I think that gameplay is currently too vehicle-focused, which is understandable, as infantry combat isn't well suited for wide-open areas. However, gameplay inside of buildings goes against Empire's RTS/FPS-style gameplay, as the commander would not be able to see what goes on inside those structures and would unable to be able to target enemies and such. Increasing the commander's effectiveness and influence in such circumstances could increase the amount of variation of gameplay, as structures would no longer be "best under-used" from a mappers point of view. Allowing the commander to see into structures would be a significant step towards this goal. I didn't mean X-ray literally, any other buzzword that would allow seeing on the other side of things would suffice. I am unsure on it's availability, it may be a interesting idea to have this view-mode a researchable ability, as that would increase the variation of research away from the very bland "do more damage" and "take less damage".
what about a trait for mapping matierials that make them invisible to com and visible to players(see throuh buildings)
That's mostly because classic maps with lots of buildings are kind of impossible atm. emp_king is one of them (the southeast).
Wouldn't work with optimised buildings. The world inside them doesn't exist as far as the people outside them are concerned. Particularly wouldn't work with king, several of the buildings are in separate areas.
i for one avoid making them because of the lack of this brush i suggest making it only 50% opacity in stead of invisible, so you can still see if players walk on top that they are not flying
I mean, you could turn the brush into a displacement on the visible sides, and the back would be invisible for all intensive purposes, but yeah...
NS allocates the roof brush (and other that you give a property to) as see-through for their top-down commander. Something similar might help. Then again, NS is all indoors fighting so it was a necessity. I'm not sure that games with commanders should really have more buildings. The urban setting, while it can be fun, really limits tanks which are the hallmark of Empires. I really don't want to play a worse version of Team Fortress with gimp turrets and crappy animations shooting building to building with the occasional tank along the main highway (which will be ML turreted all the heck, btw). So, I'm not sure this is worth it. Good thought though.
You're all looking too far into this, just put a little dot or symbol or whatever on the unit that shows through the brushes, we have them already for comm targets, so just make the dots selectable instead of the people.
Which does.... what exactly? The point was that the comm could see into buildings to manage troops and maybe even place stuff. This is... a select your team and see icons? OK, that fixes half of the problem. What about the dropping buildings part?
It is possible to zoom in very far to get your camera inside of the building to place things, but it would be nice for an easier way to do this.
It's a chicken and egg scenario, no maps use buildings to any considerable degree because the resulting gameplay down-plays the Commander mechanic too much, resulting in un-Empiresy gameplay. The lack of buildings to see into removes the need to be able to see into buildings, the reason for there being no buildings is because the commander can't see into them.
http://forums.empiresmod.com/showpost.php?p=203031&postcount=6 No need for x-ray when the level designer can just make parts of the building invisible for commanders whenever he wants to.
Honestly, why not just make it easier for the comm to move around? Try playing Zombie Master for a bit, say -- they have big multistory buildings everywhere, and the ZM can still navigate them fine. The trick is to have a bindable key that the comm can easily push to go into 'movement mode' where they move like a spectator. Pushing it again takes them back to regular mode. That's what ZM uses, anyway, and it makes it sooo much easier to get around.
Oh. Kool. Another example of bad coding. The comm camera is an entity that can get stuck on walls and such. There already is a free roaming camera, it just tends to get stuck in walls. That's why I hate comming streets of fire, I get stuck in all those sky scrapers.
Vessboy's suggestion is very limited, it requires seperate vmt's for each texture that needs to be transparent for the commander, and would cause rendering issues for the engine, unless it were turned into an entity during compile, and there's no guarantuee that only the texture, and not the whole brush will be transparent. The brushes would always be solid, and there's also no way to control this visibility, and you can't optimize it, since you can't even control it. Having it be part of an entity makes it possible to fix those issues, and make it a controllable part of the map. Note that i've also added another idea to the post i linked earlier.
