Adding Automatic Pings like in Planetary Annhilation

phong

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.

BlackYps

How would you communicate the existence of this feature in ai games but not in multiplayer games?

CocaineDiesel

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.

Jip

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.

phong

@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.

phong

@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.

phong

@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

Jip

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:

https://github.com/FAForever/fa/blob/deploy/fafdevelop/lua/aibrain.lua#L262-L275

The event happens in the sim, and therefore would require a sync operation for the UI to be aware of it.

phong

@jip Many humans struggle with these questions as well hahah

"stop pinging me or i ctrl+k"

Thanks for elaborating though.

CocaineDiesel

@jip

Good first pass would be decaying counter that only sounds above a certain threshold of new detections, on a cooldown. With a cooldown between 0.5-1s the number of pings would tell how big of a radar signature is appearing. Only one audio file needed.

OnIntelChange
        DetectionCounter = DetectionCounter + 1
end

RadarPingBeat
        If DetectionCounter > someThreshold and cooldown:IsExpired() then
                PlayPing()
                cooldown:Start()
        end
        DetectionCounter = DetectionCounter * 0.85
end

Not wild about a location based ping, both from a game design standpoint and for the technical overhead it would entail (how do you group the radar blips?).

(And any signal is just another thing you can use to distract your opponent.)

phong

@jip how about icons floating at the edge of the screen of newly-detected threats? They should point in the direction of the units, and be "unstickied" from the edge and not appear again upon zoom-in as soon as the player brought them into view once. This approach side-steps the thresholding issue you brought up and the "flicker" from intermittent radar coverage/vision.

It's a bit removed from the original suggestion but maybe close enough to count.

TheVVheelboy

Well, my stance is the same as FTX. But I wouldn't mind this as sim mod. But definitely not UI one considering the ramifications on the game meta and balance.

Jip

It would at best be a sim mod, yes

FtXCommando

Fine with it being a sim mod too

TheWeakie

Pretty sure the best way to implement this (as a sim mod) is to just give you a warning when you're being attacked somewhere, but even that sounds horrible in practice since a single scout stream over the enemy base will constantly give you pings

HollowSubmarine

Few years ago i tried to make UI mod with similar feature. It was poorly done from ui and performance perspectives. And since i got used to map management i abandoned it.

I am actually not sure if it would even make sense to use it, i just wanted to make something with moderate complexity
But the idea was following:

Besides global notifications add possibility to dynamically mark zones on map (with circles)
Each zone can have different settings based on zone type. So notification will be triggered only if specific conditions are met. For example zone associated with frontbase will trigger notification only in case if building got damaged. While zone associated with homebase will react to any damage to units within it, including shields.
Some global notifications stop working after specific amount of time. For example engs health monitoring would turn off after first 3 minutes of the game.
Notifications triggered based on percent damage received by unit per few seconds, so it won't trigger notification if your factory got attacked by scout
Each notification have priority with global limit: for example not more than 3 notifications per 10 seconds. Urgent notifications bypass this restriction.

PiGuy

Oh wow I forgot I made this topic XD I am going to read all the replies now, I already see some great ideas and counter-points here.