Commander Drawing Map
The_Disposed
Join Date: 2007-05-29 Member: 61052Members
Join Date: 2007-05-29 Member: 61052Members
The commander can click on a map button to bring the map up then he can draw on it to show places he wants the marines to attack or avoid. The marines will see a message saying Your map has been updated ,they can then see what the commander has drawn. there is also a clear button if the com wants to draw a new strategy.
what you think?
what you think?
Comments
That really is one of the best ideas I have seen.
I would tweak it like so:
1) Instead of clicking on the minimap have give the commander a bind to bring up the full scale map.
2) the the com draw on, or at least ping, the minimap for quick notes.
These notes should be visible both on the marines' minimaps as well as their full map.
Also, some sort of notification that there is a new map note should be there. I would personally just say a small bar under the marines' minimaps that lights up when there is at least one new note (clear it when the marine pulls up their map). There should NOT be notifications every time the commander puts something new up, just a steady (not blinking or anything) note that says there is a new note.
The Com should have the ability to send a quick audio message to his marines that they should go look at the map, but nothing automatic as that could just get annoying. I know that having an audio alert is kinda superfluous (after all a GOOD com should be on VC any way), however this is obviously a suggestion aimed at helping new and less experienced players (A clanner will know exactly what you mean when you tell them to "go guard via").
all in all, an excellent Idea that I am still surprised I never saw before.
EDIT: Learn to spell Shotgun, Shockeh....
Seriously, why has this not been brought up before?
all in all, an excellent Idea that I am still surprised I never saw before.
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It has several times <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/smile-fix.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":)" border="0" alt="smile-fix.gif" /> atleast in the ns1 I&S
and i agree that comm should get some full map, something like "supreme commander"s (rts game) zoomed out view so he dont need to scroll through the map all the time;
in supreme commander , you can zoom out from the common rts view of the battlefiled ( where you see a small area ) , to any level up to the overview of the whole map on the single screen, and at some zoom level you get an icon overlay , these icons show the type of unit or building , so even if something is a single pixel in that zoom level, you can see what is in there easily, the minimap in the corner works just the same way, so you can use the big overview and small preview of the battle for example. maybe i should call that strategy view to make it easier to tell what i mean ;d just play SuCo if you cant imagine that ;d properly ;p
ive just realised that SuCo has a waypoint system that looks like the one i suggested earlier it this post ;d following an idea in the thread, of course units there cant disobey the waypoints ;d
<img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/tounge.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":p" border="0" alt="tounge.gif" />.
But yeah this is a nice idea, just it would be hard to do without over complicating it or making it look cheap. being able to pin simple icons on the map would be good imo, like a red X to stop ppl walking their all the time <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/smile-fix.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":)" border="0" alt="smile-fix.gif" />, or an alien rt icon or alien hive icon so the commander can notify his team where rts and hive are. In fact as i ramble i love this idea more and more.
I don't think drawing is necessary.
(sounds harder to code)
Multiple (maybe colored) waypoints would be helpful.
Again I am going refeence Company Of Heroes ...cause I am playing it.
It has specific markers for attack and defend that you can use to coordinate attacks with other teams.
on the minimap you can just drag your mouse over it and start drawing a yellow line for everyone too see, and it dissapears after a certain amount of time
simplistic yet effective
and it could be expanded to just stay until a button removes it and only the commander can draw.
I like it.
They had a blue box that meant deffend here, a green circle that meant generic waypoint and a red cross hair that meant attack here.
Its simple and quicker for the commander to place them instead of having to draw lines or write text and effective.
If for example the commander wanted to set a route he would drop a line of generic waypoints with an attack waypoint at the end.
Perhaps if the commander holds shift while dropping the waypoints they automatically link with a line from one to another?
Also I think these waypoints should be squad assignable and GLOBAL assignable...
Whilst squads only see the squad assignable ones, the entire team would see the GLOBAL ones.
I remember a game of Alien Swarm where all 4 players started abusing the minimap and you couldnt see ###### for that few seconds, another time there wasnt enough time to draw something usefull as it vanished before you could make it out.
Here is an example of a simple flash drawing application: <a href="http://www.actionscript.org/resources/articles/10/1/Creating-a-Dynamic-Drawing-application-in-Flash/Page1.html" target="_blank">http://www.actionscript.org/resources/arti...lash/Page1.html</a>
1. A way for the com to just set a waypoint like in NS1, but in addition... i want that feature from DeadSpace which draws a path from where you are standing to the destination.
2. Now that 1 has seriously buffed the waypointing system of NS, all that's left is for the com to add information to the map that doesn't come standard. So, perhaps give him only semi-transparent brushes (because as we have seen in AlienSwarm, the solid kind can easily obscure the map). Also perhaps a PAINT-BUCKET tool, so he can just click on a room and fill it with a tinted shade (good way to indicate critical rooms to the team and aid in communication). If the paint-bucket tool is to hard to implement... then i guess a sort of rubber-stamp tool to plop down some shapes fast.
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In practice, and with reference to point #1:
Com notices a RT is going down.
He clicks the RT, and decides to specify he only needs <u>4 marines</u> for this task.
--- <b>Now the game takes over</b> ---
Immediately the game routes the <u>4 closest marines</u> to the destination (perhaps it also auto-selects based on their K/D ratio and/or weapons/health... or just closest marines, depending on the priority option set). The 4 marines see some notification on screen, in the form of LIVE-TOP-DOWN-VIEW VIDEO of the destination the whole time they are working the objective [top right or left of screen] (remember state of the bad-ass art :P), and they see a painted path on the floor automatically routing them to the destination.
All of this efficiently executed without the com needing to manually micro-manage the situation (to find marines on the map and relay the order with a microphone to marines by name), and with the minimal of effort. And best of all it would work flawlessly with multiple coms.
Perhaps a similar idea can be provided for the rambo-alien team, to make them more team oriented (and give the alien-queen something to do).
This involves sending rather large image files over the network - every commander drawing is an image the same size as the full screen map image. Usually games store all the image files locally to avoid this, or they download them once when you connect (like when you join a server with a map you don't have). HalfLife games send player spray images over the network, but they are limited to a small size and it's done at round start to minimize the bandwidth hit, rather than in the middle of the game.
Commander minimap drawings would have to be sent to all players whenever they change, so you'd need to keep the data size small.
You could address this by making it lower res than the actual map image, and only one colour, and maybe use something like the .tga format's RLE (run length encoding) to compress it (run length encoding compresses big blocks of one colour by just saying "next comes 250 pixels of transparent" instead of having 250 entries with the colour value for transparent).
If you limited it to a vector format - eg the comm builds a drawing out of straight lines and text instead of pixels, or picks from a menu of pre-determined markers - you could get the size even smaller.
So, assuming you could optimize the size of the data, this is a great idea.
1. A way for the com to just set a waypoint like in NS1, but in addition... i want that feature from DeadSpace which draws a path from where you are standing to the destination.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
O hell ya!!!! ^^
<!--quoteo(post=0:date=:name=THE TWITTER NEWS)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (THE TWITTER NEWS)</div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->"Working on waypoints. Hoping for a "breadcrumb" trail that shows marines exactly where to go (and A/V feedback as you reach them)"<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
It'll be gold in NS2.