Strategic Preview

[nine2]

This is a work in progress.

See the following rendering of the map Crimson Feud:


Dark green are cliffs too steep to walk. Red is reclaim. Bright red is more mass-valuable reclaim. If you squint, you can see the wrecks at the top-left and bottom-right are brighter than the others, these are t2 tanks worth 250 mass. This map has 2923 mass in wrecks and 6061 mass in props (trees/rocks). This map has no civs, no water. And now you know know a lot about this map before you play it.

In ranked there is a new (to me) map called Balmy. Apparently it looks like this:


But when you play it you realise it’s really much more complicated, and not balmy at all, it’s downright evil:


I have added the red lines, which are actually impassable cliffs, which is critical to know and is completely not obvious for a long time.
Here is my version of the map preview:

It clearly shows what is passable or not, and where all of the reclaim is.

I can’t be the only person who wished they had seen this image before playing their first match on Loki:

(p.s. there is a bug here not showing all of the reclaim yet)

Another painful new (to me) map was Zorg Rampage.

This map has 63000 mass in reclaim, most of which is in the civs in the middle I guess. I’m not showing civs yet by the way. The largest rock contains only 10 mass, but combined they add up to 11426.

That is essentially the concept of the strategic preview. Now I’ll go through a few things I recently discovered about existing maps.

Forbidden Pass

Red: You can send an entire army down the red pathway, other player doesn’t have an equivalent.
Yellow: You can walk through the mountain ranges.
Pink: Is it just me or does left have way more reclaim than right?

Sathira Beach

Good to know where you can actually walk, a lot of the island looks impassable which is not true.
The dark blue (purple?) indicates where underwater units (eg: acu) cannot walk. So your ACU cannot walk to the top island but can to the bottom.
Yellow: Map problem? The top player gets an extra cliff that is quite useful, near the middle.

Regor VI Highlands

Yellow: there are pathways where you wouldn’t expect.

Fields of Thunder

Yellow: You cant walk there.

Gap of Rohan:

Yellow: Top has one gap, bottom has two? (untested)

Paradise3v3

Does top mid have more reclaim than bottom mid?

Mezmerizing Paradise:

Q. Do you have to drop on the islands? A: Some of them
Note how hostile this map is to units walking on ocean floor.

Moonlight

The good reclaim is in the middle

Craptastical

This map is so simple, yet it took me a while to understand it (without the benefit of this image).

Massif

Does bottom left have more reclaim than top right? Looks like it (you have to consider brightness as well as volume)

Canis 4v4

I can visualize the chokepoints so much better now.

Tabula Rasa

I can visualize the chokepoints so much better now.

Craftious Maximus

Would be good for new players.

Twin Rivers

The first few times I played this I didn’t know you had to drop the islands, didn’t know back spot was protected by cliff, didn’t know about reclaim in middle.

Cobalt Valley

Just because it is pretty. I guess it’s also useful to know about those side passages on the sides.

Todo:

- Show mex, hydro, start positions
- Show civs
- Fix bugs
- Different colour water if can submerge acu
- Improve the legibility of reclaim.

Basically the strategic preview aims to prepare a player for battle. Where do you have to drop? Where is the reclaim? Where are the civs? How much reclaim is there? Where can you walk?

I’d love to see it in the lobby, so you can come up with a plan before the game starts.
I’d love to see it in the loading screen, so you can think whilst it’s loading (ranked).
I’d love to see it in the game itself, and just display my version instead of the real map.

Doubt any of that is possible except the first one.

If there is any interest I could post updates, or make a website, or send them somewhere, or something.

From a technical point of view, to do this I had to load the map files to get the heightmap and position of the props and wrecks (thank you Hazard X for map loading code). I then loaded the FA/FAF lua files to work out the mass value of the props and wrecks. I did all that in C#

[Lionhardt]

This is great!

[Golol]

this is really cool! the only (small) problem i see right now that reclaim field witha few large rocks seem much smaller than forests. If I was a new player I wouldn't go for the middle mass on twin rivers for example. Still the idea of those maps is pretty nice

[ZLO_RD]

THAT IS AWESOME!!!
can we have both previews in lobby?

[Exotic_Retard]

this. both previews with a button switching from the normal one to this one. that would be great.

also how much time does it take to create a preview of a map? can it be automated?

you said something about you opening each map, but i dont know any coding or anything :/

in any case the point is: will it take you a huge amount of time (5min/map) to do all the maps in the vault or can this be automated and finish in an hour?

also having tree and rock/wreck reclaim in different colours would be epic, if possible

maybe make wrecks with more value bigger dots? not sure how good this will be since resolution of preview is quite low

[Lionhardt]

Ideally this would get integrated as a vault function. When a new map or a new version of an old map gets uploaded it will automatically be analyzed and this picture be placed inside the map folder on the server. The game then reads out the file for the lobby. At least that's how I could imagine it working.

[Duck_42]

Just a thought, but it should be possible to create these mini maps ahead of time and then load them into the game at run time. Not sure if you could display it in the minimap UI or not, but it might be worth looking at.

[nine2]

Thanks guys. I guess this is how it would work:

I could write a script to generate the preview for each map and inject it into the map zips. It may take hours to run but it is a once off so doesn't matter. Users would have to delete their cached map folder to get the updated map versions.

Like Lionhardt says, we would need to run the same script against new maps as they get uploaded.

Then someone would have to change the lobby code to display the image. I could proooobably do this.

Obviously would need zep's seal of approval so I'll PM him now.

And Duck, if I could get this into the minimap I would have very happy. I'll investigate this but really I doubt it. There is a greater chance that I could make my own minimap window that displays the image, but it wouldn't show units and wouldn't have orders, and wouldn't be very good. If anyone out there knows anything about this, I'd love to hear from you.

[Ze_PilOt]

I don't get why you want to make an extra function while we have a minimap feature that is broken and just need to be fixed.

Open a FA map, resave it with the editor. Now the minimap is missing. Compare both, you now know where the minimap should be included and how.

Or just ask HazardX (basic infos : http://www.gamereplays.org/community/in ... pic=176526).

[ax0lotl]

Really nice work.

I'd love to see a larger version in the popup-map in the game lobby (when you press the magnification glass). That is the place where I study a map, when it's new to me.

On your picture of Craftious Maximus I don't see the areas with stones marked (while areas with trees are)? Like I did here in blue. They give about 950 mass per side.

craftious.jpg (193.09 KiB) Viewed 4192 times