Flora Aura

[LordGood]

In the interest of making environments a lot more engaging, I would like to propose giving certain trees and shrubs auras, slowdown, armor, damage and the like. Low thorny acacias and other brambly shrubs can be given both an HP drain and a slowdown aura, which makes clearing or avoidance a priority and tactically noteworthy. Wide trees can give a small bonus pierce armor to the edge of their canopy, thick reeds can slow troops as well.

Thoughts?

[Nescio]

How does it affect performance?

[LordGood]

Don't know yet, I don't have a working prototype, but my workaround if that becomes an issue would be to have few types of trees or bushes that would give an aura buff, more easily recognizable in gameplay and less of a performance problem. They could be mixed with benign flora if its a serious issue

[Nescio]

29 minutes ago, LordGood said:

Don't know yet, I don't have a working prototype, but my workaround if that becomes an issue would be to have few types of trees or bushes that would give an aura buff, more easily recognizable in gameplay and less of a performance problem. They could be mixed with benign flora if its a serious issue

Try this:

TreeAura.zip

[LordGood]

Can't say it provides much of an advantage, but I'm patrolling 100 fast units reasonably comfortably through a large deep forest map with all my modelling programs open

[serveurix]

Shouldn't this depend on the terrain the units walk on instead ? Make units slower in mud, snow and shallow water, faster on roads... I think there was a proposal for that.

[Alexandermb]

Yes please. add aura to all biological spaces.

Snow/Sand/Mud: Slower movement speed.
Stormy, Rainy, Fog, Sandstorm: Reduce LOS
Forests: Reduce movement speed of non skirmisher infantry

[LordGood]

I'm talking about things i can do under my own current scope, and that's constricted sticking auras on floral entities atm

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

2 minutes ago, LordGood said:

I'm talking about things i can do under my own current scope, and that's constricted sticking auras on floral entities atm

Check out Delenda Est's forest groves for an example of this. I personally think adding such auras to so many individual little trees and shrubs would be prohibitive, but using "groves" as I do in Delenda Est could work. I currently use the farm field mesh, with all of its prop points, for this purpose, but there's nothing preventing you from making custom grove meshes, big or small.

[LordGood]

I think there needs to be a solution to disappearing trees first, vast swathes of forest just disappearing when used up are going to look incredibly silly

to clarify i do like the groves idea, perhaps not so rigid though

[Guest]

1 hour ago, serveurix said:

Shouldn't this depend on the terrain the units walk on instead ? Make units slower in mud, snow and shallow water, faster on roads... I think there was a proposal for that.

Pathfinder support for non-uniform cost grid got nuked when the JPS rewrite came along. (By Philip). So units would behave kinda dumb now. Might walk through mud literally 1 tile away from a road.

I could be wrong. I don’t know much about pathfinding.

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

Just now, LordGood said:

I think there needs to be a solution to disappearing trees first, vast swathes of forest just disappearing when used up are going to look incredibly silly

to clarify i do like the groves idea, perhaps not so rigid though

When I play it, half the time the grove disappears off screen, and even when I do see it, I know it's a game and not real life, so it doesn't really bother me. But having some "destruction" animations for them would be really cool... random trees falling over as the grove is depleted.

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

1 minute ago, (-_-) said:

Pathfinder support for non-uniform cost grid got nuked when the JPS rewrite came along. (By Philip). So units would behave kinda dumb now. Might walk through mud literally 1 tile away from a road.

I could be wrong. I don’t know much about pathfinding.

Yes, this is correct. Adding terrain or flora effects to unit movement would have to be targeted and obvious, less kitchen sink and more focus.

[elexis]

There are thousands of trees and auras have bad performance (depending on the type of aura. In some cases it can take several seconds to compute). So if anything, it would have to be select few entities (probably the invisible placeholders), as wow and nescio proposed above.

From a coding perspective, I'm not sure if auras are the right way to go about this. A tile-based mechanism might be a considerable alternative. That would allow for example rectangular shaped shallows / river crowssings to be covered precisely. Or a long road without placing many small auras.

That is about movement speed modifiers. But why would a nearby tree change a units attack stats or defense stats? Ambush? Well I guess it's not forbidden to think about that, but it sounds like it could have weird consequences (all players running into the forest to fight?).  (We have trac tickets on Ambush and environmental slowdown, but that probably won't help, and who knows what the design document intended)

(Also it already is slower to walk through a forest, since the units bump into the trees and each other. But perhaps it's not as significant as desirable.)