if the engine can hangle all the raycasting, it would be cool if the units had floodlights that illuminated their surroundings, or maybe tron-like panels of light that glowed so you could see the area around your units. Having a smaller rage of vision, treating the darkness like a tighter fog-of-war, could make the day-night cycle more interesting for tactical gameplay.
I think that it would be nice if units turned on their headlights at night. Also PD turrets scanning a area with spotlights would look cool as well.
Instead of that, why not give units "night vision" when they are on the dark side? In a radius 1/2 that of their normal vision radius, use a shader or something to create a bubble which displays terrain as dark orange, and bright team-colored wireframe displaying units. Head lights are cool, but that would be EPIC.
I think this would be awesome, however I think it would be more awesome if you could manually turn off all of the lights to sort of hide from your enemy.
It would def. be awesome. On the practical side maybe it would help the robots themselves with friendly/enemy signal. Or, if they base movement off of light, if every unit had running lights it could be explained away as that's how the robots understand where other units are relative to their own position. Lights sensors within each unit utilize the lights of other units for position determination. All just fluff, but a kinda realistic explanation.
Earth 2150. It was a revolutionary game with many systems in the game that made it amazing. I think PA should take a page from the "flashlights" in Earth 2150. They would auto turn on at night, helping you see, but they also would prevent stealth units from being cloaked. Makes sense.
Who says what the players see isn't already a heavily processed representation of what the bots use to sense their environment? Maybe those "white lights" are actually spitting out everything from light gamma rays to high microwave.
And hopefully not like the Men of War engine which was awesome, *except* that you could see headlights through vehicles.
i loved the switch to night time in that game. I always thought it looked cool when all the lights came on
same; but we should also have the ability to switch off the lights of units and even building for less recognition/ better stealth; as a light in the dark is easy to shoot down.
Ya' know.... Robots don't use "normal" eyes to see. I don't really think that light/darkness would really affect them anymore than air/non-air planets. I would imagine any day/night, light/dark would be more for atmosphere. Like the different music with different planets.
It wouldn't affect the bots but we control them, yes they do have some intelligence but ultimately we control them and we are the ones who could use the light and dark to our advantage against the enemy.
That would be epic... If all the lines on the bots lit up like that... I'll have to make a picture with the Delta Commander after work. <.<