like the style that is in warcraft 3 so that if you see something it's still on the map but "shadowed out" in the way you last saw it.
Damn. I thought we were talking about a literal fog- the product of pollution and endless battle raging across the planetary surface, crippling vision and rendering units as blind as a tourist in China.
This. In SupCom you got way to much information for free. Once a building were spotted you would see it. You would even know when it is removed from the game by destruction or upgrading for example.
SupCom's method makes much more sense, but the implementation wasn't perfect. No upgrades in PA will help a lot towards this particular issue, and as for the other issues: This has been fixed in Forged Alliance Forever, there's no reason why Uber wouldn't avoid making the same mistakes as in SupCom. I'm pretty sure this is incorrect, you can only see wreckages through the fog if you've physically seen them before. Likewise, it will often appear that there's loads of reclaim in a given area but when you get there you find that it's since been hoovered up - this works as it should IMO. This is true (Spooky is incorrect) - with interceptors particularly you could get a glimpse of a transport on radar, click it quickly enough and the interceptors would find it and kill it. FAF has made some tweaks to this, initially with units losing their targets as soon as they went out of visual/radar, but this broke air combat horribly. The current method works well and I think it works around a grace period of a few seconds where planes won't lose their targets immediately. Given that it makes sense that buildings stay visible (you have scouted them, you know they are there), I would like to propose a refinement to this for PA: Say you go over an area with a scout plane and see 50 tanks - how about if this was represented with a splodge of colour superimposed on the fog which would fade away in the time the tanks could potentially have left the area? So rather than have to focus all your attention on your scout plane you would have say ten seconds to notice that a small/medium/huge detachment of forces was spotted in a general area.
Oh, ok. The fact that you see wreckages of your enemy after the enemy has been defeated confused me. I must really try FaF now. I wonder why I haven't tried it before. I like this idea.
True, I just checked. I think it was actually Total Annihilation that had it the way I described it. That was actually Vanilla Supreme Commander's original implementation and was very annoying of course .
Just a quick reminder: This time not even the terrain is static. In most RTS games you can reveal the terrain and be sure that it will stay exactly like this till the end of the match. Not this time around. One KEW/nuke later and thing can look entirely different. It might be necessary to reflect this in the FoW.
I think that if a nuke impacts the playing field, you'll know. I wouldn't be bothered if that kind of thing is visible through the fog of war, simply because it's huge and because it's awesome to see.
