Of light, darkness and the death of stars.

I did some (terribad) finger doodles on my iPad to better communicate my ideas about alternative vision modes but forgot to come back and post them, anyway:

So a regular skirmish taking place in PA



Then viewed taking place at night time



Or through a thermal vision mode

I like the idea of, after 10+ RL hours of tapping a star, it implodes and kills the whole system.

Clever stealth bots you have there...

If thermal vision let me manually spot cloakers (without that ability on any units in LOS of the cloakers), I'd likely spend my whole time in thermal mode. Much like playing AvP as the predator, where you just select the vision mode that lets you see your current enemy best (with the result that you remember most of the levels being either blue, or red, and never really saw the original textures).

It's definitely a cool idea, but much like super units it sounds too good to not use all the time. It would effectively devalue cloaking as a tech, if you could bypass the need to build cloak-spotting tech just by changing a vision mode instead. Difficult to balance, certainly.

Yay somebody noticed!

There are also mines on the opposite shore.

Thermal would be useful but it would have to be a blurry mess to not be used at all times, and suffer massive trailing and visual artefacts, and be less useful in day time, less useful on lava planets. Super useful on snow and ice planets. No good to sea underwater. Perhaps not good on sea planets or the gaseous planets with denser atmospheres.

Still, food for thought.

It's another way PA could differentiate itself further from other rts games.

And you could have these:

"It's TRON; it's TRON; it's TRONONON....." (HISHE TRON Rap)

I love the design from Tron Legacy.

I like this kind of design for when things are in computers but it doesn't really do it for me in other situations.

Plus that look was done to death in the early to mid 00's.

I like the idea of different visions for visual fun but i would really not want it to impact gameplay. For example being able to sees stealth in some vision modes. I really do not want to have to switch vision modes to see certain attacks.

Also I would not want this top be a (financial) priority in current development. Darkness is fine any thing I can not see I am happy to shoot as the grey radar blip it looks like.

Off topic I am with knight, seems to me op was the one flaming after knights post. A simple yes would probably have done.

What if the visions had a cool-down timer? Or is linked to a special radar/orbital thing? OR a special unit?

It would be not much else than another form of radar / stealth detection. I don't want to be overly negative but in terms of gameplay I don't see this adding value.

Well, if we were to make a scenario where the vanilla game would have some mechanism of thermal vision, it would simply make the game much too complex in terms of balancing and bugs, for the deadline set for its release.

I say make it a big, chunky mod; something akin to a fan-expansion pack, with the proper added thermal units, solid thermal mechanics and the rest of the game balanced around it.

I'd surely try it out for sure!

Wonder who'd take up such an ambitious project. It could be pretty cool.

Not me, I can't program

I can however 3D and Texture the **** out of stuff, possibly hack a mod together. But real life programming is beyond me. Pooperscoop.

We'll just have to wait 'till Alpha hits so that the modmen REALLY get their gears going. I'm trying really hard to not hype myself too much for awesome mods right now. :lol:

I think after seeing the lights in the most recent live steam, I'm happy without night vision and such.

Shoot for awesome, have tiny little lit up robots and tanks everywhere because it looks really really cool.

Good example of how dark I was expecting it to be is 40's-50's cowboy westerns, I think night scenes were actually shot in the daytime, but they darkened the shots during post processing.