It is basically standard practise, that games allow users to adjust the game settings to their liking. Especially the settings for the ingame graphics play quite a big role, [Caution, extreme hyperbole incoming] since they allow users to try to squeeze every ounce of graphical fidelity out of their system in an attempt to reach the glorious heavens of an eternal bathing of their retinas in stunning visual effects leading to bursts of euphoria inducing an other effect known as blur through tears of joy. On the other hands they also allow users to shoot for the stars in terms of performance, reducing the settings only to what is needed, increasing the speed at which the game runs up to the level, that the framerate synchronizes with the framerate of their brain, putting them in the deepest level of the zone with the input devices becoming essentially a neural link to the game logic, allowing them to be the gaming god they ever dreamed of being. [Extreme hyperbole is finished, you can continue reading as usual] When looking from a competitive gaming perspective, you get an other interesting reason to play around with your graphics settings, besides a performance boost. Our brain always interprets what we see, that's why we are able to recognize stuff like cars or trees. Turning that off isn't possible (and nobody would want to do that either). When playing a game the player usually has a lot of information to process and keep track of and if you look at it closely, not all of that information is useful. For instance, as a player you generally don't care about how your units got killed in a battle, you only need to know whether they are dead or not. However, on higher graphics setting you often have different death animations, like starting to burn, falling over or exploding into bits. Since our brain processes will process all of that, (after all, we are interested in information about units being dead or not) it will also process how they died. So in short: High graphics settings, contain visuals, which look nice, but also increase amount of visual information the brain has to process, even though that information isn't of any real use. (note: how units get killed may be interesting when trying to figure out which unit compositions work well against which, but that's not something you have to figure out every game, that's part of the overall learning process) Simply put, the graphics options could be used to put the game in what you could call its most readable state, meaning, that everything which is shown on screen carries a gameplay meaning. If you want to you could describe it as optimizing brain performance without surgery. The standard low graphics settings usually come pretty close to this, but those are geared towards performance, not readability. While they show less detail, they still show it and less detail also doesn't mean increased readability. Basically what I am looking for would be a graphics setting, which provides a direct representation of the gameplay and nothing else. Reducing everything even mildly fancy to nonexistence while making important things easily recognizeable. Getting more specific, here are some examples for how this could be achieved: - Predominantly having textures which are just one flat colour, with the colour representing something important, like biomes. (provided those are important) - Usage of outlines to show the characteristic shapes needed to recognize the different units. - Heavy use of team or player colours for units. Judging from what was already shown PA already has a style that's very readable and close to a direct gameplay representation, (plus possibly the strategic zoom unit symbols, which basically fit perfectly to this) but I think it still would be interesting to see how far you can go. Furthermore, stripping a game down to its gameplay can show you if you got the gameplay right or you just made it feel good with fancy visuals. Also, the heavily simplified visuals could also prove to be a performance boost. (On a side note, I feel as if I just proposed some sort of "fancy graphics are way too mainstream" hipster porn mode. Probably because it's kind of true.)
Blah blah blah blah, ah! Here we are: Looks like someone wants to play strategic icon wars (now for Android).
SupComFA has an option to view “cartographic mode” which turns all the units into flat, blocky things and changes the map into an ordnance survey-type thing with height rings and all that. It's probably easier to play in that mode but I don't know if anyone does. Also it doesn't work on most custom maps. Perhaps PA will have a similar wireframe mode?
I play FA *only* in cartographic mode. I literally cannot stand playing it in normal. If there was a way to take out the flashy bangs and the FPS draining shield bubble, then maybe. But as it is, I don't see how anyone manages to survive normal mode for more than a handful of eye-bleeding seconds of explosions. Oh, and PA *must* have a way to turn off screen shake. It may be cool to have your camera shake from a nearby explosion or nuke, but have a way to turn it off or I literally will not play. I would also love a colvol draw mode, where units have their collision volumes drawn in wireframe with their icon sitting on top. Clear indication of profile and footprint for every unit, coz sometimes the graphics lie. Then again, I'm the kind of player who plays ZK with 88 icon level (ie. it's all icons until you zoom all the way in where a factory takes up 1/10th of your screen) with green ground radar and full range rings for everything. Screw the graphics, give me the information!
I start out playing normaly but allways change to cartographic mode in big games after a while (realy helps out with performance).
I don't think that would be too good, since one unit would have two representations displayed at the same time. Using the unit model as some sort of merge between the two looks like the better option to me. You know, if you zoom out a bit "strategic icon wars" becomes a pretty good description for SupCom, which does a great job at displaying what is going on. So i think that's quite close to what I want, except that icons imo aren't the ultimate solution for reaching the most readable state. After all they kind of ignore the unit size and direction, therefore making it harder to judge what ecactly is going on. (On the other hand, if it would work on an Android, it would probably work on almost every PC out there, which I see as a really good thing.) (btw, nice try at sarcasm, but it didn't work.) This sounds close, but turning units into blocky things could mess with the ability to recognize which unit it is. Also, it probably is a little bit too early to be discussing this, as how the mode would look depends a lot on how the gameplay will work out. Oh well, better to start talking about it now, than to forget talking about it in the future.
Of note for supcom, it's "wireframe" or icon mode was typically shown on a multimonitor setup. It worked excellently, however it had a more than expected performance hit. In the end, what would happen would be a finely tuned graphics settings for one screen would be just barely annoying, wanting you to turn it off.
I'm almost the opposite, yet to the same effect. I play with icon level at around 250 (i.e. you almost can't zoom out enough to see icons on most 1v1 maps) but with Outline and XRayShader on (which basically semi-flat-shades the units based on internal angles, and draws a black outline around them to delineate unit from map) for visibility and distinctiveness even at a distance. Also lets me see unit angle at all times.
Not exactly related to the core of this topic, but i think many of early bakers would like to have a rendering option making the game look like the kickstarter video. I wonder if this is possible at not too much additional cost, if the current core engine is compatible with such an option or if it can be modded.
