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What's the 'usual' on viewable area? Apparently I'm quite strange, as I like being able to zoom out a respectable distance (far more than games like DoW and CoH allow, for instance), but I imagine SupCom and it's sensible 'why not just let them zoom out, fullscreen map, awareness ++" approach may change the accepted level of visibility.

I simply can't play stuff like DoW where you spend more of your time peering at the tiny, but super-important, minimap. The actual 3d window doesn't zoom out far enough to even see whole battles: without the minimap you'd be boned, but the minimap is tiny, has poor/no filters, etc etc.

This comes to me because I was having a bash at Act of War recently, and High Treason lets you lock the camera to airstrikes. So... the engine is fine with having a camera way up high (the planes are usually 'above' the camera and invisible) and seeing whole towns, streets, sprawling bases, etc. You can even watch the amusing AAA and SAM activity. But you can't play the game from such a vantage point. Why the fuck not? Old stuff like WZ2100 had respectable views and cameras, so why are modern games so limited? Why does a game like Act of War or DoW let me zoom in so far I can count blackheads, but not zoom out enough to actually manage anything?

Because you touch yourself at night, obviously.

More seriously, it probably has to do with limits of sprites and animations and such. Notice in SupCom after you zoom out so much, everything is represented by icons rather than the actual units.

Laziness on the developers part.
You can get around memory limitations easily by using LOD textures (lower quality as you get further away). But then it doesn't look "shiny" and show off the animations and volumetric particles. In CoH and DoA you can modify camera.lua to change the max zoom, but it just adds fog because it doesn't have a decent LOD system.

They did all this work to make them sexily animated, they don't want you pulling back so far that you clog the system and ruin performance. It's like removing your ability to jump in an MMO so they won't have you getting on top of stuff. By intentionally hamstringing their camera, everything looks good all the time, at the cost of it not being wide enough to see anything of use.

With my new vidcard I can finally run SupCom on decent settings, but even then, scrolling back makes it hard to see stuff. What we really need is a more interactive minimap than a more-scrolly main viewer. I would love to give orders directly on the strategic map, rather than clicking around like a madman on the viewer pane. Even SupCom makes it hard to manage at times, since you're always trying to scroll around and grab the units you want while not telling them to do the wrong thing or screwing up a queue'd action.

It should get to the point where the minimap is where I do all my planning, and the viewer pane is just for looking at the glorious sexy action.

DPDarkPrimus wrote:Because you touch yourself at night, obviously.

More seriously, it probably has to do with limits of sprites and animations and such. Notice in SupCom after you zoom out so much, everything is represented by icons rather than the actual units.

But this is my point: there is no middle ground between 'tiny worthless minimap with uninformative dots' and 'zoomed-in awesome models for micromanaging'. SupCom's approach is GOOD, because even if you COULD render eight trillion polys, you'd WANT to overlay icons. Such a fullscreen strategic display would make most RTS's far, far easier to play. Even things like the TW games let you make the minimap as big as you want, to get as much information as you want.

And really, they invented LODding for a reason.

Cov, I sortof agree with you, but I feel that the zomg uber detailed modern RTS stuff is a waste of time if it means you can't see shit. MOST people plan using the minimap... so why is it so fucking small? Why can't you make it bigger, or fullscreen? Why can't you get better filters than 'coloured dots'? These are all reasons why SupComs approach is a good change, but many older RTS's had nice wide views as well.

Yeah, I agree. I wish I had 2 screens. With a dual-screen setup, SupCom puts a full-size minimap up there, letting you command easily while also watching individual actions. It also has the tiny secondary view you can slide around like a second screen.

I don't know why they have such a fetish for small minimaps though. To be honest, my favorite map/viewer handling scheme was in Homeworld. You can zoom way out or way in, but the minimap is huge when you need it to be, there's on-viewer minimap support via iconing of suspected enemy units, and it's all wonderfully intergrated.

I wasn't saying the zubar detailed unats were the better way, just explaining their reasoning, which I believe is flawed. I'd rather see what the hell is going on than tell my soldiers apart from each other. There's a line between FPS and RTS that these games start to blur... when what I'd really prefer is a war sim.

Yes, every RTS since the 90s ignoring the Homeworld map is pretty laughable. Oh no, it's that easy to control multiple fronts and show fullscreen detail for the whole area simultaneous! Let's never, ever do that.

This is probably my biggest pet peeve with The Battle for Middle Earth. For the most part it's an entertaining rts so far, but the damned inability to zoom out to a point where it's actually useful irks the hell out of me and makes it difficult to find units at times. Plenty of RTS managed to get this right, so it's extremely annoying.

BTW, the DoWXP mod for Dawn of War/Dark Crusade lets you zoom out farther. It also makes infantry smaller.

I really like the SupCom system. You can play it almost like a hax wargame if you want, with just icons. (though it's a little hard to precision-place buildings like that) Then, you zoom in on your experimental units to watch the carnage

That's why I liked Jane's Fleet Command. The unsexy 2D "minimap" of your NTDS is where you did anything useful. Sure you can look at the pretty graphics, but you can't issue the order to attack from there (you do bring up the little menu of a unit's action on the 3D view, but you target on 2D).

Of course, this isn't a normal RTS where you resource gather, build units, place buildings, and all the rest of it, but it was still a good setup for trying to control large-scale engagements.

Hawkwings wrote:BTW, the DoWXP mod for Dawn of War/Dark Crusade lets you zoom out farther. It also makes infantry smaller.

What! I must now both download this and dig out my DoW disks.

Hawkwings wrote:I really like the SupCom system. You can play it almost like a hax wargame if you want, with just icons. (though it's a little hard to precision-place buildings like that) Then, you zoom in on your experimental units to watch the carnage

Yeah, actually being able to PLAY strategically, and just zoom in for complex stuff or to watch a battle, is neat. Of course, realistically you're probably not going to have enough time to sit and watch against proper opponents, but SupCom has a robust replay feature.

Why the need for such a far zoom. That would be a clunky solution, because the act of zooming out itself would take time.

Just have a hotkey or mouse button to instantly switch to a top level tactical map that shows the current positions, activities, and paths of all known units and the topography of the whole battlefield.

Battlestations: Midway does that, though I don't know for what scale (it's other mode puts you in direct control of your units). For something like Dawn of War though it would be ideal, as your units are grouped into squads for easy selection and control, so there aren't a hundred different units to select and micromanage.

Even the Kingdom Under Fire games, which have half their chromosomes from Dynasty Warriors allows you to expand the minimap to cover a significant portion of the screen to direct units on it, see where things are going, and check what they're doing (like lining up spearwalls/axe volleys against cavalry charges).

... What.

The need for a wide view is pretty clear, and what does 'the act of zooming itself would take time' mean? How is it relevant to things like the HW system or other 'big map' systems? Call me nuts, but wide-view, icon-based maps might have already been mentioned in this thread.

In SupCom, it takes me about half a second to zoom from all the way out strategic view to a reasonably close standard RTS view. I don't even use the minimap to move my main screen to faraway places anymore. I just zoom out and zoom back in. Saves time and it looks cool.