Target Marker

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

Hello. I think the Target Marker template should have this flag:

 

  <Visibility>
    <AlwaysVisible>true</AlwaysVisible>
  </Visibility>

 

[Stan`]

@wowgetoffyourcellphone Did you notice a bug ? I couldn't find any difference with or without this flag.

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

Without the flag the target marker does not show up in fog of War, I mean black map. With the flag the target marker shows up in the black map. See if that's true for you. Maybe I never deleted all of the files from the original patch but I think I did.

[Stan`]

It has the tag to show on fow though.

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

8 hours ago, stanislas69 said:

It has the tag to show on fow though.

 

Did you test it? lol. When I remove the AlwaysVisible tag the marker will not show up in black map. When I put the tag back into the template and run the game again, the marker will show up in black map as expected.

 

[elexis]

The marker shows up in the fog of war, but not in the shroud of darkness.

It was noticed in the review, but we thought it might be ok for it to not show up, because it allows finding out the terrain at that place. But I guess that is totally irrelevant and we were just lazy to find a way to always display it So if the others agree, I will commit your patch.

While discussing the thing, I was also wondering if we could make that thing use playercolors. It'd allow showing markers for all players in observermode and would be more in line with the selection, aura, rallypoint and minimap colors. It only runs into that contrast issue again (black playercolor on volcano, green player color on anatolian plateau). Can't we solve that by adding a second color around the playercolor? I guess there is only white available and that's already there. Don't tell me it's impossible, there must be a way to keep the contrast.

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

1 minute ago, elexis said:

The marker shows up in the fog of war, but not in the shroud of darkness.

It was noticed in the review, but we thought it might be ok for it to not show up, because it allows finding out the terrain at that place. But I guess that is totally irrelevant and we were just lazy to find a way to always display it So if the others agree, I will commit your patch.

 

1 minute ago, elexis said:

While discussing the thing, I was also wondering if we could make that thing use playercolors. It'd allow showing markers for all players in observermode and would be more in line with the selection, aura, rallypoint and minimap colors. It only runs into that contrast issue again (black playercolor on volcano, green player color on anatolian plateau). Can't we solve that by adding a second color around the playercolor? I guess there is only white available and that's already there. Don't tell me it's impossible, there must be a way to keep the contrast.

I... actually think the player color rally lines are overkill, didn't like the change, and would probably also think the same of a player color target marker. I could maybe see their usefulness in watching replays, but inside a match why wouldn't the player know that the rally line is his? He can't see other players rally lines, so why would there need to be a player color distinction? Same goes for the target marker. Take my opinion for what you will.

[elexis]

That contrast problem is getting more annoying the more often I mention it. FFS, it must be possible to fix it. @stanislas69 no ideas?

The purpose isn't an indication of ownership, but to give more immersive feeling (blue is what you are and everything you do is blue) and to make UI colors consistent.

Should be relatively easy to make an option to use a fixed color in all these places (except in observermode).

(Also the target marker isn't really needed for players because the marker is directly beneath the mouse cursor and has disappeared before the mouse moves somewhere else. It's just there becaue it's fancy afaics).

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

1 minute ago, elexis said:

(Also the target marker isn't really needed for players because the marker is directly beneath the mouse cursor and has disappeared before the mouse moves somewhere else. It's just there becaue it's fancy afaics).

Disagree. It's a feedback issue. Same with the target flash feature. It visually indicates a successful player input.

[Stan`]

@elexis Contrast issue for what ? If it's for line, everything should be circled by a white AND a black line before being a player color, this way it should be visible on every terrain.

About changing colors I haven't had time yet, I'll make something after the hotfix for DE;

[elexis]

30 minutes ago, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:

Disagree. It's a feedback issue. Same with the target flash feature. It visually indicates a successful player input.

You mean it gives a new information to the players because the players might not know that their command definitely makes it into the game until the next turn is executed (which might take some seconds with heavy lag?).

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

2 minutes ago, elexis said:

You mean it gives a new information to the players because the players might not know that their command definitely makes it into the game until the next turn is executed (which might take some seconds with heavy lag?).

Not sure if this is snark or what.

 

Regardless, I did my part and pointed out a minor beneficial change to the template. Over and out.

 

Actually, know what? Leave the tag out. Your first instincts were right. It's unnecessary. I'll keep the tag in for DE though.

Edited September 2, 2017 by wowgetoffyourcellphone

[elexis]

Not sure why this would be considered as such. I've stated this in the differential revision proposal as well. If one knows that a command will be executed upon click, then the target marker does in fact not add new information and is just a fancy graphical enhancement and does not provide new information, am I wrong? I have committed that because I like it, so not sure why I'd be considered a critic of the feature.

If one does a rightclick, then the units will react to that. But that isn't obvious. If the game is lagging then units don't react to the player command until some considerable amount of time later, so the players might assume the units didn't react to it. So often players reported that they can't play with the lag, while in fact it becomes easier to play with more lag (as one has more realtime per gametime to send all commands).

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

ok

[elexis]

Patch review:

Stan agrees with the patch and the cheating factor is really negligible. The most one could find out is if there is a mountain or not. (The rallypoints allow for more cheating as they indicate the entire path, obstacles on the way and the entire terrain changes on that path.)

Patch is correct because that property does by definition what were looking for, its complete because the other non-optional Visibility properties are given in the inherited actor template.  Ive tested it and it works as a dvertized and doesnt reveal the marker to enemy players. The alphabetic order of the components is kept too. </review> Thanks for the patch.