Essential UI feature, show movement path

HI,

it's been a while and I'm looking forward to FE. But seriously, in no video i saw what is IMHO really important.

 

Please show the path a unit/army will take. It is crucial for me to know e.g. how near i will pass a city or enemy. And also i would like to know how many turns it will take. 2, 4, 22? will I arrive in time?

 I wonder why such a common feature is missing. Shouldn't be much effort to program, the information is already there and even if it is somewhat (time)expensive it is worth it.

 

136,470 views 37 replies
Reply #1 Top

Agreed (Lost count how often I agreed with a post that requests this feature)

Reply #3 Top

Please oh please! :pout:

Reply #4 Top

There are no words to describe my disappointment if this is not in the game, after all this time.

I have posted a similar wish at least four times at different phases of WoM.

However, to the OP: It is most certainly *not* easy to implement this feature. Pathfinding is not a trivial task; if you try to calculate the absolute optimal path with brute force, the calculations will take forever. It's a complex optimization task to write an adequate pathfinding algorithm for a game such as FE. It seems to be a field that Stardock has a lot of problems. My guess is that they don't have a game dev that has a lot of expertise in complex networks.

Reply #5 Top


Absolutely.  At a mininum, when you select the unit.  A nice addition would be a global button that was "show all unit paths" click on and off, so you could look at your grand strategy for unit movement.

Reply #6 Top

Quoting Sir_Linque, reply 4

However, to the OP: It is most certainly *not* easy to implement this feature. Pathfinding is not a trivial task; if you try to calculate the absolute optimal path with brute force, the calculations will take forever. It's a complex optimization task to write an adequate pathfinding algorithm for a game such as FE. It seems to be a field that Stardock has a lot of problems. My guess is that they don't have a game dev that has a lot of expertise in complex networks.

I know pathfinding is not easy, but

a ) it is a solved problem (see A* on wikipedia for a "trivial" implementation), but i still agree with you for "real time" situations e.g. RTS games. But we are talking one army to move (and ai tasks in the background)

b ) most important: the army does already do this, the path is calculated, we do not move tile by tile. Its not new, its just providing the information to the user which is already present.

Maybe the art style and making the graphics will take some effort. Don t get me wrong, I'm sure there is already enough work for you guys, but we need this! It will cost so much fun not having it.

Reply #7 Top
Thumbs up for this request. It's effects would be felt all the time, so I consider it pretty big in importance.
Reply #8 Top

I'll ask.

Reply #9 Top

count me in

Reply #10 Top

Another vote for this feature.

Reply #11 Top

I imagine Derek and Brad fighting over these issues in some sort of mix between Megaman and Tron.  

Reply #12 Top

Yes, please.

Reply #13 Top

I think this is important as well.

Reply #14 Top

Edited out.

Reply #17 Top

Yes please! If the environment is so hostile, it is good to see if the path will be close to enemies. Also, seeing how many turns it will take to get there is pretty basic in a game like this.

Reply #18 Top

Maybe it could have little colored flags on each tile, color indicating the turn that move will be on. It might even turn red when it crosses paths with an enemy.

Reply #19 Top

Quoting seanw3, reply 18
It might even turn red when it crosses paths with an enemy.

Now this would be extra cpu cost. Intersecting all paths with each other (of enemy fractions and wild life) -> bad idea if trivial implemented. Additionally it would imply that you know where the enemy will move to. This is  unknown and part of the fun, predicting the enemy :)

What might be helpful is the range of a unit/army in one turn. Marked as a red area or some outline. But this might also be intentionally unknown.

 

Reply #20 Top

It should be doable. I know in WOM it was an issue because a lot of this stuff was in a single thread.  But in FE, a lot of these calculations are done in the background so we've been able to indulge ourselves. I am pretty sure that in FE, the path is now stored as a linked list rather than brute forced during the move like in WOM. I'll look.

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Reply #21 Top

Yep, there is:

Reply #22 Top

Quoting Frogboy, reply 20
It should be doable. [..] I am pretty sure that in FE, the path is now stored as a linked list rather than brute forced during the move like in WOM. I'll look.

Thanks, this would remove one BIG thing from my/our list. And also nice that "unnecessary" cleaning of working code is already done :)

Reply #23 Top

Quoting Frogboy, reply 21
Yep, there is:

Damn whats your MTBF - mean time between feature  o_O  

*compliments* 

Reply #24 Top

Agree, showing the route would certainly be preferred if possible.

Reply #25 Top

Quoting Schnorkde, reply 23

Quoting Frogboy, reply 21Yep, there is:

Damn whats your MTBF - mean time between feature 

Well the next step would go something like this:

Have a new message OnClick: If there's a destination then go through that list and display the dots to the destination.

It's still a good day or two type feature so it probably won't make it in for Beta 1.  But it's clearly doable.