Talk:Gameplay Proposals/Visibility

"The stance of the target. Crouched units are harder to spot than standing units (+5 stealth), and prone units are harder to spot still (+10 stealth)."

This is not necessarily true. If seen from a height (the top of a building for instance), the unit would be more visible prone than standing up. The above would be easy to implement, but it would be a lot better if this stealth modifier was a function of how much of the target's model is actually inside the actor's LOS. It should still have a maximum, though, so simply dividing 1 by the percentage of the model visible isn't the way to go. --BTAxis 17:44, 18 June 2007 (CEST)

maybe you could use the "to-hit" estimate function to return a "to-spot" probability. It takes account of distance to target, crouching and partial cover. (though the partial cover bit isnt very good - though making it better would probably make it too slow). --Blondandy 14:30, 21 June 2007 (CEST)

Addendum: Visibility and firing

It occurred to me that as it stands, a soldier can fire at an enemy he can't actually see if another soldier can see that enemy. I feel that, especially in the case of direct-fire weapons, a soldier should not be allowed to accurately attack targets that are invisible to that soldier. Therefore, I want an accuracy penalty to apply in such cases. Reaction fire should also not trigger unless the soldier who is using RF can actually see the target. --BTAxis 14:07, 4 July 2007 (CEST)

no crouching in the near future

There will be no prone stuff in the near future - because this would alrise the need for new animations (no real problem, because we have the bip files) - and we have no animator at the moment.

Detection

The detection table doesn't make sense when the stealth mode takes the light level of the target into account. Humans do see dark targets better if they are standing in a dark area. I think a good solution would be to have a function that gives the detection value for the light level of the target for each species. This can either be done by a (may be 10 item) table or coded as a real function. This would allow non linear panelties including aliens that are blinded by too much light or have an special twightlight blindness. The fact that eyes do adjust the the light level and that is more difficult to see from the light to the darkness should be ignored IMHO as it is too difficult to be implemented sanely.

Having a real (C) function for each race would allow to also take other parameters into account. May be some races do not see movement or have difficulties seeing at very short or very long distances or have eagle eyes and are not affected by distance...

• This is far too complicated. I'd rather stick with something simple. That way the player can at least somewhat predict how his detection and stealth will behave and that is beneficial to the gameplay experience. --BTAxis 01:13, 28 September 2007 (CEST)

Movement

Much more than visible size and light level does movement influence the visibility (or better the recognizability) of an object. Persons that did move and are visible at the beginning of the round should be much easier to spot as nonmoving (at least 3 times further). During the own movment other persons could have their stealth factor be modified by their used up tus (may be only tus used for moving). This would allow people to sit in the darkness and watch the enemy walking into the set trap.

• Good point. We should make moving actors have a lower stealth factor than static ones. --BTAxis 01:13, 28 September 2007 (CEST)

Spotting & stealth ability/skill

I was reading btaxis' proposal about attribute increase then got here; could we have "spot" and "stealth" abilities/skills on actors? That would give deeper gameplay, and a potential new "recon" class (with short range weapons and light armours also affecting that); i never played the ufo after[math|shock] game serie myself, but a friend of mine told me there's something similar implemented in those games. However in general i think this proposal about actor visibility would represent a great plus on the ufoai gameplay. --Flea 20:41, 17 November 2008 (UTC)

Displaying visibility information

As I've been working on the new rendering system, I've been thinking that it would be nice to have a better way of displaying the per-team (or per-actor) visibility information. Right now, it's impossible to tell what parts of the world your soldiers can see right now, what parts they've seen in the past, and what parts they haven't explored yet. I think that we should try to change that.

I'm envisioning a system where "unexplored" areas might be completely black, or covered in grey fog, or something, so that the player wouldn't know the exact layout of areas that hadn't been seen before. This would be particularly meaningful on the RMA maps, because it would actually force the player to explore, rather than simply moving around known terrain. In the original X-COM, I think that this type of exploration added to the sense of drama, because you never quite knew what you were going to find.

The other thing I'd like to have is some visual representation of a "fog of war" that would let the player know what areas had previously been explored but were no longer in direct view of any soldiers. This could be some sort of interface toggle that would cause an overlay (e.g. a green cone, or something) that would show what was currently visible to the team. Alternatively, it could be an "always-on" type of effect, like having areas that couldn't be currently seen rendered in greyscale, and directly observed areas rendered in color.

Not only would these things improve the atmosphere, I think they would be useful gameplay additions as well; right now, it's hard to know where an alien could be hiding, because you can't really tell which squares are directly observed and which aren't.

I'm open to suggestions about how this should look, or what information we want to display; what do people think?

i think this would be a nice feature (but should be switchable of course) - something like in warcraft 3 maybe. unexplored = black, not visible but explored earlier gray, visible ... well no color overlay. --Mattn 16:08, 19 June 2010 (UTC)