ORIGINAL: crushingleeek
Is the concern here that the average CC fan does not have a computer capable of handling these numerous calculations? Or that the game engine can not handle this?
I'm pretty sure with the computers out there today, this could be handled by decent cpu's.
Help Programmers!
Displaying LOS this way would be computationally equivalent to calculating LOS to each possible location on the map in worst case (unit sitting on top of a hill with view to entire map). Some short circuiting could be done but it gets a bit tricky.
One thing that could work (and was done in the early days of FPS games like Doom for example) would be to pre-calculate all viewable locations from every location in the map at load time and then store that in a table for fast lookup. Of course, it would still be complicated by vehicles and wrecks blocking LOS that didn't exist when the game started.
Also, you could have the issue that the 'shadow' of a vehicle that you could not see would give away its location. In other words, its possible that a vehicle that is in the sight range of a unit but had not actually been spotted yet would block cells behind it and these dark cells would indicate the location of a yet unspotted vehicle.
Only people intimate with the actual game code could really speculate on the complexity of pulling this off efficiently enough to work in a real time game.
On the pathing issue:
One thing that's always bothered me with talk of better pathing and pathing improvements and all that is the fact that the A* pathing algorithm has been around for about 20 years and there is really nothing to improve on it. One should easily be able to calculate a path from any point to any point on maps this small in a fraction of a second. I'm sure there is a good reason for the pathing problems but again only someone who has looked at the source code could really speculate on why there are any issues on this at all.
