Air collisions

Hello

Could someone pass on this question to the next LiveStream Presentation or maybe a developer can answer it here? :mrgreen: I think its a better question then: "Will PA have offline mode?" *Derp*. If that person bothered a search they would know the answer.

I only did a quick search for this btw hehe.

So, will PA have collision/correct path-finding, for its air units while they are in flight?


By collision and correct path finding, I mean: air units cannot cloud or cluster together (like in TA and SupCom). Thus they are forced to take individual positions, spreading out their weapon damage and making larger air forces more vulnerable to anti air defences (which are traditionally stuck in one spot). This will make anti-air vs air units more balanced in terms of strength and weapon damage. It also opens the interesting idea of mid air collisions; players have to consider proper flight plans.

What do you think?

My own concern is it is a difficult problem to approach and handle. If it isn't 100% correct, then air battles will look strange and may even slow down the game (with the number of collision detections and rapid unit movement changes).


Thhhhhank you!

i would imagine clustered ships are much more vulnerable to flak defense

Clustered ships, (eg: gunship swarms) also deal a lot more damage at the same time.

Air is too strong (or was in TA and SC) due to swarming.

This might be an opportunity to prevent huge swarms of planes, so to reduce air superiority in late stage games.

If planes cannot occupy the space they will be less effective against a single target.

Slim

On the other hand flak could easily take out all the planes at the same time because of clustering.

The idea is to avoid clustering.

I don't think just because there are flak weapons, its ok to have air unit clusters. The area of effect of flak weapons should be adjusted as air units spread out.

I'm not saying they should be able to cluster I'm just saying it can be a disadvantage too.

"Midair collisions" is my favourite solution to the TA/supcom air-cluster problem, since it's a sensible use of contemporary computing power, and that's the spirit of TA.

Other solutions such as refuelling/rearming bring up inconsistencies with land/sea units, which don't need rearming/refuelling, and generally seems to require more micro, or make air units pointless.

Would be nice if air units ordered to move together would automatically fly in formation too.

like supcom2?

Aircraft in supcom 2 behave almost the same as in the other games, especially when given attack orders and such.

I think it comes down to choosing between the lesser of 2 evils, which Air units clipping together is far from realistic, but if the alternative is air units having traffic jams as land based units can, is that really any better? What do you do to units that 'collide'? It's fine if you can get the pathfinding to avoid those collisions, but if you can't do that than I'd say that air units clipping is a lot less immersion breaking then having high speed air units getting into traffic jams.

Mike

Or, just don't promote air-spam. That way traffic jams don't happen.

Look at how many air units are seen in the KS video. There's lots of land, and only a few air to augment the foot troops.

I think it would actually promote air spam if air collisions worked between armies and not only between friendly units.

(Note: ASF = Air Superiority Fighter, a typically late-game fighter)

Think of it this way, which air force is cheaper: twenty ASFs, or sixty tier 1 interceptors which form into a cloud and collide into those ASFs. The end result is the same: One player has air superiority with the sheer number of units created instead of their power, and air spam continues because if it's anything like any other TA game, those interceptors are cheap. ASFs not so much. Even if they were forced to fly in formation, there are only so many places in the sky-layer the ASFs can fly without making physical contact with so many of them.

The reason interceptor spam itself was phased out was because of the sheer versatility and power of ASF units which came later. Then ASF spam became popular because it was _the_ #1 way to own the skies. By giving a much better avenue for cheaper units to kill ASFs, we wouldn't solve the blob problem, we would just make ASFs useless.

Air units can avoid each other in 3 dimensions so I don't see where you imagine this issue.

So far that doesn't seem to be the case, to my knowledge there is no RTS that deals with aircraft ina full 3D space WITH collisions. Like I said, if you can solve the issues that's great, until then, I say let them clip away.

Mike

There is only an issue in your head. The collision system must already be in full 3D so it's not any more perf intensive. The air layer I imagine will be fully pathfinded using flow fields and aircraft can easily avoid each other that way. The second way you have in the air is actually to allow them to occupy the same tile but offset them vertically when they do. Same trick could be employed on the sub layer for that matter.

And yet, no one seems to have done it yet to my knowledge, in an RTS with collisions and not just 3D space-ocupation.

Mike

Ok, nobody has done full solar systems before either. And not many have delved into thousands of units and full projectile simulation. I don't see why it's a problem just because lesser games don't do it. It's like saying BF3 can't have destruction because modern warfare doesn't.

Cause and Effect, maybe BF3 only has Destruction 2.0 because it was already native to the Frostbite Engine, who knows.

But I think it's fair to assume that if it's as easy as you claim, why doesn't everyone do it? If anything it should be EASIER in smaller scale RTSs simply due to the smaller numbers found in most games.

The point I was originally hinting at is that when dealing with Air units, the key aspect is thier movement, and that while clipping and stacking is far from realistic, they still MOVE like you expect high speed aircraft to.

Once you get into having air units move in 3D space and actively avoid collisions, things get a LOT more complex, which also means there are more ways for the system to 'fail' in an immersion breaking way unless done perfectly.

Clipping is about as good as compromise as you can get because you have the complete freedom to get the the flight path/dynamics to work exactly how you want them to and not have to worry about getting all that to interact, and if that happens for PA I'm fine with it.

Mike