The one thing I found lacking in Supreme Commander were the attack alarms. TA vets will know what I'm talking about - the klaxon that sounded when one of your peewees got obliterated by a wayward bomber. Given that PA is to be fought over multiple worlds, where it will be impossible to visually monitor every base that you own, can we take it as read that there will be such a warning system in place for this game?
Or better yet, not such a system, but one that actually takes into account scale of engagement? Because I don't think anyone would get very happy from a binary alarm that triggers at equal force when a random scout-bot runs into an enemy scout-bot and when your primary base is being blasted to hell by a major offensive.
I should hope so. Although maybe the sound shouldn't be as harsh and as long as the one from TA. This kind of warning sound is essential to allow quick response to unexpected attacks. Many RTS games also let you quickly zoom to the location that triggered the alert by pressing SPACE. I hope we can do that as well. EDIT: I'm all for variable alarms based off the intensity of attack. That's a pretty neat idea.
It would be pretty good, but I should imagine very hard to code? Unless, off the top of my head, it is possible to measure the number of hostile units in a given proximity to the first shot that hits you?
Possible and a piece of cake. You can grab all units in a certain area, amount of incoming fire, all units in visible range, or a few dozen other options. There's bound to be something in there you can attach the intensity of the alarm to.
I'm fine with an alarm been in as long as I can set the parameters, for example like in EvE online. Shield 50% Armour 95% Hull 95% A Different alarm triggers for each one. Now with the scale PA is going for I don't want a klaxon telling me that Scout i'd sent to the moon has been obliterated I want to be informed but a event history would be nice, with some sort of unique sound. Event history could just be a little box to the side of the Screen listing minor events happening clicking on the events would zoom to the location. Also you could edit which things would show up on the Event history in the same way Hearts of Iron does it. - Metal Extractor on Planet A Completed. - Unit under attack on Planet A > Moon 1. - Unit destroyed on Planet A > Moon 1. Obviously "Unit destroyed" could clog up peoples History logs a bit so maybe if 60 units die in a 15 second window the following would appear. - x60 Units destroyed on Planet A > Moon 1. This would cut back on history spam. Anyway to get back to my original topic. How about been able to set which event gets a sound? So if you wanted a klaxon for unit destroyed you could or if you wanted a minor beep so ahead. All Uber would need to include is a small number of different sounds to make recognition easy. Will edit soon... Bosses are back!
Well we're not sure what kind of mini map system there will be. I didn't really need attack alarms in Supcom other than "Strategic launch detected" and "Commander is under attack". But obviously the "planetary" thing is going to make it more difficult to know what's going on in different places. But still I'm not sure if these attack alarms are needed. IMO player should be aware of what's going on on the battlefield without automatic voices. I personally like the little "whoops what the F is going on here??" moments. The radar allows you to see most units trough fog of war so I think it is enough alarming that you see a gray dot in your mini map. If they make a good mini map system there won't be much need for this IMO.
About scaling with the battle. If it's small tension on border lines - quiet klaxon, if it's an assault on one of your forward bases [protoss advisor voice] "We are under attack!". But if it's your main base burning down [z advisor voice] "Loooooooser!!"
Well, They hired John Patrick Lowrie for a reason, didn't they? Your base is being attacked! In his voice would be awesome!
I'm going to stick this here, which is a little previous discussion about game announcements, just for reference. viewtopic.php?f=61&t=41630 I'm not saying that this topic has already been discussed, because it hasn't; attack alarms are not the same as announcements. But I thought that that discussion might help to inform debate about this topic.
I don't mind the alarm thing, but really it's pretty time consuming to account for all of the kind of situations that are possible and would require announcing. I propose something slightly different to a recorded audible alarm. What about a news ticker like in TA? You can set the number of lines and you could also control the kind of info that is displayed in it. It could still have an audible warning when news occurs, but it could be less intrusive and the klaxon could be reserved for when the commander is under attack. For example, you could have it only display info about units under attack or you could have it display when an engineer completes a building. It might be neat to have different audio for each class of alarm so you can hear the difference between coming under attack and completing a building. You could then click that icon to zoom to that location. I believe Dawn Of War utilised a similar interactive news ticker. For PA, different planets could have different icons to allow easy identification. Symbols could be used to represent units, structures or control groups. You could even have a window dedicated to displaying this information, since I believe we will be having multiple configurable windows.
You could have a "top down" view of the solar system, basically the sun with a circle orbiting it for each planetoid. Planetoids can be green if you have a presence on them and can flash (for example) yellow if an enemy is in radar view or red if there is combat on the planet. If you click on any of the planetoids your camera will fly to the planet (google earth style, except maybe faster). This is speculation and will probably require refinement but at this point I think this will be non-intrusive, informative, understandable and useful for a player to keep track of multiple planets. There are lots of ways you could play with the idea, for example instead of equal sized icons for the planets you could make their size proportional to the size of your base+forces on that planet. While this isn't directly related to audible alarms, it is relevant to the topic of notifying the player of important events. Sounds are good, but quickly get annoying or ignored when overused. Sounds may be good to inform you when a fight begins but after that a small visual aid like what I'm suggesting may be useful. Edit: this is good, we now have two reasonable ideas (wolfdogg's) for a visual notification system.
Sounds like there is room for modding. Bringing the possibility to let the advisor announce stuff with text, voice and mappinging could/should be moddable. Like a UI widget so it only local and doesnt require everyone to have it.
I kind of liked how there weren't any alarms in supcom 2, except for nukes and your commander being attacked. It let you distract your opponent in one area and then drop and engineer by their nuke silo and take it over while he wasn't looking . but over multiple planets some kind of warning system would be nice.
