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Re: Mutilple maps?


On Tue, 2002-06-18 at 11:54, Stan Shebs wrote:
> Clouds should have both bottoms and tops of different elevations,
> at least if you want to do the aircraft thing - you can have
> fighters attack ground forces if the cloud bottoms are a couple
> hundred meters up, but high-level bombers are blocked.

In that case, I guess it wouldn't work.  It would probably work for
games like "napoleon", though, because all you need is to obscure the
vision of a balloon.

As I think about it, the coating trick might work in the standard game
because aircraft are not very good at fighting ground units anyway.  The
clouds would only have to affect their accuracy when attacking towns,
cities, and other aircraft.

> 
> A practical difficulty with all this is how to display it to the
> player; cloud density is doable with stipples, at the cost of
> readability, but tops/bottoms are harder.  One way might be to
> display the net effect of clouds - gray out cells that a
> high-level bomber cannot attack (of course then you have a bit
> of footwork to let the bomber pass over potential victims in
> the same cell, only reveal them if the clouds blow away).

This might not be so difficult with a working isometric view.  You could
make semi-opaque clouds appear over affected tiles, and their elevations
could be shown in 3D and be much easier to read than a string of numbers
in the corner of each tile (as if it's not already bad enough in
"napoleon" when temperature and wind are turned on).

Of course, the isometric view probably needs more work before it's
usable enough that anyone would want to use it.  It might also be slow
to render clouds on older hardware, but it would not be impossible.


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