Territories

[plumo]

1. Will the borders expand like in Rise of nations ? ( technology based + buildings like forts and command centers)

2. I think the thick border lines kind of 'ruin' the nice graphics. Maybe make them thinner ( again like in rise of nations) ?

[historic_bruno]

1. Will the borders expand like in Rise of nations ? ( technology based + buildings like forts and command centers)

2. I think the thick border lines kind of 'ruin' the nice graphics. Maybe make them thinner ( again like in rise of nations) ?

Yep, this was discussed a few posts earlier The border graphics will definitely improve.

[Mythos_Ruler]

2. I think the thick border lines kind of 'ruin' the nice graphics. Maybe make them thinner ( again like in rise of nations) ?

These are my proposed borders:

Although they may be difficult to achieve.

[plumo]

@ Mythos

Your proposed borders are definitely an improvement over the current ones!

[Ykkrosh]

Is this the right idea?

(Currently the implementation is very rough and inefficient - it splits the spline into 3 straight line segments per tile, and converts each segment to a quad with the joining edges tilted to follow the terrain's normals and lifted upwards slightly. There's some glitches in the top right where it intersects the terrain and disappears; increasing the separation between line and ground improves those but the gap underneath becomes annoyingly visible. The terrain height/normal computations are a bit broken so fixing those might help. There's also some glitches at sharp corners where the inside edge of the line turns back on itself and overlaps itself; not sure what's the proper way to deal with that.)

[feneur]

Is this the right idea?

(Currently the implementation is very rough and inefficient - it splits the spline into 3 straight line segments per tile, and converts each segment to a quad with the joining edges tilted to follow the terrain's normals and lifted upwards slightly. There's some glitches in the top right where it intersects the terrain and disappears; increasing the separation between line and ground improves those but the gap underneath becomes annoyingly visible. The terrain height/normal computations are a bit broken so fixing those might help. There's also some glitches at sharp corners where the inside edge of the line turns back on itself and overlaps itself; not sure what's the proper way to deal with that.)

Apart from the glitches that's definitely a good idea

[Mythos_Ruler]

Is this the right idea?

(Currently the implementation is very rough and inefficient - it splits the spline into 3 straight line segments per tile, and converts each segment to a quad with the joining edges tilted to follow the terrain's normals and lifted upwards slightly. There's some glitches in the top right where it intersects the terrain and disappears; increasing the separation between line and ground improves those but the gap underneath becomes annoyingly visible. The terrain height/normal computations are a bit broken so fixing those might help. There's also some glitches at sharp corners where the inside edge of the line turns back on itself and overlaps itself; not sure what's the proper way to deal with that.)

Awwwww yeah! Looks great. I can even see some minor glow around the borders, similar to my mockup. The glitches are obvious, so I won't mention them, but perhaps the "glow" can be a third wider. Just a minor quibble.

[Ykkrosh]

The terrain height/normal computations are a bit broken so fixing those might help

Helps a bit, but not enough (particularly at the crest of a hill where the flat line-segment quad sticks out over one edge). But the lines are too wide in any case, since they won't fit in one-tile-wide sections of terrain (which occur occasionally in practice), so I made them half the width, which seems to improve the problems with hills etc too. So Jan's suggestion of just lifting it off the terrain a little is probably sufficient.

I can even see some minor glow around the borders, similar to my mockup.

It's not really proper glow, it's just a white part of the texture with an alpha gradient, but hopefully that's close enough

[ribez]

excellent :-)

but i think you should add a gradient to one side of the border: if you plan to not give a border to Gaia, it's not obvious to understand what is the inside or the outside of a territory, if it don't borders with another territory

[Shield Bearer]

Awesome! Philip, you are awesome!

[janwas]

Hey, congrats, looks good already, and I imagine territory borders near mountains aren't the common case, anyway.

Glad it was possible without resorting to more complex implementations

[Mythos_Ruler]

excellent :-)

but i think you should add a gradient to one side of the border: if you plan to not give a border to Gaia, it's not obvious to understand what is the inside or the outside of a territory, if it don't borders with another territory

I doubt this will actually be an issue when you have the minimap and your own nearby buildings to tell you. This was never an issue in Rise of Nations.

[Mythos_Ruler]

Philip, you're a miracle worker. The new borders work perfectly. I've also played with the weights and radii of the buildings in my local copy. I seem to coming up with some decent values for everything. Hopefully the entity template reordering can come soon so I can show you guys what I've been up to.

[oshron]

I doubt this will actually be an issue when you have the minimap and your own nearby buildings to tell you. This was never an issue in Rise of Nations.

personally, i think there should be an option to visually turn off territories in the minimap and/or in the overworld. this could potentially be useful if someone just wants to take a screenshot or if they just feel overwhelmed by the borders so that they can turn it off for a while, all while still playing a territory map

[SMST]

I think the borders could be a tiny tad bit thicker than in the current version.

Also, which buildings will eventually affect borders? I'd say Civic Centres, Outposts, Fortresses and maybe Barracks. I don't know if pure economical buildings should affect borders - it doesn't make sense to me that houses should extend your borders, as they currently do.

