Fog of war

I'd be happy if there was a clearer difference on the main view between mapped space and visible space - maybe give the invisible space a shade of blue or something. Oh, and having it remember where resources are, but I already said that one.

Both good ideas, and they don't sound very hard to code. I would love to see them in the expansion pack.

-Drake

~SDC~

The Fog of war isn't working at all. I just met the altarians on a planet I explored but had since moved everything beyond sight range.

I would also like to see resources stay rather than disappear. Think about it. An area should appear like it did when you last saw it untill the area is seen again. I think our stellar cartography division would have the smarts to mark a resource on a map.

I double and triple all of that!

~SDC~

I'm at uni now, so I'm not sure, but the "show ships" option on the minimap turns on/off starbases too, right? (never bothered turning it off.) If that's the case, they could set resources at the same level as stars (i.e. always shown), and if you have "show ships" selected, then it'll show a starbase on top.
So you could easily see which starbases are parked on top of resources across the galaxy by turning the show ships off/on for a sec. Of course, you still have to find them before that happens.

The last seen idea makes sense, especially for starbases. It's pretty silly that you can see every single ship defending a planet, but you can't remember where a starbase was

Um, you can set it so the Top Right map shows what is unexplored. I think you have to turn off sector influence.

Small map shows unexplored areas, but in very stupid way. If any part of sector is explored whole sectors shows as explored.

On gigantic map there can easily be big unexplored areas that are 1.998 sectors wide because some ship explored 0.001 from edge. Then just have to go through your space to check if there are such things, and of course without zoom it is not nice...


~SDC~

The reason that there isn't true FOW on the minimap is that it REALLY drags down the framerate.  Our painting code is a pig, the person who wrote it isn't here for us to castigate, and we didn't have time to completely re-write it, so we were only able to optimize it somewhat.  We're going to spend some time for Gal Civ 2 in figuring out a better solution, and we'll probably be able to apply that to Gal Civ 1.

Would it be possible to show 3 levels of exploration status? In addition to current unexplored and explored it would have partly explored. That shouldn't be too hard and would help locating unexplored areas.


~SDC~

What we wanted to do in GC 1 was to break the minimap up into subsectors and paint the fow by subsector instead of sector. Is that what you're talking about?

Hi CariElf

Galciv 2 is in progress???? (your first post in this thread):SURPRISED:
Wow exciting!

Just throwing in my own comments:

I think the fog of war should be made more distinct. Currently, it's a purple haze on a black/purple backgroung, which can be slightly difficult to see what is covered and what isn't - especially for colourblindness (which is a seperate issue).

As an option (.ini or GUI-based), I suggest displaying the fog as a dark to medium-dark gray. That will make it much easier to identify fog at a glance.

I was thinking just showing fow status for sector, just like it is now. But have 3 different states.

Totally unexplored sector. Current implementation. Or some new color.
Partly explored sector. New background color.
Explored sector. Current implementation.

I would think that would be fastest and easiest way. I would think that because sector is actually quite small area it wouldn't be interesting which part of sector is actually unexplored, just would need to know what sectors have unexplored parts so know where to look more closely.

Of course it wouldn't be bad idea to show fow status by subsector



~SDC~

Was there ever any thought given to hiding planets from view that were in unexplored sectors? I don't think I've ever seen the AI use scouts to it's advantage even once. Is it the levels I'm playing at? A little mystery never hurt. Of course, smacking that annoying AI for knowing where resources and habitable planets are is a must with that scenario. Ah, well, maybe I'm just thinking of something different. GalCiv is a great game, and I stand as one of the 'casual' few.

~SDC~

The reasoning behind being able to see stars once you've explored them was that once you knew that they were there, they weren't going to move...