So whoever's played Planetary Annihilation is familiar with the auto-ping system, every time a group of units are attacked, or a sometimes if a certain building has finished being constructed IIRC, a ping is sent to the player with a camera position.
Would it possible to implement something like this into FAF? And perhaps for its "sensitivity" to be adjustable? Since different players may want more or less pings.
Many games use sound cues to notify you of attacked units, finished buildings etc. I always perceived the lack of these as a deliberate choice of the developers. "You got the ability to see the whole map at once, so now use this feature. We will not babysit you by telling you about everything on top of that."
It certainly made the game harder, but found it kinda cool to completely lean into the strategic zoom feature
Those choices always suck (in strategic view games), BAR has that and it just makes the whole distinction between active and passive intel worthless. Being able to abuse human error and get a drop or a few bombers through while enemy is prioritizing some bait you put elsewhere is one of the best skill aspects of the game. Get some random AI voice to go HEY YOU GOT THE 3 STRATS COMING IN FROM THE NORTH MAKE SURE U SEND THE NEXT ASF ROTATION THERE just encourages lazy gameplay and removes nuance in aggression.
To everyone shitting on this idea, please keep in mind that a vast majority of FAF games are unrated. There's nothing in the opening post that even suggests it's mainly about competitive rated games. The post isn't submitted in a balance sub-forum, it's in general suggestions.
It's an interesting idea put forth in a respectful and eloquent way by the OP. It could help new players come to grips with the tradeoffs that strategic zoom forces one to make if implemented well, even if it deviates from the original game's vision which we can only speculate on or it has to be restricted to non-rated games (a premature conversation before an implementation even exists).
It's sad to see @FtXCommando ignore all that, interpret the suggestion in the most uncharitable way possible, and then go into that embarrassing hyperbolic mouth-froth pantomime of the OP.
To everyone shitting on this idea, please keep in mind that a vast majority of FAF games are unrated.
I keep hearing this, but I am pretty sure playtime is much higher for rated games, the amount of games is a pretty irrelevant metric. A single DualGap game has 11 more players than a single player game vs AI.
@femtozetta maybe you have some stats to back that up? I'm basing my statement on data posted by @Jip here.
40k unique players in games with AI vs let's say 5k ladder players. 400k AI games vs maybe 15k ladder games.
That's orders of magnitude difference both in player count and number of games. Unless AI games end after 5 minutes on average (they don't), I can't see how playtime could be in the same ballpark.
Even if it was, that wouldn't mean what @PiGuy suggested isn't worth discussing. And even if it wasn't, that wouldn't warrant such a shit take on their inoffensive post.
There are other ranked games that are not ladder.
That's about 233k global games in 2022. Almost 90k of those are DualGap. You can still assume that the AI games are probably around 2 or less players per game and the global games are at least like 7 or 8 players on average. The DualGaps alone should already come close to the playtime of AI games.
I'd like this for when a scout (or any unit) discovers something interesting.
There's also notifications for building upgrades but feels like those could be expanded.
@femtozetta can you estimate how many of those custom games were rated? Also, what of it? Even if only half the players were non-competitive, would that justify the focus of the conversation around this suggestion being about how it would affect rated games when there isn't even a concrete implementation yet, as opposed to how it could help new players if it were implemented in the first place? Or the shitposting?
All of them should be rated because I chose "Leaderboard:Global". It filters stuff like unranked maps automatically. Maybe desyncs are in there, but those would still have been rated if not for a bug. Also idc about the topic, I am just replying to the statement that the vast majority of games are not competitive multiplayer.
OK @FemtoZetta , maybe you find this more agreeable: a significant number of play-time hours are non-competitive. Many new players start out playing such games, many never even go on to play rated at all. I hope that's not controversial to say.
More training wheels for a game with such a steep learning curve could increase the fraction of players that make the jump from non-competitive games, at which point they're already contributing more to the competitive community by, at the very least, filling lobbies. You should care about the topic because player count is the kind of thing that decides if the game will still be alive and playable competitively years from now.
Let me chime back in and say that the framing of "automatically give information to the player that they could otherwise access" as a balance issue instead of a game design one (and all the focus on ranked vs unranked that's ensued) was probably the wrong way to go about it.
I see value in the idea of the OP, it reminds me how much more immersive Deserts of Kharak was because you could get overloaded with information during a battle.
And that is sort of the issue: I think it would be great to increase immersion for the average casual game (against AIs, usually). But for competitive play it would prevent you from being able to divert the attention of your opponent, as @FtXCommando describes
And last: it sounds like a lot of man hours to implement. Not just the code, but also the audio files is difficult to get correct.
A work of art is never finished, merely abandoned
@blackyps I'm not sure but it's an interesting question.
One way I can think of is promoting this as a companion mod wherever the various AI mods advertise their features, the same way other mod communities organize when they want to avoid making mod-packs and uber-mods for other, technical reasons.
Another, more ambitious way is possible to envision if any of the single-player scenario builders like @speed2 ever considers making or adapting some training missions and feels such a mod might help.
Until then, maybe a sticky news post could serve as a guide for new players, pointing out how to play the campaign, how to play vs all the different AIs and providing info on such helper mods as this.
Shipping faf with noob-helper mods pre-activated might even be justified the same way (some, I think?) AI mods were recently added in automatically for new users. Making sure such mods are deactivated to ensure the game is rated would be up to custom game hosts, but it might be easier to burden them with this task instead of completely new players with finding such mods if we can't come up with a better on-boarding experience.
@jip couldn't garden variety pings be "issued" instead of making a parallel system? I'm sure there's a reason why they couldn't, I was just curious. Unfortunate to hear it's such a daunting task though.
It does bring up a trivia question, though, maybe some AI dev could chime in: technically, can an AI ally ping a human player? If yes, that would be an interesting way of realizing such a feature, and a good way of making sure new players get to see it. I'm no programmer but this feels like the kind of problem that's right up that alley and an AI might already implement much of the functionality needed for such a feature, like detecting threats, for instance.
@jip If sounds are hard, maybe a visual alternative is within reach? I'm thinking of those threat pips that hover at the edge of your screen, pointing roughly in the direction of said threat, you must have seen that in other games. I think even supcom uses this UI convention for offscreen pings but I'm not 100% sure right now
The basic idea isn't tough: there are events in Lua that trigger when a unit enters vision. What is tough is deciphering when to send a message: when the first bomber is in vision? When the fifth is? And what if you lose radar, and they get back in vision a few seconds later? Do we resend the same message? And what happens when there's two squads of bombers at the other ends of the map? Do we send two messages?
Technically it is quite easy: the event is there. But sending the right message / ping / sound queue with the correct interpretation of the situation is what sounds difficult to do right.
This is the event:
The event happens in the sim, and therefore would require a sync operation for the UI to be aware of it.
A work of art is never finished, merely abandoned
@jip Many humans struggle with these questions as well hahah
"stop pinging me or i ctrl+k"
Thanks for elaborating though.