Fog of War & Line of Sight

Started by Vagabond, May 16, 2016, 10:03:40 AM

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Vagabond

Hello,

I would like to put forward (again) that we need Fog of War and Line of Sight mechanics. Player controlled characters and npcs should both be equally affected by this system. I believe that this will benefit the game as it will provide a real challenge to gameplay and allowing us to move past the arbitrary system of artificial challenge increase via ever increasing amounts of hostile npcs.

The map will start blacked out and be discovered by pawns as their line of sight passes over it. When they aren't actively looking in a direction it is still visible to the player, but you can't see any activity going on in the area - it being "greyed" out. Terrain features and buildings can still be seen, but entities can't, and any changes to terrain or structures since your pawns last looked at it won't register until they do.

Ideally line of sight will pretty much extend a certain distance based on degree. Best explained with a picture:



Red extends the farthest. Green extends less, and blue extends way less. The reason for this is what I would call "Useful vision" - what you can actually process, react to, ect. Just go outside and look at some point in the horizon - you can USEFULLY see everything in red pretty much as far out as you can see before obstructed by something. You can USEFULLY see everything in green to a distance of about 10 meters. You can USEFULLY see everything in blue to a distance of about two or or three meters. So assuming we consider a tile a meter, a pawn on a tile can see two/three tiles where the blue would be, 10 where the green would be, and as far out until obstructed with the red. Again, for gameplay purposes this would be sufficient to simulate what we can do in real life, as in real life that is about those are about the distances you can actually make use of what you see.

The perks of such a system should be quite apparent. It would make simple things like finding materials actually something more than just scanning around the map in pause. It would make hunting actually hunting instead of magically knowing where the herds are. Bandits would have to search you out, and you wouldn't know when or where they landed - we wouldn't have to have as many enemies flooding the map. The bandits could actually do stuff without us knowing, which would provide all sorts of opportunities for them to eff us over - setting crops on fire, sapping our walls, blowing up solar panels or wind turbines, sneaking into our storage and stealing stuff.

We could have interesting characters come into our colonies. Consider a wanderer who asks to join our colony and after a time we suddenly lose his vision cone and he no longer shows up on any of our info tabs. Then your colonists start coming up missing. The guy is a psychopath and now he's murdering your colonists. In this system, there would be flanking bonuses, there could be executions if you can manage to sneak up on someone and put a bullet in their back of their head or a knife in their back.

Injuries to the eyes would mean more than just loss of accuracy. A colonist who just lost an eye also just lost part of his vision cone.

Watch towers could have a bill that allows citizens with certain weapons to go and keep a look out. Scoped weapons and binoculars could extend vision.

Cameras could be a thing, so when you have a pawn monitoring them remotely you will have vision in those locations. Prison Architect has a lot of really good, fleshed out systems that could be utilized in Rimworld to give REAL challenge, not the arbitrary difficulty curve we have now.

Cheers,
Michael

Cores

i completely agree with this. This not only be about colonist line of sight but also allow cameras, guards and other wonderful things to be added to Rimworld.

Darth Fool

I am in favor of FoW.  I don't think the vision cone is necessary, as it requires tracking individual pawn heads.  It doesn't take much to swivel around and look in all directions and adds a complexity that doesn't add much to the effect compared to adding FoW back in.  That said, prepare to be flamed by the FoW hater.

falconbunker

I think a blend between the current system and the one you talk about could be made, basically during raids, the enemy would activate a sensor jammer, which would cause FOW since your God sight depends on sensors that bored underground when he escape pods dropped, which would bring the security cameras and the like into use since you wouldn't have the God sight sensors anymore, as well as during solar flares that would happen. This would allow for more tactical combat, as well as less annoyance when not in combat, at least this is what I thought of.