Persistent tracks and footprints?

So here's a question that I am not sure has seen it's own topic, but to what level would we want to have tracks and footprints from walking or driving across terrain?

This is not a huge thing, but since there has been some note of terrain deformation being desired, would we want any sort of light terrain deformation from walking/driving on stuff like dirt and sand?

Or would it be enough to just have a simpler pattern that was applied which didn't deform the terrain?

Or is this something that wouldn't be worth having at all?

If we had them, would they disappear after a while, stay forever, or have a menu option to select between those and turning them off?

Be interested to know where everyone else is. While I'd certainly like some deformation, I am not sure it would be consistent with the desire to keep things lighter to ease processing the thousands of units we'd eventually like to have. I'd be alright with something super-simple, but I would like something as opposed to nothing at all.

Usually these are done with particles or similar billboard type techniques.

It would be pretty amazing to send a scout to a distant enemy land and see physical signs of which routes their units traverse, then lay traps.

This seems like it would be hard to implement, but I would certainly love it if they could!

Not so much hard to implement as resource intensive in-game. Especially as the game gets longer. Might be worth messing around with longer decay times thought.

Mike

Tracks help immerse the units into their environment. I actually think this could be pretty important. Having the tracks stick around for a long while would be a cool mechanic so that you could actually use them to hunt down a base or fleeing units.

Cool yes, but unless the devs actually cover every planet in a modifyable "track map" (Which would be fairly memory-heavy), it's not really feasible
A better way to see where units have been would be smaller things like rocks/trees that have been pushed out of the way or reclaimed by scavenging engineers

I'd love to see "persistent" tracks... depending of course, on the terrain and planetary weather conditions (and, ultimately time and resources).

You could make it so that the oldest tracks fade away as resources are overused on a client machine, but overall, I like the idea. Could help players catch hidden army movements, etc.

Ideally, would be nice for mod support (or even stealth units) to avoid leaving tracks in the first place -- or to clear them.

This is fine with me, really. Seeing little details like footprints and dirt was one of those bits of polish that I missed when SupCom 2 came out. Don't expect too much here, guys. Like neutrino said, these are just particle effects and texture decals, etc. We don't need physics and terrain deformation for absolutely everything. I mean, realistic deformation of terrain for every footprint is a bit much, don't you think?