When a commander explodes it bursts in to a cloud of smoke that is a mix of grey and a rather pleasant blue color. After watching quite a few games where different casters would add their commentary (including a few games from PAX) I noticed that in a lot of cases when a commander finally meets its demise it is difficult to tell at first glance which team the commander belongs to. Upon further inspection of the surrounding buildings/units, one can make a rather decent prediction as to who the commander belongs(it can become more difficult to judge such detail as the player zooms further and further out). For example an explosion in the middle of a group of Orange buildings is likely the destruction of the Orange team's commander. But there are still some cases where multiple commanders are in close proximity and those visual cues do not exist. And PA has already shown that there is potential for some really oddball and crazy situations that can put a commander in places it shouldn't be. When it is not clear many casters and players resort to using the Chronocam to see who it belonged to. (though, they probably also want to see how it happened as-well) I think this is really more an issue when spectating games then it is when playing. A spectator is viewing multiple teams on multiple planets and switching through them fairly rapidly trying to get a good look at the big picture. As the number of teams increase and the number of planets increase this becomes a bigger issue. An effective way to deal with this problem(if people think this is a problem) is to change that blue color to match the team color of the commander that met its demise. I feel that this change would fit in well with the PA's current aesthetic and improve the overall visual clarity. What do others think? PA Developers: Are there plans for this, or has it been considered? Are there any reasons that I have overlooked that show this to be not such a good idea? TLDR: Commander explosion color based on team color?
Thank you everyone who posted about that Mod, I wasn't aware of its existence. I had a feeling that someone would have felt the same way as I did. It would be really nice though if this was included in the main game. I have not tried loading any mods mostly because I have encountered some game breaking bugs that make it unplayable on my Linux box.
Some mods, particularly graphic effect ones like com explosion color, have worked from alpha builds. They don't become incapatable nor cause many bugs over very distant builds. Anything messing with UI script can break between updates where they change a line of code. Anything doing a complex function can become broken all the time and cause capatability lapse. Com explosions though, that should be fine. If you want to make it even less a chance of causing problems, keep the file manually installed in storage, and literally copy-paste it into your actual PA directory. It will overwrite the vanilla file, and your game will load it clientside. Every install you must reload it though, unless you just mount it as a mod which is persistent through patches. For com explosion, you basically copy the com_explosion.fbx into the pa/specs/effects/ directory of your PA install. It will ask for overwrite if you did it correctly.
