I was just thinking about fossils, and I realised that with fog of war it would be impossible to see them, which is too bad.

I had an idea:

Instead of the way fog works now, add another layer to every map, which is essentially another one of these:



This layer would sit on top of everything else, like the fog of war does now, to block everything out. But instead of being black, it would be rendered just like a regular map (I don't know if that is possible).

That way you could still roughly see everything (like awesome fossils), but enemies and caves and gold (if you wanted) could be invisible. It might be a good idea to tint the new fog of war a little to make it clear that those areas are unknown.



There might be a problem with the sky, since backgrounds have a lot of layers, but no matter what it wouldn't be worse than everything being black, so whatever.



It's just an idea. Let's use this thread to talk about fog of war if we want.

So, what you're saying is that terrain should be clearly visible, but everything else, including gold and caves, should be fogged out? I like it. Makes it much easier to navigate foggy areas, if you can at least see where the soil is, if nothing else.

I feel like it'd be a bit more difficult to implement than the current system, though.

Now that I think about it I'm sure they had this idea, which means that it won't work for some reason.

Kinda like a normal RTS? Where everything is black-black, but you can still see whats there?

I love it. Would certainly beat seeing those ugly black boxes.

Agreed. Is it possible to edit them with some other sprite? Even some simple little gray cloud would be better, and more akin to actual fog.

The fog of war could do with some work.

What you say in here is definately an interesting idea.

I agree, current system is less than ideal, though I'm not sure how easy it would be to implement something else.

I like the "darkened/greyed area" idea, though.

Zalo what the hell did I just see?

How would this work with underground bunkers? You could see the enemy bunker layout when attacking? Personallly I like the fact I do not know what the enemy bunkers look like beforehand.

You wouldn't be able to see them. You would see dirt until you walked over there and the fog disappeared.

You'd run into some problems when the base starts protruding from the ground.
It's difficult to hide things that are out in the open when your background is not a uniform solid color.

It is possible to pull some terrain trickery to make it look like the terrain extends farther than it actually does to cover the protrusions.

It's also possible to animate your fog of war images, but you'll never get a very high framerate with a reasonably sized map.
Also the images scale to the map size, so its not feasible to reduce the resolution of them.
(Yes, you can have rectangular fog cells when you image is not the same aspect ratio as the map.)

So, what did I just download, and how does it work?

EDIT: Never mind. That's cool. Real cool.