Beacons

[Lewin]

I played a few games last week and my team was using beacons quite a lot to alert each other of things, usually complimented with something said in chat like "can I take these trees or do you want them?" (with close villages), or "move your army here".

However, I found myself mostly relying on the flashing "!" on the minimap to see where a beacon is, because the flag that appears on the map is not very reliable:
1. It is invisible on unreavealed areas (this is a bug which I've fixed).
2. It goes behind houses, trees, units, etc. meaning often it's hard to find or in the case with houses, completely hidden.

I want to fix this and I have some ideas:
1. Render beacons on top of everything, so they will never be covered by a house, unit, tree, etc. Unfortunately this looks pretty bad when you put a beacon right on a unit's face: (it looks ok on the house IMO)

Still, it's better than not being visible at all when you place it on a house/tree by mistake (or by clicking on the minimap when you aren't very accurate). I guess you can think of the beacon as not being part of the map but being placed on top of whatever you see.

2. Add some kind of glow/highlight/outline to the beacon that goes on top of houses/units/trees. I don't really have an idea of how this could look though, maybe like in other strategy games when your units are behind trees and they get an outline/glow?

Regardless of the two above options, maybe we can make the map beacon flash like the minimap icon so it stands out?

I'd be interested to hear your opinions and ideas.

[Ben]

Option 2 sounds like the best. The site of beacons appearing on top of units and objects would be way worse than having to place beacons in front of houses (like we have to do now).

On this subject, please make black beacons more visible on the minimap's unexplored territory

[dicsoupcan]

How about something like this?

[sado1]

Hm. How about (if it's not too difficult to implement): if the beacon is placed on a building, then the game highlights the whole building?

[Krom]

KaM has very saturated graphics, it will be hard to pick something that stands out yet fits with the style.

I like Sado's idea with contextual beacons

[Tiank]

Option 2, for sure. Beacon on top of object looks just ridiculous.

Sado's idea of highlighting the building is great. That + minimap's icon flashing style, when pointing anywhere else, would probably be enough and would look nice.

[pawel95]

How about something like this?

Lol. I think Dota 2 as a big 3D Game isn´t comparable with a slow and a "low quality graphics" Game like KaM So that "3D Beacon" wouldn´t fit well into the game.


About Lewins idea to show beacons on the top:
Wouldn´t it be possible, to only use "houses" that should be behind the beacons? I often had the problem, that I couldn´t see a beacon because my ally placed it behind a house, but I never had the problem that e.g a serf was hiding that Beacon(which is nearly impossible) ? This would at least solve the "beauty problem" with a beacon in someones face


However it would be really great if you could improve the beacons somehow. Highlighted could be done with Highlighting just the edge of a building/object. Here an example of Heroes V:

Normal:


Hightlight:



One other thing about beacons(because the title of that topic is just "Beacons" , would it be easy to implement, like a "spam secure" to avoid spamming beacons?
Good that dicso brang the example with dota. When you spam beacons there too often in a certain time, you just loose the right to place beacons for like 2 minutes Sometimes when I play KaM there are really "Beacons Smashers" and you can´t stop them really (Offtopic: Same idea about a limit of "saving game" / time. E.g: 1 save/min, because I had a huge folder of saves,because of a funny guy that saved every min at least 5 times :-/ )



And one last unimportant idea , also came into my mind of dota, because there are 2 different Beacons with ALT or CTRL:
When you play a 1vs1 for example or a FFA with only one player per team: What about allowing then, that also your enemy can see your beacon? Sometimes in a 1vs1 after PT I wanna show my enemy sth, but I´m unable to do so Maybe also with a 2nd button(So like in dota 2 different beacons for team/enemies)? Or you think, that would just confuse many players?



Pawel95

[Nissarin]

I agree with pawel, ability to send signal not only to your team but all player would be quite nice, as for "spam" protection - combination of some throttling (1) and "area" protection (2) should do it..
- 1 - something like 10 signals per minute with 5 signal burst, that means you could use 15 signals "instantly" and after that you would get 1 signal "back" every 6 secs, after 90sec of "inactivity" you would completely "regenerate" your quota, those numbers obviously need some tweaking
- 2 - a lot of players spam beacons in single location to get "attention", if we bind beacon to specific tile (beacon still could be placed anywhere within it) it would be possible to "drop" additional ones if they are placed in the same place

BTW: tt would be also nice if beacon faded with time, besides currently beacon lasts 10 in game seconds (afaik)... if you play at 1x it's fine but on 2x it's a bit troublesome.

[Ben]

Topic went from simple idea to overly complicated and unnecessary features/limitations.
Sado's suggestion (and Pawel's example) is nice about highlighting buildings.
Sending beacons to the enemy seems nice as long as players can be muted (needed for team members as well)
As for muting, it would erase the need for overly complicated "beacons per minute blah blah blah." Heck, we could even include the mute to seeing team member's chat, too.

[Nissarin]

As for muting, it would erase the need for overly complicated "beacons per minute blah blah blah." Heck, we could even include the mute to seeing team member's chat, too.

This complicated idea requires one status variable and a few conditionals.. maybe 10 lines of code total.

PS:
"Throttling" actually require less work than muting because you don't need to touch the interface at all.

[dicsoupcan]

i know pawel, but i was more aiming for the beacon design, a ! with a cirkel around it so it is more obvious.

[Lewin]

Beacons always last for 8 real seconds regardless of the game speed.

Limiting beacon/chat spamming is something that needs to be talked about. As Nissarin said a throttle is certainly much much simpler to implement than muting, although muting might help with other stuff like chat spamming. On the other hand, it could lead to muting becoming very common and teamwork becoming even less common because players might mute each other over small things (or because they want to be anti-social and play without any talking). It's kind of nice that you can talk and know that your team is seeing it. You don't have to think "I wonder if he has muted me... is it worth typing out a message?"

Back to the original topic:
Rendering the beacons on top of houses but under everything else (as normal) is very hard within our current rendering system, it would require a special case for beacons and quite a lot of code to be rewritten. Currently things are ordered based on position and all sprites are treated the same, there's no special rules like "always put beacons on top of houses, but behind everything else" (there will be cases where that's not possible anyway).

Highlighting houses which get hit with a beacon sounds like a good idea, since houses are the main thing that's hiding beacons right now. Perhaps that's all we need?

[pawel95]

I agree. There is no need to highlight other things than houses. This could even irritate when you just wanna show a place, where a player can place his forests and wizh a random placing of the beacon on a mushroom, would let the mushroom shine

[Tiank]

Highlighting a house is all that we need indeed. Even if you place beacon behind a tree or deep forest (or even a LARGE mushroom), you would see it (especially when it flashes).