Edited July 30, 2011 by SMST

[Mythos_Ruler]

I think the borders could be a tiny tad bit thicker than in the current version.

Also, which buildings will eventually affect borders? I'd say Civic Centres, Outposts, Fortresses and maybe Barracks. I don't know if pure economical buildings should affect borders - it doesn't make sense to me that houses should extend your borders, as they currently do.

I'd say something like this... (all of these are ratios, with 10 the highest border effect and 1 the lowest):

Civic Centre = 10

Fortress = 6

Barracks = 4

Scout Tower = 3

Temple and Market = 2

Mill and Farmstead = 1

Farm Fields and Corral = 0

I think the Dock should have 0 border effect too--their focus should remain on the water. Or perhaps the presence of a Dock would extend the player's territory to nearby islands, when usually the water would be an expansion blocker.

Walls don't expand borders, but they prevent the enemy border from expanding past them (either they have 0 radius effect and massive "weight", or some other method). I'm messing with the entity templates now, but I'll wait to commit any changes for testing until the entity reordering is committed.

[SMST]

Well, the ratios sound good to me. As long as 1 is really, really insignificant.

[Mythos_Ruler]

Well, the ratios sound good to me. As long as 1 is really, really insignificant.

If a Civ Centre has a 50 tile radius, then that would mean a House or Mill only has a 5 tile radius. Eventually it would be cool to add border modifiers, like technologies and other things. One such thing could be that the <weight> of your buildings goes up for each Temple you build, and things like that. Perhaps Heroes can have positive effects on borders while they are alive, for instance a particularly expansionist king may give a <weight> bonus or <radius> bonus to your buildings.

EDIT: Revised my chart.

[SMST]

If a Civ Centre has a 50 tile radius, then that would mean a House or Mill only has a 5 tile radius.

I can do math. I just see no reason for houses etc. to affect borders at all.

[Mythos_Ruler]

I can do math. I just see no reason for houses etc. to affect borders at all.

I care not, either way. Perhaps others can give their opinion.

[janwas]

Red Alert had a rule where buildings had to be placed within 2 tiles of an existing building. Since it was helpful to establish outposts, people built a long chain of really cheap storage silos to the desired location (a so-called "spider base"). That obviously defeats the intent, and the same is possible with our houses, therefore I think it might be a good idea to prevent that. Besides preventing this abuse, I don't see much harm, since houses would probably be built within the radius of CC or fortress anyway.

I'm messing with the entity templates now, but I'll wait to commit any changes for testing until the entity reordering is committed.

A word of warning: if you have any local changes to those files, and then merely svn-update them to receive the changes from the entity reordering, then your SVN client is probably going to go bonkers and complain that it can't automatically choose between your changes and the reordering. That will insert lots of "<<<<<<< this is your version ======= this is the reordered version >>>>>>>" markers, which are a PITA to resolve. The easiest way to prevent this is to revert your local changes before updating; you can also revert after the update to fix those conflicts.

Apologies if you knew that already - not sure how often you use the text merging features of SVN.

[Mythos_Ruler]

I agree, I would not like to see spidering, although a small amount of it will be inevitable. That's one reason why I like the Civ Centre radius, the curtain walls idea, and the fact you can build new Civ Centres in neutral territory--you are able to and encouraged to build self-contained cities while ultimately expanding your territory and slowly taking over the map. Currently, none of that works, so spidering is all we have. But I take the long view when we come up with new ideas (and new ways to implement old ideas) and try to fit them into an overall complete design.

[plumo]

Good work philip. I like the border system.

Some feedback:

1. The borders can be a little bit thicker, imo.

2. BUG: the colours of borders get other colours on the minimap.

[Ykkrosh]

Walls don't expand borders, but they prevent the enemy border from expanding past them (either they have 0 radius effect and massive "weight", or some other method).

Might be best done like special/territory_block.xml with <TerritoryInfluence>. (The <OverrideCost> means that tiles under the entity's obstruction shape will have a traversal cost equivalent to that number of normal tiles. Water and steep terrain have a traversal cost of 4 (coming from simulation/data/territorymanager.xml), so if a territory would have a radius of 64 tiles on normal land then it'll extend at most 64/4 = 16 tiles over water instead; OverrideCost overrides that terrain-dependent cost of 4 to whatever you want it to be (but not higher than 255).)

That will block all players' territories equally. In particular the wall will block the territory which it itself is built on top of, so it'll probably immediately be considered disconnected and start decaying... I guess it should be restricted to not affect its owner's territories?

1. The borders can be a little bit thicker, imo.

Like this? (That makes the problems at sharp corners more prominent (most notably the grey one, but also e.g. the yellow has some self-overlapping quads too) so that really needs to be improved )

2. BUG: the colours of borders get other colours on the minimap.

Oops, forgot about that - fixed.

[SMST]

I'd like Philips thicker version, but obviously without glitches. If there is no way to elliminate those, I'm happy with the borders that are already in.