New 'formations' and/or Flow Field into F.A?

Post here any idea about current FA Balance.
REMINDER : This is NOT a community balance forum. The thread ideas won't be used in a patch.
Forum rules REMINDER : This is NOT a community balance forum. The thread ideas won't be used in a patch.

New 'formations' and/or Flow Field into F.A?

Postby Crayfish » 25 Apr 2012, 12:51

Even though it gets next to no use / discussion now, the formation system was highly touted and discussed before the release of Vanilla Supcom, but proved to be extremely limited and under realised at time of release. Despite the practical difficulties with F.A's pathfinding that really hold it back, the (2) formations themselves never seemed the most usefull possibilites to me. I was wondering if it was possible to mod in extra formation options?
The main one I always thought that should have been included is a 'scatter' formation where all selected units spread out in a radius away from eachother. This would help reduce the amount of micro needed when coming under bomber / artillery / naval bombardment and any other splash heavy attack.

Also, this is probably engine limited, prohibitively complicated and timeconsuming, but just wanted to ask about the possibility of working the fantastic Flow Field path finding system into F.A? This was one of the (few) truly great advances made in Supcom 2, and would be amazing to have in F.A.
For those not informed, here is the Flow field system compared to F.A's:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jA2epda-RkM
http://grail.cs.washington.edu/projects/crowd-flows/
LIBERTE
User avatar
Crayfish
Contributor
 
Posts: 166
Joined: 18 Apr 2012, 22:55
Has liked: 0 time
Been liked: 9 times
FAF User Name: Crayfish

Re: New 'formations' and/or Flow Field into F.A?

Postby uberge3k » 25 Apr 2012, 13:34

Crayfish wrote:I was wondering if it was possible to mod in extra formation options?
The main one I always thought that should have been included is a 'scatter' formation where all selected units spread out in a radius away from eachother. This would help reduce the amount of micro needed when coming under bomber / artillery / naval bombardment and any other splash heavy attack.

You already have that. :)

Select a group of tanks and give them an Assist order to another unit. They will spread out in a circle around it.

Crayfish wrote:Also, this is probably engine limited, prohibitively complicated and timeconsuming, but just wanted to ask about the possibility of working the fantastic Flow Field path finding system into F.A? This was one of the (few) truly great advances made in Supcom 2, and would be amazing to have in F.A.

Unfortunately it is indeed engine limited. Maybe after GPG makes FA open source it would be possible (hint hint hint GPG ;)).
Ze_PilOt wrote:If you want something to happen, do it yourself.
User avatar
uberge3k
Supreme Commander
 
Posts: 1034
Joined: 04 Sep 2011, 13:46
Has liked: 2 times
Been liked: 48 times
FAF User Name: TAG_UBER

Re: New 'formations' and/or Flow Field into F.A?

Postby Ze_PilOt » 25 Apr 2012, 13:53

Even if it's doable in lua, I bet that it will be slower than the current pathfinding.
Nossa wrote:I've never played GPG or even heard of FA until FAF started blowing up.
User avatar
Ze_PilOt
Supreme Commander
 
Posts: 8985
Joined: 24 Aug 2011, 18:41
Location: fafland
Has liked: 18 times
Been liked: 376 times
FAF User Name: Ze_PilOt

Re: New 'formations' and/or Flow Field into F.A?

Postby Jace » 25 Apr 2012, 14:06

SC2 has much less units so you can go for more recource eating algorithms. And that flow field sure eats lots of recources.
Jace
Avatar-of-War
 
Posts: 178
Joined: 12 Apr 2012, 09:26
Has liked: 0 time
Been liked: 0 time

Re: New 'formations' and/or Flow Field into F.A?

Postby Crayfish » 25 Apr 2012, 14:54

Jace wrote:SC2 has much less units so you can go for more recource eating algorithms. And that flow field sure eats lots of recources.

Could those be spilt off onto other cores, or are they intrinsically part of the 'sim thread'?
LIBERTE
User avatar
Crayfish
Contributor
 
Posts: 166
Joined: 18 Apr 2012, 22:55
Has liked: 0 time
Been liked: 9 times
FAF User Name: Crayfish

Re: New 'formations' and/or Flow Field into F.A?

Postby uberge3k » 25 Apr 2012, 14:58

At the moment the only thing we can do is implement it in lua (which would be no small feat!). And lua is, well, slow. :) Throwing more threads at it is unlikely to make a big difference with this, as the threading we have access to is optimized for "making sure you don't hard lock your PC with a casual mod", rather than low level performance.

It's really something that we would need access to the engine to fix.
Ze_PilOt wrote:If you want something to happen, do it yourself.
User avatar
uberge3k
Supreme Commander
 
Posts: 1034
Joined: 04 Sep 2011, 13:46
Has liked: 2 times
Been liked: 48 times
FAF User Name: TAG_UBER

Re: New 'formations' and/or Flow Field into F.A?

Postby Karottenrambo » 25 Apr 2012, 16:09

The current pathfinding would be fine, if the units would not be stunned when they bump each other and if the delay between given move-command and executing move-command not extremly increase with the unit amount.
User avatar
Karottenrambo
Avatar-of-War
 
Posts: 189
Joined: 31 Aug 2011, 23:04
Has liked: 0 time
Been liked: 0 time

Re: New 'formations' and/or Flow Field into F.A?

Postby Crayfish » 25 Apr 2012, 22:31

Btw, would it be possible to bring back air formation bombing? You used to be able to fly bombers in formation over targets and they would bomb 'in formation'. This got taken out in one of the patches, maybe 98 or 99 I dont remember, but this was a really cool feature that I had looked forward to since the announcement of formations before Vanilla's release. Unfortuantely it got removed just as bombers were made cheap enough to actually be worth building.
Anyone?
LIBERTE
User avatar
Crayfish
Contributor
 
Posts: 166
Joined: 18 Apr 2012, 22:55
Has liked: 0 time
Been liked: 9 times
FAF User Name: Crayfish

Re: New 'formations' and/or Flow Field into F.A?

Postby AdmiralZeech » 26 Apr 2012, 18:02

Crayfish wrote:Btw, would it be possible to bring back air formation bombing? You used to be able to fly bombers in formation over targets and they would bomb 'in formation'. This got taken out in one of the patches, maybe 98 or 99 I dont remember, but this was a really cool feature that I had looked forward to since the announcement of formations before Vanilla's release. Unfortuantely it got removed just as bombers were made cheap enough to actually be worth building.
Anyone?


I have named this feature "Carpet Bombing" and have been calling for its return for 5+ years :P
I wrote a mod for vanilla bringing the feature back. Never bothered to port it when FA came out though.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ng_-jkaRGZA

So yeah, join my Carpet Bombing fanclub hahaha.
AdmiralZeech
Priest
 
Posts: 364
Joined: 17 Sep 2011, 16:56
Has liked: 1 time
Been liked: 62 times

Re: New 'formations' and/or Flow Field into F.A?

Postby FunkOff » 26 Apr 2012, 18:11

I considered adding carpet bombing to FAF patch a long time ago... but I think it has too many balance implications to just be tossed into the game without proper testing.
FunkOff
Supreme Commander
 
Posts: 1863
Joined: 26 Aug 2011, 17:27
Has liked: 14 times
Been liked: 43 times
FAF User Name: FakeOff

Next

Return to FA Balance Discussions

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 1 guest