More interesting fog of war screenshots

[Implode]

I only realised about a week ago a corollary of the combination of the way I wanted fog of war to work & how the map smoothing works. I've been working on the movement routines today, to get them working correctly with fog of war, so could finally test this out so thought you folks might find this interesting:



If you look at the first area, in the bottom right, there's what appears to be a lake surrounded by land on all 4 sides. In fact we've no idea whether its surrounded by land on all 4 sides because we can't see below or to the right of it - so the map smoothing assumes its probably more land.

When we actually move down and scout a bit further, we then see that its not a single square lake, there's more water below it, so the game then switches which terrain tile it uses to display it... and then again when we scout another square and discover that the water extends further again.

Of course this is more noticable now because I'm not yet drawing the black 'fuzzyness' on the edge of the fog of war blackness, which I will do eventually. Once that's done it should cover up the bottom/right edges of that 4 sided lake so it doesn't look misleading.

But I just thought this was pretty cool/interesting :)

Edit: I just noticed looking at these screenshots again that it also changed the graphic for the right edge of the mountain ridge, once I'd scouted further around the mountain range and could see there was no more mountain below :)

Implode.

[Coyote]

I don't really know anything about graphics, but I've never seen this before. If you scroll up and down with the screen relatively fast, the black squares "blur" and stretch up and down in your picture. I don't know what's causing the image to stretch when you scroll around the screen, but it might be something to look out for in the game while scrolling around the map screen. It'd make things kinda hard to find things if they were all blurry while you were scrolling around. :-)

So the map redraws itself every time you move around?? That sounds difficult. I'd like to at least get a clue where the map is going if I'm adjacent to its square. Its kinda important to know if the mountain keeps going if your calvary's looking for the pass. :-)

[ikanreed]

That's definitely not the style of the original MoM. Still an interesting approach, and it increases the usefulness of scouting as an ability. I can see why you'd be concerned about sending too much information to the client.

This also brings up concern for how the edges of tiles themselves are blended with the blackness. MoM had a wave pattern, but using a modern processor, IME could probably get away with something a bit sleeker.

[Implode]

That's definitely not the style of the original MoM.

That's right, the original MoM cheats endlessly - e.g. by using the surveyor you can see whether there's a city within 3 squares of somewhere, even though you haven't seen everywhere within 3 squares of there. You can look at enemy cities and see what food/production/etc they're getting, even though you can't see all the terrain surrounding the city. MoM IME only ever displays info based on what you've actually seen, so you can't tell what food/production enemy cities are making until you've scouted all around them, and (here's the fun one) you can get a situation where you *think* you can put a city somewhere because you've not seen another city within 3 squares of there. It will let you give the settler the build order but will then abort building the city, wasting the settlers' turn.

This also brings up concern for how the edges of tiles themselves are blended with the blackness.

I was just going to use the original MoM graphics (that's the "fuzzyness" I was talking about). I might play with alpha blending a bit to see if I can make the edges fade nicely, but I don't see anything wrong with the original graphics (& they're nostalic!) so won't spend too long on this.

Implode.

[Lupinedreams]

Looks sharp! I finally beat a game on impossible mode yesterday; It seems like sucess or failure on impossible is largely based on luck - having other wizards fight each other, and having a good start location with nearby cites that can be conquered without too much of a struggle in order to build up your empire quickly.

Err, didn't mean to derail from the point of the thread. Looks like the next version is coming along well, I can't wait.

[Implode]

Fog of war border smoothing, and you can see the more greyed out area - this is where your units HAVE seen, but you don't have anyone scouting the area currently. (Whether you see updates/units moving about in this area depends on the Fog of War settings you pick in theserver New Game form).



Implode.

[aggelon]

Great!


And what about change type of land ? Like turn land to mountain or rise a volcano ? Is this viewable only when an unit re-go near the square ?

[Implode]

And what about change type of land ? Like turn land to mountain or rise a volcano ? Is this viewable only when an unit re-go near the square ?

Depends on what settings you pick, on MoM original settings, yes... you can see all future land changes even if you don't have a unit there.

On "recommended" settings, no you can't... you have to send another unit there take a look.

Implode.