DFD-R3: 741 vs. 1009, 510 vs. 488

[Deformat]

well i'm just kidding why so serious.

about tile shp.
you forgot about when unit tile in some direction their turret is possible to get hide by chassis part [specialize if turret is small ]. that seem like it need more specially way to deal with.
and this logic increase ton of work [ i think it too much for what i can do]. even this thing get done and working perfect i'm not sure to use it.
i'm ok with my shp and my beta tester said it's ok even my shp can't tile.

that make me think 510 is more realism and more useful to make it happen than 488.

Tho probably some tags could be added to make it work?(issue 488 I mean.)

[Renegade]

Administrative Notice:

Since the last post in this discussion was four days ago, it is assumed to be over. We will proceed to judgement.

[AlexB]

Fight 1
The proposed bodyguard logic is not complete. What should happen if the leader dies? Why are bodyguards unselectable? Even if they aren't controllable it's good to know their health status. Clicking a bodyguard may automatically select the leader unit. And the request is mixed up with another request, the IsBodyguardControlled= logic. If this is tidied up, this logic is well worth being implemented.

Helicopter tilt is a fun optical change. It's not something affecting the game at all, but rather nice eye candy. Even if this isn't Generals it would still look cool. Nonetheless, save the bodyguards.

Fight 2
I don't know how the game can correctly infer to which extent turret, barrell or chassis are hidden by one of the other parts. They are all flat sprites. They have no depth information. Reversing drawing order if the turret is pointing away from the viewport is not a real option, as the chassis would hide the turret, then. Adding some new drawing tags instead of inferring the drawing order would not help, because the tank's chassis would still be drawn above the turret. Supporting non-turret units only would not be the smartest thing, though.

Multi-turret units would be as widely used as cliff sequences. Mods without naval forces wouldn't have battleships but could still have epic units and mods without shp tanks wouldn't profit from slope climbing sequences. So the multi-turret units would benefit more. Having an additional tag defining whether all turrets are firing together or alternating or whether they are split primary and secondary weapons should be relatively easy. What it takes to get the logic itself working I don't know, but that feature would be awesome.

Having to chose between something I can't estimate and something that is impossible – just to be on the safe side – I'd chose the impossible one. But for this, I'm going with the multi-turret battleships.

[Renegade]

Fight 1

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As outlined last time, I love helicopter tilt, and I think it greatly improves their visual appearance.

That being said, helicopter tilt alone provides absolutely no gameplay value, while #1009 allows everything from bodyguards over patrolmen with guard dogs to Generals-style defense drones.

Kill: #741
Support: #1009

Fight 2

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It's the same situation as last time: I love RA's Battleships and I want them in YR. But even if I weren't biased towards #510, #488 is just not worth implementing, imo - signified by the fact that I already tried to kill it last time, but was overruled.

The argument back then was that #488 is misunderstood. I say: Even with its actual intention, it's simply not going to be relevant, and, at best, encourages the implementation of problematic units. Why would we want to increase the number of SHP units in the game? SHPs suck to work with!

More importantly, however, #488 is simply not going to see much usage.
Creating an SHP unit is a shitload of work already - this would require 16 additional facings (8 directions, up and down each) to be generated per unit. And for a unit like a mech, these are going to be sequences, not still frames. So we're easily talking about at least a hundred additional frames of work per unit. Even if the artist works from 3D, and even if he can automate the camera positioning and facing-rendering, it's still going to be a shitload of additional work - per unit.

How likely is it that the broad majority of artists will switch away from the ease of voxels to SHP units because of an "advantage" that requires all this additional work?

Sure, there may be an artist or two for a conversion or two which prefer SHPs because they're supposedly prettier or whatever. But the majority of unit artists is simply not going to give a shit - for one, because it'll be too much work, and for two, because all this extra work would be unusable in the stock game, limiting their work to Ares or some other patch. (Not to mention they'd likely have to provide individual coding for each patch supporting this.)

#488 may be nice in theory, but in reality, it's just not going to see wide usage.

Kill: #488
Support: #510