Adding Automatic Pings like in Planetary Annhilation

phong

@jip If sounds are hard, maybe a visual alternative is within reach? I'm thinking of those threat pips that hover at the edge of your screen, pointing roughly in the direction of said threat, you must have seen that in other games. I think even supcom uses this UI convention for offscreen pings but I'm not 100% sure right now

Jip

The basic idea isn't tough: there are events in Lua that trigger when a unit enters vision. What is tough is deciphering when to send a message: when the first bomber is in vision? When the fifth is? And what if you lose radar, and they get back in vision a few seconds later? Do we resend the same message? And what happens when there's two squads of bombers at the other ends of the map? Do we send two messages?

Technically it is quite easy: the event is there. But sending the right message / ping / sound queue with the correct interpretation of the situation is what sounds difficult to do right.

This is the event:

https://github.com/FAForever/fa/blob/deploy/fafdevelop/lua/aibrain.lua#L262-L275

The event happens in the sim, and therefore would require a sync operation for the UI to be aware of it.

phong

@jip Many humans struggle with these questions as well hahah

"stop pinging me or i ctrl+k"

Thanks for elaborating though.

CocaineDiesel

@jip

Good first pass would be decaying counter that only sounds above a certain threshold of new detections, on a cooldown. With a cooldown between 0.5-1s the number of pings would tell how big of a radar signature is appearing. Only one audio file needed.

OnIntelChange
        DetectionCounter = DetectionCounter + 1
end

RadarPingBeat
        If DetectionCounter > someThreshold and cooldown:IsExpired() then
                PlayPing()
                cooldown:Start()
        end
        DetectionCounter = DetectionCounter * 0.85
end

Not wild about a location based ping, both from a game design standpoint and for the technical overhead it would entail (how do you group the radar blips?).

(And any signal is just another thing you can use to distract your opponent.)

phong

@jip how about icons floating at the edge of the screen of newly-detected threats? They should point in the direction of the units, and be "unstickied" from the edge and not appear again upon zoom-in as soon as the player brought them into view once. This approach side-steps the thresholding issue you brought up and the "flicker" from intermittent radar coverage/vision.

It's a bit removed from the original suggestion but maybe close enough to count.

TheVVheelboy

Well, my stance is the same as FTX. But I wouldn't mind this as sim mod. But definitely not UI one considering the ramifications on the game meta and balance.

Jip

It would at best be a sim mod, yes

FtXCommando

Fine with it being a sim mod too

TheWeakie

Pretty sure the best way to implement this (as a sim mod) is to just give you a warning when you're being attacked somewhere, but even that sounds horrible in practice since a single scout stream over the enemy base will constantly give you pings

HollowSubmarine

Few years ago i tried to make UI mod with similar feature. It was poorly done from ui and performance perspectives. And since i got used to map management i abandoned it.

I am actually not sure if it would even make sense to use it, i just wanted to make something with moderate complexity
But the idea was following:

Besides global notifications add possibility to dynamically mark zones on map (with circles)
Each zone can have different settings based on zone type. So notification will be triggered only if specific conditions are met. For example zone associated with frontbase will trigger notification only in case if building got damaged. While zone associated with homebase will react to any damage to units within it, including shields.
Some global notifications stop working after specific amount of time. For example engs health monitoring would turn off after first 3 minutes of the game.
Notifications triggered based on percent damage received by unit per few seconds, so it won't trigger notification if your factory got attacked by scout
Each notification have priority with global limit: for example not more than 3 notifications per 10 seconds. Urgent notifications bypass this restriction.

PiGuy

Oh wow I forgot I made this topic XD I am going to read all the replies now, I already see some great ideas and counter-points here.