Fog of War?

Well horizon is roughly √(((planet_radius + hight_of_eye)*( planet_radius + hight_of_eye))-(planet_radius*planet_radius))
Thats around 5km on earth in a plane.
On a 4km radius planet a 40m comander would see ~570m so not half of the map small units (2m) would only see up to 130 m.

Edit: but one commander would see another on from further away becuase he would clip over the horizon.
So the vision range to se him would be the double range on a perfect sphere.

Think about it, if you're on a sphere, you can't see THAT far.
Scout planes will probably come pretty close

I really like the sound of this. Flashes and distant rumbles from explosions and weapon fire would be awesome.

We have Orbital units, dont we?

How about actually really having the Fog of War black, with radar only revealing units, but not the terrain, and Satellites being sent to Orbit revealing areas of the Planet as they pass over it.

That means you will only be able to see the enemies base, when you have a satallite above him, which he can counter by jamming or simply destroying it with a missile, or whatever.

Having Satellites revealing/updating your vision leads to an interesting part of intel warfare...

one thing, that would be nice concerning fog of war would a record of the age of your information on specific regions.

e.g., assuming areas with no current visuals are marked as such, those areas could show the last known state with some rough time info separating different area information originating from different scouting missions. That would allow the player to see which region infos might be too out of date to trust much. It would also be a system to mark sightings of larger enemy movement, which makes only sense with the additional time info.
How much sense such a system makes, depends a bit on how important the intelligence part of the game is or how soon you have real time data on the whole planet via satellite or some such.


Another set of questions in the context of fog of war is, in which way will it touch the inter planetary level?
- do you have to "find" other planets (e.g space probes etc) or are they generally known in position and type
- can you partially "scout" other planets from your own via telescopes or do you have to be on that planet
- orbital layer: geostationary over you base (aka same view point origin with larger radius) or also other satellite types on moving orbits with full or at least variable view fields - here a system to somehow intuitively mark the up-to-dateness of your information, as suggested above, would fit in

One big thing that Supcom didn't have a capability for was to give the modders access to rendering things on the terrain. The new system of giving you ONLY the information you can see means you should, technically, be able to give users the power to make client side mods that record where and when you saw the enemy.

Neat! Although the Comms we've seen were what... 10-15m tall?
viewtopic.php?f=64&t=42949

Unlike flat terrain, units can have true vision and still have very finite vision range. The only real problem is discerning between tall and short things, which will have remarkably different discovery ranges (this makes bases and Comms easier to find, which isn't always bad). Larger worlds get naturally larger vision bubbles to help with scouting, high terrain gives more sight, giant mountains really block vision, and nightmare terrain could create devastating blind spots. That could end up really cool.

Giving that same vision to air units may be troublesome, but I guess that depends on how air works out. Giving them a vision cone pointing down might keep imba to a minimum, but anticipate lots of cloud cover and smoke.

Well the big question is what Line of Sight really means.
IRL, soldiers don't have fixed Line of Sight. So even if they can spot a tank miles away they might not be able to see an enemy crawling in the bushes behind them.
Invoking realism in argument for how LoS should work must be done with care because a more realistic Line of Sight system might be less intuitive and be harder to read.

The usual fog of war as seen in TA or SupCom is simple and intuitive to understand. If the enemy is inside the LoS you see them. Otherwise you don't.
Realistically the LoS leaves much to desire though as you can "see" through cliffs and obstacles in SupCom and are unable to hide units as such.
The Line of sight system in the Spring engine can in some instances cause units to be unseen when they are behind cliffs even though they might actually visually pop-up from behind the hill. This is because that the Line of Sight sight is blocked on the ground and even if the unit visually pops up behind the hill, the ground remains unseen and all units that might be there are out of Line of Sight.

A probably better system would be to make units actually check the Line of Sight between 2 units to determine if they can see eachother. If the line is unobstructed they can see each other. If I can see you, you can see me. Of course one unit might be able to see further than the other one and penalties might be given if the "line" of sight is obstructed by trees, grass or leaves for example.
Now if this is realistic to calculate on a large scale I don't know.
There could also be some trouble to visualize this and make it intuitive to the player as a hill might block the ground behind it but you can still see large units towering above the hill that are positioned behind the hill.

Actually in TA the true LOS setting will not see behind hills or on top of ridges unless your unit is behind/same height/above said obstacle and you can hide units
Edit: I think i read that wrong, I thought you said that there was a problem with TA's.

Indeed.

Well that would be a n*n cost problem. Not good for hughe amounts of units.

Could we pretty please have the option to see larger units from further away than smaller ones? I realise it won't be as easy to show ranges of vision, but maybe just categorize between small/big and draw two (or three, for medium) rings or something.

It'll be cool if small bots could actually sneak up to a base while the giant experimental walker can be seen from a mile off. Might make small units a bit more useful in the lategame.

This!

I think it would add a lot to the strategy in the game.

Sure me too. The problem it that it's very hard to display such fog of war in a simple way.
While I was enjoying playing Spring without any representation of the fog of war, it was disturbing for a lot of players.
It might be too hardcore for a lot of players

edit: and it would be a very elegant way to implements cloaking.

You can probably get quite far using three different shades: full color for clear vision, grayscale for spotting big things only, almost monochrome for nothing.

Alternatively, you could use a simple graphics deterioration. Clean, crisp vision for regular, slightly blocky objects for semi-vision, and severely blocked and only showing basic terrain layout for no vision.

To be honest, showing less detail in non-visible areas might be pretty neat in general. And possibly lighter on the server as well.

Well true. It would be worth trying to see if it's possible to come to a representation that make sense.
You could have discrete size. Small, middle and Big.
At long distance you would see big units fully, middle units as blob and no small units.
At middle you would see fully big and middle units and small units as blob.
etc..
Clocking would decrease the size of a unit by one.

Something like that might work, yes.
I also think that you could boost the "oh ****" rating of very large and powerful units by rendering them at full detail in a low detail area. It might give a feeling of "It is so far away that even the trees look like little squares, how big IS this thing?"

I liked how there were separate mapping/LoS options in TA. You could have the map all there, but it'd play by the normal LoS rules. You could still see big explosions even if you couldn't see what exploded. If there were something like that where the terrain you did and didn't have LoS on where visually different, that would be nice.

If it's a volumetric setup, would units have a cylindrical or spherical LoS?

How does radar play into this? Would a unit you don't have LoS on just show up as an icon?