Are advanced warp scanners broken?

[Traveller]

'cause...they're not doing anything when I've got them on a planet with an incoming wave.  Normal wave, retaliation wave, doesn't matter.  I've even tried putting one by each wormhole in that system, and it doesn't help.  I don't see any UI change in the planet or galaxy view for having them.

[Pumpkin]

The effect of warp scanners (logistic command station, 250K unlock "adv warp sensor", sentinel frigate builtin sensor, ...) has the minor effect of changing the color of the wormhole by which the incoming wave will soon come by from green to yellow. It allows to put one's army on top of the wormhole and ambush the wave. No that useful, IMO.

[Traveller]

I understand what it's supposed to do, and in a "Spokes" map it seemed like a reasonable purchase for its very low price.

Ah...Taking a much, much, MUCH closer look, I do see the green/yellow change, but it's almost impossible to see against a lot of planet backgrounds, or if there's any glare on the screen.  Also, if you're zoomed out and have a lot of turrets around your wormholes, that means you have to zoom in all the way.  On a "Spokes" map...pretty time consuming to check them all.  A much better implementation would be changing the color of the wormhole *name*, or making the name flash.

I've been playing on and off since the game came out and I've never actually used the minimap.  So somehow I read 'minimap' as 'galaxy view' in the description...  Still, shouldn't the galaxy view get some interface love for the warp scanners too?  Flash the wormhole it's coming through.

[Pumpkin]

I highly recommend you post this very interesting suggestion on Mantis.

[Chthon]

I would like to see a galaxy map indicator as well. Perhaps turn the wormhole link into a flashing red arrow when it's detected. Also a planet view image would be nice too, maybe some sort of pop up in that planets view showing how many ships of what kind, and point to the wormhole when you're in system. Just something to catch your attention, nothing fancy.

[Captain Jack]

Why not just expand the yellow color further? Triple or quadruple how far out the wormhole looks and it jumps out immediately.

Agreed that the galaxy tab could use an indicator, but all you'd need to do is change the color of the line between your system and the one the AI is coming from.

[Red.Queen]

Expanding the color would work, but I'm leaning towards the suggestions that include flashing it -- partially because there are bound to be AI War players with colorblindness, so a moderate, pulsing flash would end up working well to get anyone's attention, wouldn't even need to do any other tweaks then.

I definitely like the galaxy map suggestion of having the connection line be what changes in that view.

[Toranth]

A while back, there was a player that created a new icon image for the wormhole that made it very obvious which one was being highlighted, but I can't find the post in question.  If someone feels adventurous, modifying the current icon to be more obvious might be a solution - maybe add a red ring around the wormhole, or such.

[Red.Queen]

AI War has most of its textures unpacked instead of being crammed in the .assets files... No faffing about with Grim's to unpack/repack.  Bliss.

FakeEdit -- It even doesn't care if you resize images, it's not hardcoded to look for specific filesizes or image dimensions.  Bliss x2.

Lazy active hostile wormhole recolor #1 -- now it's red.  Close up and zoomed out icons original size.

Lazy active hostile wormhole recolor #2 - BIG WORMHOLES Edition -- It's red, and the zoomed out graphic is 3x the original size.

Both versions packed together in 1 zip because I am lazy and they are tiny.  Original textures backed up in the Original_Backup folder for easy restoring.

Installation is pretty self explanatory, just follow along with the RuntimeData\etc folder structure in my zip with what's in your AIWarGame\RuntimeData\etc folder.  GalaxyView contains the graphic that you see on your planet when zoomed out far (not actually in the Galaxy map, name is misleading).  The other one contains the close-up graphic.  Replace one or both as desired.

Back up original textures.  Overwrite with new.  Enjoy being able to see which wormhole is about to spew bad things at you.

Bonus screenshots.

Normal size.



Close Up



Super size me!

[Captain Jack]

Oh wow, that's a big improvement. I'll put this thread up on Mantis for someone to take a look.

[Tolc]

That looks really useful! Thanks for sharing, Red.Queen! I kind of like the idea of the highlighted (and maybe even blinking) wormhole connection in the galaxy map as well, though. Maybe both conbined would be best?

[Traveller]

Thanks for doing the Mantis thing, Watashiwa!  I'm not sure how good I'd be at using that site.

Red wormhole looks a LOT better, but that doesn't solve the problem of having all your wormholes surrounded by turrets/mines/etc so you have to zoom in.  Flashing the system-name text seems like it would be foolproof even when cluttered (and also good with colorblindness).

And yeah, the more I use them, the less optional the warp scanners seem in the Spokes map.  It's really nice knowing which of ten wormholes to rebuild all your mines around.

[Red.Queen]

Red wormhole looks a LOT better, but that doesn't solve the problem of having all your wormholes surrounded by turrets/mines/etc so you have to zoom in.  Flashing the system-name text seems like it would be foolproof even when cluttered (and also good with colorblindness).

That's what the "Super-size me" version is for, but yeah, if you have dozens of mines layered on top the wormhole, even tripling the graphic's dimensions is still not going to keep it too visible.  Hopefully we'll see some of the suggestions in this thread make it into the game in a future update.

[Pumpkin]

Red wormhole looks a LOT better, but that doesn't solve the problem of having all your wormholes surrounded by turrets/mines/etc so you have to zoom in.  Flashing the system-name text seems like it would be foolproof even when cluttered (and also good with colorblindness).

That's what the "Super-size me" version is for, but yeah, if you have dozens of mines layered on top the wormhole, even tripling the graphic's dimensions is still not going to keep it too visible.  Hopefully we'll see some of the suggestions in this thread make it into the game in a future update.

This is... what "future" precisely is?