Line of Sight Lighting

The Line of Sight lighting is really starting to bother me.

It can be daytime on one side of the planet, with plenty of light, but where there is a unit with LOS it's MORE daytime? If that makes sense?

I think a possible solution to that is displaying a grid of some kind where you do not have LOS, but keep the light levels the same. That way you show that somewhere with a grid is something that you can't see, and somewhere without a grid is your LOS. This way you get no dark pockets, which just looks odd.

A good example of this was this:



Original thread for above image: http://forums.uberent.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=61&t=47822

You can see in the above image where the planet has a day side but there are lots of what seems like pockets of darkness because of this extra lighting that the LOS lighting currently causes.

What about something like this? But instead of the darkness outside of LOS just have the grid, with possibly an outline where the grid border LOS?



Hope I'm making sense.

Edit: Added example image that I quickly photoshopped up.

I'm not so happy with LoS either, neither with the current visualization, nor with the implementation.

LoS is completely pointless on most units, since they only have very low vision, often enough less than the range of enemy defense structures so they are basically just cannon fodder unless combined with extensive scouting and/or radar (which isn't such a smart thing either, since its absolutely necessary, which is never a good thing to say about an unit).

Also it takes nothing in consideration, nothing at all. I actually need to stumble across the enemy in order to find him. It feels like stumbling through a dark forest at night without a torchlight, even on the dayside of the planet.

Seriously, we need a better system than those "areas of perception".

Updated first post with example image

definitely an option, i'll echo the interest in a light=los alternative

well, this doesnt look more natural either, but it may be an alternative.

See also this thread for another suggestion. I agree, however, that it would be better to not have FOV look like it affects the lighting of the planet (even though it doesn't, per se).

I think it might also be worth experimenting with age of the FOV.

For instance using the above suggested visualisation (for lack of coming up with something better), the tiling could become progressively tighter as regions go unexplored for longer. Or its colour could change, e.g. from light blue to dark blue for instance.

This can be helpful in many situations. For instance, when scouting, it helps in seeing which areas haven't been explored. If strategic icons of enemies remained in the FOV (but just darkened/greyed out), it would allow to see how old the intel is.

It's worth trying out to see how usable it is, I think.

Don't worry about anything visual until at least the beta, it's only alpha at the moment, that means that pretty much everything you see is incomplete and Uber already plans to improve things.

No, I think it's worth experimenting with the fog of war system to find a workable system.

Only once a good system has been found should they start putting effort into making it look good, though, I agree; and that'll probably come in beta.

I messed around with the FOW shader code to try to emulate the image in the first post.
I'm a complete novice so it looks awful; all this does is affect the lighting on the surface of the planet.


(Click for bigger version)



Stan's Used Planets fog of war:

That first one is kind of what I was aiming for, but lighter and without the blue shade over everything.

Maybe instead of using blue lines, use a transparent white? Just so theres a lighter grid instead of a whole different colour?

I think it looks even poorer without the shading to be honest. It doesn't help that the code is a total hack, either.

Here's what white transparent lines with no shading looks like:


And here's a an attempt at "radar static" (that really just came from a bug in my code at one point, but hey). It looks better in movement.

I'm tellin' you man, greyscale, go with greyscale! Do it!

This messing about did give me an idea for how units could appear into the line of sight though (as opposed to blinking into existence once their center of mass enters a given radius). I made a little mockup (image editing... no way I can pull this off by modding):

I don't know how to turn unexplored terrain into grayscale right now, but that's a great idea actually.

What if it had a radar scanning type effect, ie, still a grid, but it only shows in waves or sweeps?

Maybe, but I think it should be instantly clear what's in LOS and what isn't at a glance; you shouldn't have to stop and watch any animation before it is clear what is visible and what isn't.

True, I guess the sweep could change the alpha,

But minimum would still be something like 10% on the grid.

I agree that as it is the games use of shadow to depict what is not in units line of sight is compromising to the visual quality of the game. This might be a radical idea but I think the line of sight range should be removed from the game. I believe it it currently harming what could be a very good looking lighting engine more then it helps gameplay. Of course, this would mean it would need to be replaced with something else...

My thoughts are this:
. Full visibility of the day side of the planet (this assumes at the start of the game all commanders place a minimal number of high orbit satellites in orbit, but it would make it a level playing field, everyone can see what everyone else is doing by the light of day although not necessary at the same time)
. Reduced visibility at night (units seen during the day are continued to be tracked via satellite/radar, and if a unit sees the enemy in its field of view cone, which is depicted via head lamps/night vision projection, it is tagged and tracked even after leaving the field of view cone as a radar tag)
. Fog/dust/cloud cover/water submersion/solar flares break satellite tracking line of sight (tracking is lost for enemy units with only their last know position recorded, but if they don't move its regained when they emerge, even if at night, or when they are next seen by a unit or in the light of day)

The sum of this would be that players would get a reasonably up-to-date view of what each other is doing, but they could still obscurer what they're doing by concentrating their unit build ups and construction during the night and all unit positions would eventually be hidden by random passing cloud cover. Good players would start to synchronise attacks with dawn and dusk depending on the direction they attack from and they may even get lucky and move army's into position in the cover of a storm or a eclipse.

wow xedi, you are going in the right direction!

A quick test with using the atmosphere fog to give rise to fog of war:



I'm still trying to figure out how to do a grayscale FOW. Any ideas?

I think there's something to the atmosphere blur representing FOW, that would mean the darkside would still be dark even when you have LOS. It needs to contrast enough to be legible though.

If the intention is to keep the dynamic lighting I'm not sure grayscale is ideal.