acui
Posts: 7
Joined: 7/13/2013 Status: offline
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Please excuse any errors as I am from China. The CMANO is a really fun game. But the God's eye view is not that fun. It made the development in the communications technology nearly useless. The ship of 50s can get the same threat infomations as a ship after 2000. If we make the communication just as real as it in reality, an isolated unit(like a submerged sub in H3) will be controlled by the AI, and the AI controlled unit will make the game unreal and less fun. From my experiences in the Combat Mission, I think they have got it solved. The idea is very simple: Let the player has the God's eye, but every units can only see what their sensors have detected and what they received from others(with some delays based on the comm method and the path from the source). When none is selected, the player can see all the units and contacts. After the player select an unit, the map will be changed to that unit's view and shows only what it knows. The player can still control all the units and is aware of the overall situation. But an unit will only react to what it knows. So a F-15 will not take evacuation maneuver to a SAM just in sight of a sailor. A ship will not turn on the radar and begin launching the SM-2 immediately when the white trails of vampires towards it are spotted by a P-3 pilot. This method will also make us to play realistically more easily. We only see what an unit knows when it is selected, so we can order it to react based only on that information, thus make a more realistic move. And we can even make friendly fire possible under some circumstances. In the future MP games. This method will make even more fun. We can lock players to sub-branches in the OOB. It works like the sides in the current game, but is more flexible. The implementation will be hard but not impossible. I know nothing of the implement of sensors in the CMANO. To the best of my knowledge, the CMANO has a global sensor map for each side, it is merged from the contacts of all the activated sensors of that side, and each unit will react based on the global sensor map. This will not works with the new model because of the delay. I made a simple implement of the sensor map to be used with the new communication model. It has multiple sensor maps with different update interval. The first one is the real time one, it's updated real time. Then the 5s, 30s, 1min, 5min...1 day and 1 week ones. Each unit will then monitor different contacts in different maps based on their delays to the sensor's platform. It could deals with 100,000 units with multiple sensors easily on an i5-4690 using one thread. But this is without the complexity of the real sensor model and unit AI. It is only a test to see whether where is a way to implement a more realistic communication model in the scale of CMANO.
< Message edited by acui -- 2/18/2016 8:53:58 AM >
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