[CF-Devel] Fog Of War code in Gtk

[crossfire-devel at archives.real-time.com]

Todd Mitchell wrote:
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      In a realtime strategy game fog of war is very much a part of the game
     
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      as these games have an exploration and sphere of influence component as
     
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      part of the game mechanism.  In an RPG - fog of war is not helpful in
     
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      the same way and in fact may even be misleading or unhelpful in some
     
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      conditions since it shows things that were and not thing that are.  Also
     
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      your sphere of influence is a lot smaller and you can move a lot quicker
     
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      in crossfire.   Now a spell that expanded your field of vision is a lot
     
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      more interesting to me than fog of war.
     
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      As for fun - I'm entitled to have an opinion on fun as well.
     
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      Netrek is fun. (this is not an out of the blue reference).
     
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      Automatic food consumption is not really fun.
     
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      Suspense and challange and good gameplay is fun.
     
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      Instant gratification is not always fun.
     
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      Personally I didn't mind the fog of war especially since it is something
     
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      you can turn on and off in the client but you have made me decide not to
     
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      use it for a while to see if I enjoy life more without it.
     
     
  I was about to comment that since fog of war can be turned off, I don't see 
any issue with having it in the game/client.  People can use the tool if they 
want to, disable it if they don't.

  I personally find it is convenient to know if you've grabbed everything on the 
map, without having to re go down every hallway, etc - you can pretty quickly 
see if something is left behind or not.  So in that regard, it is a time saver.

  Re, no darkening of grey - I like it - blue is perhaps a good choice in that 
it is normally used to denote darkness and shadows for most things.  I wonder if 
it could just be a bit more blue, or perhaps instead of adding more blue, reduce 
the intensity of the other colors (eg, leave the blue value as is, but reduce 
the green and red values).

  Or maybe make this a setting, as it seems the color rendering on different 
monitors varies quite a bit - on one of my monitors, it is more blue, and thus 
much more visible a change, compared to the other monitor, where the change in 
color is much more subdued.


  As far as drawing the not visible spaces something different - I think it will 
be difficult to find something that is going to look better than black.

  The problem with smoothing the edges is that it could seem pretty odd if the 
map doesn't otherwise use darkness.  OTOH, it is perhaps more realistic - things 
fade from view.

  One of the things I always wanted to do was have partial blocking.  EG, 
something like fog wouldn't completely obscure your view, but reduce it by say 
50%, so then everything behind it should be darker (effectively).  A second fog 
would block the view 100%.

  This could be really nice for things like forests/jungles - you can see a few 
rows in, with diminishing visibility, and then it just gets completely dark.


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