Of light, darkness and the death of stars.

Now however dark the far sides of planets and moons are going to be, combat is most likely going to be very pretty on them. Pew Pew lasers and explosions and whatever else will no doubt look great if there is some kind of dynamic lighting system.

The question real is, will the planets and moons actually be dark, or will they be more of a 'Hollywood' dark where everything is blue, or a planet appropriate night time colour? Then we have to ask, what effect will that have on gameplay?

Will units have reduced vision and engagement ranges?

If not, why not? Night vision? Heat vision? Infrared?

All very well if the robots have access to these, but why not make these vision modes accessible to the commander/player too?

Imagine weapon been able to spot a cloaked attack force closing on your base at night time ahead of your units, and ordering your artillery to ground fire while you get some units and radar coverage to the position, just because you pressed a single button while scooting around on your map.

Also I keep hearing chatter of people wanting to affect the star that matches will take place around. Now if the star could be tapped for energy and lose mass or be damaged, then it might be interesting to have the star darken, providing more use for vision modes.

Robotic armies fighting around a dark and dying star, all alone in the night.

Planets choked with smoke and dust and meteor impacts.

No starlight, just the flash of weapons fire and the glow of lava as the ground is ripped open and volcanoes erupt around the gravitationally stressed planets.

I feel like this is the kind of gameplay opportunity that RTS games have been missing for sometime now, and PA is the game that can push new ground while remaining true to the gameplay concepts we PA kickstarters know, love and crave.

TLR, Sam fisher robots fighting in the dark.

Did you try a Search? I'm pretty sure this kind of thing has come up before.

Mike

Yep. Typed in vision modes into the search bar, specified the PA section of the forum.

Nadda.

Tried Night and Time, and then search engine wouldn't even let me search, told me I had to wait. So I thought I'll post a topic anyway.

Next time I want to start a topic though, I'll ask you first in case I search won't work for me and I don't want to spend my entire afternoon going through hundreds of topics in case someone has said something similar to me.

If you want to criticize everyone for posting topics you've already seen as soon as they are posted why don't you apply to be a moderator on the board and delete the repeated topics as they come up.

Did you actually read the guide I linked to? there are many options to cut down on the results that pop up, particularly setting the results to show up as threads instead of individual posts.

Mike

I saw a screenshot with some red scrawl on it pointing to the search bar.

I've seen it before, I've lurked these forums a long time before I started posting.

Rather than jumping into everyone's topic to tell them how to post and search, you might stop and consider that the search function isn't intuitive or functional enough for some people.

And if you're so adept at using it, you might just link people to the other topics, letting the new ones die as the others are necro'd.

Or perhaps people have seen the topics and have a different angle or specific idea they want to point, without having to read through 20 pages of other peoples ideas, just to make sure they aren't repeating themselves.

Maybe you could just discuss the game and be enthusiastic with people who are looking forward to what looks like its going to be the most fun RTS game in a long time?

Or you could start your own PA forum and have control over exactly what's posted there, without making this forum such a toxic place to join and post.

Better any of these options than rushing to tell people you think they've made a mistake.

Dammit, Mike! Moderate the GPG forum. This is my turf!

Do continue with your thread rabbit, I find the topic interesting.

Okay, so this time, I'll do it for you, but if you're not going to put any effort in to searching, don't expect to find anything either. Try reading the entire guide, I explain most of the options and how they work, between the options and picking the right keywords you can get good results, for example;

Keyword "Dark" (1 page of results)

viewtopic.php?f=61&t=43855&start=0
viewtopic.php?f=61&t=43356&start=0

This last one is a bit iffy, but it touches on the topic;
viewtopic.php?f=61&t=36542&start=0

Keyword "Light" (2 pages of results)

viewtopic.php?f=61&t=43420&start=0
viewtopic.php?f=61&t=36009&start=0

This all from just pulling the keywords from the first post, when more variated searching more niche topics could come up as well.

Next time thought, put in the effort yourself, I'm not here to do it for you.

I guess it's been awhile since you've been on the GPG forums, you've forgotten how I moderate, I can post a few times like that if you want, it's quite different really.

Mike

Off topic: for me rabbit has one point: you are poisoning the atmosphere knight.

Its how you say it.

On topic: I dont think darkness schould change LOS. But could make for some good visuals.

In this I agree that while a day/night side for planets would be cool, it would be preferable to not have to deal with the added layer of complexity that comes from using certain units to spot at night/LoS/FoW.

This game will already be massive, and I'm not sure a mechanic like this has a good awesome to added complexity ratio.

It would make for an interesting difficulty modifier. IE harder the game gets the less you can see on dark sides of planets. If this was a toggle able setting it would make for some challenging game play.

I think to start off it would be nice to have at minimum the day/night graphics effect ( maybe some headlights and whatnot), and then from there, see if it's worth it to have darkness affect sensors.

Bobucles will probably chime in here any second with dark mutterings about how robots don't NEED headlights to see.

Huh? Eh. Art direction is not my thing. Only the icy, heartless claw of logic makes me feel alive.

There are any number of reasons that a unit would need to use active detection. Headlights are as good an abstraction as anything else. I merely feel that the Commander deserves the best light show.

If there is nighttime, I'd prefer the Hollywood night. If nothing more than so you can see the terrain features even in the dead of night. I think that this makes sense if the fog of war is anything like the campaign did it in SupCom where the terrain was always visible, even if you didn't have LoS on it.

could we have a slider in settings?

like: darkness settings:
none
blue (Hollywood)
black (just dark, for those who like realism)
night vision (also dark, but with red wireframes or just simple red glowing textures.)

something like that?

It does add some interesting game elements. It also seems very complex given where the light is comming from in relation to where the planet is in orbit and gravitational spin. Maybe this could be a mod or an expansion. I would rather see great gameplay at this point and have that be a future project. I am not a game designer but this does seem complex.

I'd love to see it personally but make it one of the option pre-game.

Just something as simple as "Realistic Darkness *Tickbox*"

Would make for a fun survival type gamemode...

It's worth mentioning that I love how the Night of the Dead mod does light & dark on Starcraft 2...

I think it would be great to have it as an option. Realistic lighting based on position/rotation of the planets/moons/etc could lead to some very cool visuals.

Having it as dark or nightvision would could have some awesome cinematics, positions of units marked by muzzle flash while being backlit by the guttering flames of the killed units.

From a gameplay standpoint, night vision and reduced LOS is one sensor issue too many to consider, at least in the core game. I'd cheerfully play that mod later, though.

Visually, though, nightside battles would be fantastic, expecially on stark, airless planetoids. Head- and running lights would do a lot to mitigate potential confusion, but a dark blue-gray color filtered night seems like a better idea than pure darkness.

It would be interesting to have darkness influence the economy and strategic planning. Every unit has the ability to turn on the lights, the lights turn automatically (can be turned off) if its played in the darkness but they spend a certain amount of energy, depending on the unit size.

Also during the day there should be areas of darkness where units can turn the lights on and do some funky stuff.
Have the ability to turn all lights off in the base, making it virtually invisible but harder to manage, you can still see the buildings and units but they are quite greyed out and difficult to manage compared to the normal daylight management.

That would be pretty interesting.
Also the Commander has a light cannon, he can shoot out a light beam into a certain position on the map and that light is there as long as you have the switch turned on on the Commander(but wastes lots of energy)
That would be good for sneak attacks, you send a pack of bots in the darkness towards the enemy base and right before you attack you turn the light on to see the enemy base.
Radars not being able to see units in the darkness would be a cool idea as well(would bring more meaning to the light in combat)