Community DLC Suggestion Poll: Week of 1/24

[HellishFiend]

Thanks! Now the only thing I have left to figure out is how we should handle "shelved" ideas. I'm thinking an ongoing, repopulate-able, revote-able, no expiration poll placed in the suggestions forum would do the trick. That should keep it neatly out of the way but still give us a way to voice on which features we would like to see the most in the next expansion. You can just ignore it for now, and start to take a look when you get around to planning the next expansion.

Thanks again for the idea and for your support of the poll process.   Hope work on the puzzle game is going well for you!

[Shardz]

Feature: Engine Burn Effects This is a pretty substantial feature to work in (not from a coding sense, but in terms of lining up all those burns with the various ship hulls), and I suspect it will harm performance for nearly everyone who uses it, so this makes it not a terribly high priority for me personally.  But, given that this is fairly popular of a request, I will definitely keep it in mind for the schedule.

I'd like to see this, but with an option to toggle on/off in Preferences since it could indeed affect performance significantly. When I build my new fast computer I'll flick it on, but right now I think AI War caters to a wide margin of yesteryear's computers (including mine) and should stay that way.

Feature: Mouse Scrolling view This seems like definitely one to do, any it should be pretty quick.

All win, all the way!  

[I-KP]

Feature: Engine Burn Effects This is a pretty substantial feature to work in (not from a coding sense, but in terms of lining up all those burns with the various ship hulls), and I suspect it will harm performance for nearly everyone who uses it, so this makes it not a terribly high priority for me personally.  But, given that this is fairly popular of a request, I will definitely keep it in mind for the schedule.

Okay, feel free to ignore my layman's position on this, but could you not 'fake' engine burn effects by having a 'last' frame in a unit's animation that only engages when the object is on the move?  This last PNG frame would be the one drawn with the engine burn effect in situ.  No performance hit either.  After a minor amount of coding the only grunt work appears in drawing this final frame for all of the mobile ships. 

The only downside to this approach would be that the unit doesn’t animate whilst it’s on the move, but when things are on the move you don’t notice animations anyway.

I’d be prepared to help out with a few, as I’m sure a couple of others would, and after a round of quality control everyone’s a winner!  Eraser might moan about the lack of blending but a nicely drawn PNG will fake it well enough for moving objects.

EDIT:
After having a quick squint around the ship sprites, a good number of them don’t leave enough room at the bottom of the image for engine burn.  Can the render engine support frames that have extended dimensions?

[Shardz]

Well, there's always particle effects you can tack on to the bottom part of the png...but I'm thinking you might as well just make the game 3D at that rate.    Some of the ships are so small that I doubt anyone would see it anyway. I would much rather see animated afterburners over a static flame graphic, but that's just a whole other can of worms and falls into a "To Do Someday" category more than likely.

[Spikey00]

(Thanks Chris as usual for your insight!)

Feature: Engine Burn Effects This is a pretty substantial feature to work in (not from a coding sense, but in terms of lining up all those burns with the various ship hulls), and I suspect it will harm performance for nearly everyone who uses it, so this makes it not a terribly high priority for me personally.  But, given that this is fairly popular of a request, I will definitely keep it in mind for the schedule.

Okay, feel free to ignore my layman's position on this, but could you not 'fake' engine burn effects by having a 'last' frame in a unit's animation that only engages when the object is on the move?  This last PNG frame would be the one drawn with the engine burn effect in situ.  No performance hit either.  After a minor amount of coding the only grunt work appears in drawing this final frame for all of the mobile ships. 

The only downside to this approach would be that the unit doesn’t animate whilst it’s on the move, but when things are on the move you don’t notice animations anyway.

I’d be prepared to help out with a few, as I’m sure a couple of others would, and after a round of quality control everyone’s a winner!  Eraser might moan about the lack of blending but a nicely drawn PNG will fake it well enough for moving objects.

EDIT:
After having a quick squint around the ship sprites, a good number of them don’t leave enough room at the bottom of the image for engine burn.  Can the render engine support frames that have extended dimensions?

I would be interested to see this in action if it all works as you say--or, perhaps have two options to either draw the actual engine effects or through this 'fake' method; of course, with the usual to disable it entirely, and if that would be worth it.

[x4000]

Thanks! Now the only thing I have left to figure out is how we should handle "shelved" ideas. I'm thinking an ongoing, repopulate-able, revote-able, no expiration poll placed in the suggestions forum would do the trick. That should keep it neatly out of the way but still give us a way to voice on which features we would like to see the most in the next expansion. You can just ignore it for now, and start to take a look when you get around to planning the next expansion.

Yeah, that seems like a good idea to me.  Thanks!

Thanks again for the idea and for your support of the poll process.  Hope work on the puzzle game is going well for you!

My pleasure.  The German translation and related work took up a lot of last week, along with general start-of-the-year accounting work and tax stuff, but work is still going well on Tidalis and I'm looking forward to being able to devote more time to it next week.  The goal is to have something to show in 2-3 weeks (alpha versions for demo/preorder).

Okay, feel free to ignore my layman's position on this, but could you not 'fake' engine burn effects by having a 'last' frame in a unit's animation that only engages when the object is on the move?  This last PNG frame would be the one drawn with the engine burn effect in situ.  No performance hit either.  After a minor amount of coding the only grunt work appears in drawing this final frame for all of the mobile ships. 

The only downside to this approach would be that the unit doesn’t animate whilst it’s on the move, but when things are on the move you don’t notice animations anyway.

I’d be prepared to help out with a few, as I’m sure a couple of others would, and after a round of quality control everyone’s a winner!  Eraser might moan about the lack of blending but a nicely drawn PNG will fake it well enough for moving objects.

EDIT:
After having a quick squint around the ship sprites, a good number of them don’t leave enough room at the bottom of the image for engine burn.  Can the render engine support frames that have extended dimensions?

Well, adding on larger images for every ship is just as much work, and would actually use more memory, if slightly less CPU power.  Though, if done right, the engine burn as a separate image could actually use less CPU/GPU with texture sorting, compared to what it would as a combined engine.  Aside from the fact that, as you say, almost all of the images do not have enough extra room for burn effects in them, and oblong images would make the game take a GPU hit as well as making the game incompatible with certain older graphics cards (we keep it to perfectly square powers of two for texture size for maximum compatibility and speed).  The best way, by far, to handle this is as separate images.  And, from a programming sense, it would be the easiest way, too, since I could program a general-purpose placement-from-script method for this and then let anyone who wants to help assist with the positioning of the burn effects. 

But, it's still quite an undertaking for something that I worry that most people would have to turn off, anyway -- and given that most players would not even know to turn something like that off, it would probably have to default to off, meaning that most people wouldn't even see it.  Hence my reluctance.

[eRe4s3r]

Well compatibility and performance are important, but if engine effects are considered to be done -> If these effects pose too much a performance hit in the proper way, then it would advisable not to do them at all. Would be far beyond what i ever hoped to see if glow effects become implemented because that would improve the explosions, but engine trails.. when not done right, these will look much worse than it looks now.

I would not want graphical fluff just for graphical fluff, glow can simulate engine strength and is a vital special effect for explosions, engine trails however are largely graphical fluff because they would clutter the display even more.

Also i don't think that AI War can implement dynamic engine trails without grinding the cpu or gpu to a halt on 500+ ships.