guanotwozero
Posts: 651
Joined: 12/27/2013 Status: offline
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I'm going to make a potentially contradictory argument here. Immersion is important for games. It mentally puts us, the player, into the hot seat of a particular game. Maybe it's a Warthog driver moving mud or a Supercub pilot waterskipping its tundras. Perhaps it's a pioneering colonist chopping wood for a granary or mining minerals for a Martian base. Could be a warrior countersniping in a ruined tractor factory or a tankie hurling sabot rounds at that faint glow through the gap in the trees. There's excitement in slaying a rogue griffon with a silver sword, while others have given up that adventurous stuff after taking an arrow to the knee. Some folks point and click their way around a detective thriller, others leap between platforms to collect eggs while dodging a giant flying duck. A few of us even remember having to "go south" and "get sandwiches". While they're a relatively recent medium of entertainment, computer games have spawned a plethora of genres and produced an impressive amount of excellence. Key to that excellence is the ability to immerse the player in a particular role. CMO is a strategy game; the hotseat is that of an operational commander. We marshall our forces, coordinate actions and make judgement calls with a limited situation awareness like a real commander. IMO CMANO did an excellent job in providing such immersion, and CMO is set to take that further. What about Tacview? Does it fit with that sense of immersion? I'm new to it and quite like it - but I admit it changes the nature of the immersion. When I use it I'm no longer the commander - I'm the wingman or observer viewing an action from close quarters. That's not usually what operational commanders do. I realise it's been edging me away from the main reason I play this game. So even if CMO is extended to include Tacview FoW why would I use it? The main reason would be as a learning tool, to better understand the consequences of the decisions I make as a commander. An excellent accompaniment for tutorials and trying out new techniques; an opportunity to learn from AARs and replays. Nevertheless I've a feeling I won't use it so much when I'm playing "for real". But hey, that's me; everyone has a different take on this game. Other people will value Tacview for different reasons from me; they paid their money too so who am I to say they shouldn't? That's why there's a request thread - to get feedback on what players would like. I've already expressed my preference to prioritise the AMP; at present that's the most popular but TacFoW is close behind. I'd argue that the AMP will significantly enhance the operational command aspect of the game while TacFoW will not. ON THE OTHER HAND... Many commercial programmers are familiar with the idea of low-hanging fruit. Clients want all sorts of changes and improvements; some enhancements take a lot of work before any results are apparent, others take less effort to create satisfaction. A quick burst of wow! can make clients happy enough to stop breathing down our necks so we can get on with the tough stuff. Could TacFoW be in that category? I read the argument that it's "only" filtering what's fed to Tacview; I don't know how CMO works under the hood, but I don't reckon it's quite as simple as that. I'm guessing there'll be all sorts of issues about sorting, timing, threading and synchronisation optimised for different purposes. Nevertheless I don't reckon it will be quite the giant extended nightmare that the AMP could be. Not least because the TacFoW goals are pretty straight-forward, whereas narrowing down what an AMP should do will likely take much debate and thrashing out of concepts before a single spec or line of code is written. It follows that it may be worth the devs' efforts to get Tacview FoW out of the way, impressing many close-quarters combatants and bringing new blood to CMO, before embarking on The Big One for all of us old-school commanders. So, OK - maybe "do" Tacview first.
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