Fog of War?

Is there going to be a Fog of War ,or are you just going to be able to see everything?

I would guess that PA will embrace the usual options: where ranked games have fog of war, and custom games have options between everything seen, and fog of war. Generally speaking having no fog of war is only fun if you are playing against the AI. If you are playing against a person it ends up being endless if you can see/counter what each person does.

Personally if there is, I hope it's only for hiding units. Hiding the terrain doesn't make a heck of a lot of sense when you're talking about armies making regular use of space travel. It should at least be assumed that they surveyed the planet's terrain features on approach.

unexplored terrain in combination with a randomized procedural map would lead to a gameplay of exploration. no need for that imho. It needs to be possible make plans based on the terrain, so that needs to be explored from the start of the game.

Yes there will be fog of war.

The cool thing is that the server won't even be updating you on stuff underneath the fog so you won't be able to cheat.

Thats actually pretty awesome!

Superservers!
They may have a lot of work, don't they? *Stare at League of Legends server issues*

How will the fog of war look? Will it be like most other RTS's where areas where you have no vision are black & white or slightly darker? There was this thread a while ago stating that fog of war should look like cloud coverage.

Not sure yet. I'm open to ideas here. Doing a volumetric fog solution is a possibility but it may be something simpler.

You could make the fog turn into a virtual representation of the terrain remminisent of tron.

i think i'd like to be able to see the terrain in "fogged" areas rather than complete darkness.

It was nice to also see explosions / flashes of light like in FA. It built up my anxiousness awaiting pending doom just after seeing a lot of flashes and explosions from afar (someone's base going down in flames)

considering we're seeing everything from space, maybe for planets with atmosphere it could be actual cloud coverage?

or maybe true line-of-sight based fog of war like the upcoming company of heroes 2? Or is that way too detailed?

I see little sense in obscuring vision of the terrain itself with fog effects.

One change from the convention I think that could be interesting is rendering the models of radar returns on the terrain itself.
These super advanced robots should be able to fuse all their sensor inputs in to a single representation of the world around them.

First way to do this would be to make no distinction between Vision & Radar, by extension Cloaking & Jamming become synonymous, and each unit simply has a "detection" radius.

However, I understand this might be too radical for some.

So, alternatively radar returns you have yet to put eyes on get a generic on map model.
Probably need one per domain (land/sea/air/sub) and possibly even some distinction based on unit size.
Then once you have "seen" them it'll render the actual model from then out so long as you maintain radar track.

sorry if this is a stupid question, but what would a volumetric fog solution be like?

Also i like being able to see the environment and terrain without scouting it. would fog of war work if the unsighted areas were just slightly darker than the sighted areas? I say keep it simple

This is what I would like to see in the FoW/Radars in PA:

There would be 2 ways of detecting another unit, Visibility and Radar, and they'd work in a similar manner to the system used in Supreme Commander. However, both detection methods should be limited by the terrain.

The reason why I think it should be so is that if both the radar and visibility are terrain limited it would really open up for some interesting implicit gameplay.

Mountains, hills and high-ground in general would be a sought after to build radar-stations, due to the fact that it would maximize the range of the radar and minimize blind-spots.

Valleys and canyons will work as good routes for flanking attacks as you would be more likely to remain undetected.

Satellites could be used for high-altitude radar by essentially giving you a good look of 30-50% of the planets surface at the risk of being detected.

And of course scouting would be essential.

My main concern is that there shouldn't be a "Automagically know-it-all" structure such the omniradar in SC.

I thought the game was awesome enough, but it turns out the code itself is too!

I want that as a mod by the end of release week ><

For the love of God, make the unit vision radii realistic. If there's one gripe I've always had with RTS games, it's that the vision radii are so small that you can't see enemies unless they're on top of you.

If unit vision was realistic in rts, then we would be able to see the entire map and there would be little to no point.

Horizon.

So we can almost perminantly see half the map at the same time?