LoS improvements

[Palaxin]

It would be nice if the line of sight depended on the surrouding terrain, buildings and other big obstacles. Also the field of view could get a more realistic shape.

This would provide a more strategic role for line of sight, I can think of situations like

• scouting an enemy army without being seen
• sneaking from behind to an enemy
• more realistic guerilla warfare between (blocks of) buildings

Terrain

• Simple: adjust LoS like archer's range
• Advanced: units cannot see behind hills/mountains, on top of a plateau (when standing on a lower place) or at the bottom of deep gorges (if not standing at the cliff's edge)

Objects

• Simple: units get an LoS Bonus when garrisoned on a wall (also tower, fortress or ship if implemented)
• Advanced: Buildings and gaia elements like rocks with their height above the unit's eyes (human ~1.5m, mounted units ~2.5m, units on elephants ~4m, units on ships, buildings and siege towers perhaps even more) block the vision behind them.
• Fancy: even if the obstacle's height is below the eyes' height there should be invisible area behind it like shadow is not "visible" for the sun; also smaller objects like trees or large animals could partially block vision (I don't know if this would demand too much resources for a large amount of units and therefore lead to game lags)

Field of View

Humans have a ​field of view of about 180° with decreasing vision quality at the edges. Animals have various angles and therefore a field of view in the shape of circular sectors. Actually I think it is debatable if animals should have an LoS since they can't communicate and therefore can't provide information - perhaps they could show some passive reaction if they detect something interesting instead?

• Simple: LoS offset towards the current viewing direction
• Advanced: semicircle LoS for humans and other circular sectors for animals (if they have LoS)
• Fancy: modified "semicircle" LoS with less vision range at the edges e.g. vision range is described by something like r(θ)=sin(θ)*R for 0<=θ<=π where R=r(θ=π/2)=r(θ=90°) is the vision range straight forward. For animals the sine function would have to be stretched to match the specific maximum angle.

[Lionkanzen]

Again, need be discussed.

[Palaxin]

Ok, I have made ​this thread open for discussion.

[Palaxin]

Seems there is not much room for improvement at the moment... In the far future perhaps

[leper]

Parts of this are going to be hopelessly inefficient, other parts are balancing, other parts are config settings. All in all not really something for trac, and you already have a forum topic.