Amnectrus
Posts: 80
Joined: 10/22/2015 Status: offline
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I apologize ahead of time for getting long winded here. I know this wouldn't be easy, and the devs probably have more than enough to keep them busy already without radically reworking their visualization system on top of everything else, so I'm reluctant to officially request this as something to be on the feature list just yet. And the existing system works, though I do still think it would be cool to draw the 2D range circles with various changes. But with all respect, I strongly disagree with the people who say 3D isn't needed or useful in games like this. To bring this back around to the subject of the thread, if I have an F-15E at 200 ft, it looks identical to one at 40000 ft. I have to mouseover it to tell the altitude. And if there's a ridge between it and a radar site, I have to mouseover the entire ridge to see if it's high enough to block the radar's view. But if I could just tilt the view, I could see immediately both the altitude of the plane and the approximate view of the radar site, no mousing required. Or if I have a stack of planes flying CAP at different altitudes, I could see immediately which one's where. Is a sub inside the layer? Just look. Etc. And I'm guessing here, but it seems to me that all the radar calculations needed to tell whether a radar can detect a given target must be already being done in realtime, so perhaps (guessing again) extracting the necessary visualization data wouldn't be quite as hard as it might be. I used to play F-19 Stealth Fighter way (way way) back in the day, and one thing it gave was a cockpit readout of your current approximate detectability. Obviously it was nowhere even remotely as sophisticated as the CMANO radar model, but nevertheless it gave a simple visual indicator of how strong a given radar signal was relative to your current location and attitude. If you were in a high steep banked turn, your detectability went up, and if you were low and slow, it went down. So if you were trying to pick your way around a bunch of radar sites to get into a target, you had at least some indication of how close you could get to them without being seen. I was thrilled to see that CMANO includes the F-19 as a hypothetical unit, because from the time I got the game I've wanted to make some Red Storm Rising scenarios, but it's going to take a lot of test scenarios to figure out how I want to plot out the missions, checking to see how likely the F-19 is to be picked up at any given range and altitude from all the different radar sites. It sure would be cool if I could check a box or something and the range circles would just adjust themselves... :) I've played quite a few wargames. I have fond memories of many 2D games, like Steel Panthers, Close Combat, and Highway to the Reich (speaking of which I believe I saw someone with a Panther Games badge in one of these threads somewhere). But once I played Combat Mission, 2D games were just never quite the same again. It's like the difference between Google Maps and Google Earth (or World Wind of course). There's just so much more data that can be seen at once when it's presented in 3D.
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