Decide on land unit fishing

[historic_bruno]

Fish have a tiny obstruction radius (0.1) which makes it very difficult for land units to approach and fish them (see this bug report for a demonstration). Fishing ships have no problem because their gather range is much greater at 12m vs. 2m for land units and also they can move in deeper water. While we don't restrict land units from trying to fish, it's almost impossible to do so in practice even if the fish are right along the shore.

Increasing the fish obstruction size doesn't work, there's no value that works for both ships and land units without looking odd. So I think a different solution is needed. Either we should restrict land units from gathering fish (it's not generally an attack - we can't use those restricted classes), or else give them a special fishing behavior with longer range and special animation w/ net or pole, etc. - more work but perhaps added value to gameplay?

(There used to be AI issues with fishing, but now they should simply ignore "SeaCreatures" so there's no terrible problem from the AI perspective. It's a player-usability problem at this point - we misleadingly show land units as being able to fish when they often can't.)

[Erik Johansson]

We could always do things the AoK way and differentiate between shore fish, which can be fished by land units, and other fish, which can't, but can be fished by ships. Not sure how easy it is to make that distinction clear in 3D though.

[historic_bruno]

That's like what we have now, though they aren't visually different, even if we made them distinct the underlying technical problems would exist. In AoK units couldn't go into the water, they had a special animation for fishing with nets at a distance.

[Pureon]

If land units were able to fish it could add variety to the game's early economy, which is currently quite repetitive. A special fishing behaviour that increases fish gathering distance and plays a net throwing animation would be my preference. I don't see complex net throwing animations being possible with the current biped animation, but we should be able to do something with it.

Do many maps have fishing spots near the shoreline?

[wraitii]

Almost none have currently, but it should be easy to add some.

I agree with you on the special fishing behavior, though perhaps, given that our units can slightly go into the water, it would look better to make them fish using spears (one AoE/AoM had that, I believe)?

[historic_bruno]

Replying to Pureon:

Do many maps have fishing spots near the shoreline?

I think they were mostly seen on random maps.

[wraitii]

Those are mostly the consequence of "random" placement of fishes though.

Looking at template codes, it looks like this would require a change to ResourceGatherer.js to support different max Distances for different food subtypes, and that would be about it (bar the animation, obviously). I think generally this would be a pretty good change for "future use", and moddability.

[Pureon]

If we have time we can discuss this in tomorrow's meeting, although i'm fairly confident nobody will be against this behavior.

Wraitii, good point about the spear fishing animation, that would be the easiest option to use.

Scenario maps can easily have shoreline fish added, and the random maps can probably be tweaked too if needed.

[Stan]

Any update on that design decision ?

[Imarok]

Move tickets to Simulation as UI & Simulation got some sub components.