A change of perspective

[moth]

I think Multiwinia is an awesome game, but I sometimes find myself thinking that the mechanics of the game give the player a bit too much godlike detachment, and when I do remember to zoom in I can get a very intense view of the action with laser bolts flying past me and everything looking much more impressive. I think most of the screenshots shown in reviews are zoomed in too, it's just a shame that the game experience marginalises this view.

Yes - you can already zoom in close to the action if you want to, but the game discourages this: every time you move the camera over higher terrain the camera gets bumped up into the sky again. Also, although zooming in occasionaly provides a bit more insight into the effect of terrain, the godlike perspective is generally much more useful for winning. Zoomed in you can see less, so you have to spend more time flying the camera around.

To bring the zoomed in view to the fore we need a new mode constrained and optimised for it. Other people have suggested things like 1st person mode, but here are my ideas for how i think it could be done. I think the changes required wouldn't be too huge, though they'd certainly cut deeply into the interface.

Tie the camera close to your multiwinians
This way everyone will be dragged down close to the action, so no-one is at a disadvantage, and by making the camera move with your multiwinians some of the camera flying is done for you. The interface would need changing to add ways of selecting which multiwinian the camera is focused on. I've put my ideas for how that could work at the end of this post.

With a tied camera won't be able to see enemy hidden behind terrain, and capturing high points that you can get a good view from will become important.

Less cool effects are that you can't give move orders to places your multiwinians can't see, and can't always even see where all your own multiwinians are, so might loose track of groups of them. It will get harder to navigate around the maps because you won't always be able to see where you need to get to, and you might even get lost.

These problems could easily be fixed by providing a map, but maps can be really naff. Total Annihilation was a good example of a game spoiled by it's map - they put a lot of effort into making the units look good, then wasted it all with game mechanics that led to most battles being conducted out of visual range, with the players focused on clicking coloured radar blobs on an ugly little map.

Add a map, but carefully limit the information it shows
I think the map should show the terrain, all your multiwinians and the souls of your dead (but no-one else's), flags of your officers and their path indicator lines, icons for crates, icons for everyone's turrets and armour, and the control status of all spawn points. Other things like blitz flags, radar dishes, control circles i'm not sure how to handle. Showing too little info makes the game hard to play, but too much forces competitive players to play the game on the map.

Make the map a layer in the sky
My simplist idea for a map was simply to put a horizontal mirror in the sky, but that wouldn't completely solve the problem of making all the terrain visible, and could just lead to people playing the game upsidedown on the map.

Instead, take a full-size plan-view of the level and make it a layer in the sky, lined up above the level below. Allow the player to select and give move orders to units on the map in the same way as units on the ground.

Putting the map in the sky like this allows the cursor to move onto the map while still keeping the cursor centered on the screen. It also makes things in the distance easier to select than things close by, which you'd have to look up further to see on the map. I think this should encourage players to play the game down where the spectacular action is. The down-side is it means messing with the current pretty sky.

So, what do you all think?

moth


Camera control details
The camera should be restricted so that it must always be within a certain (small) distance of one of your multiwinians. That multiwinian is the 'focus' for the camera, and the camera moves with him, and he is always kept visible. Moving the camera left or right orbits the camera around the focus, while looking up and down tilts the camera as normal, but also moves the camera vertically if necessary to keep the focus on the screen. (It might be good instead to have the camera move on a vertical circular arc as it tilts, with the bottom of the arc at the focus.)

The WASD keys could move the camera as normal, but only so long as there are more multiwinians in the right place to take over as focus. For smallish gaps between groups of multiwians the camera should simply jump to the next multiwinian. Large gaps cannot be crossed with this method.

To move the camera large distances, provide a way of moving the focus to the multiwinian under the cursor. This could be by reusing some of the now redundant altitude controls. Pressing Q or scrolling down to move the focus to the multiwinian nearest the cursor. This should work both for multiwinians on the ground and their representations on the map.

It might be pretty and less disorientating to make the camera fly to the new focus, but i think instant jumps would be better as they'd allow skilled players to get around quicker.

For convenience, pressing E or scrolling up could move the camera back through its focus history.

When the multiwinian in focus dies, the focus shifts to your nearest live multiwinian, and the same happens when you de-select a turret or radar dish. Spawn points under your control should be selectable for focus, and the camera allowed up a little higher when this is done.

[moth]

Oh i do realise it would have a huge effect, and i'm not realistically expecting it to happen, so relax - no-one is about to shatter this thing that you (and i) treasure. But please join me in this indulgent thought experiment about a game that could have been.

I think you are wrong about this reducing the strategy in the game. Yes - it would break some of the existing strategy, but the terrain would become more important, adding more than is lost, and hopefully the map and camera controls would still be good enough to support fighting on several fronts. I don't believe an on-the-ground perspective is incompatible with strategy (see e.g. the rts mods for operation flashpoint, which once wasted many nights of my life, or some levels of the 1998 battlezone remake, or homeworld which had a decently limited map and tied the camera to it's units).

Also, you seem to be denying my argument that the current game doesn't allow me to stay down and dirty if i want to win, without really saying why.

[moth]

Read again. I never said it reduces strategy, it just replaces the style of strategy everyone is used to with something new. It's still strategy, but it's different. That's the main reason the game would become a different game - you'll be required to play it differently.

I didn't say it does (but nor do I say it doesn't) allow you to stay down if you want to. What I'm saying is you can always choose to do so, and if you're in a game without any obsessed players who play the game night and day, you generally have enough time to fly down there and admire the small battles that are evolving. I wouldn't recommend playing an entire game from that perspective, no - but I certainly think it would be possible, with the condition that all players stick to that method.

Fair points. I think we are each reading the other as more absolute that they are.

A minor correction to your first post: the game may bump your camera up every time you run into terrain, but this is only to prevent the camera from clipping into the terrain. You could argue you'd want the camera to stick to the ground to follow the shape (i.e. fly down again when terrain allows this) but generally this is not favourable and I can see why this wasn't done. So the game doesn't encourage it, no. But it doesn't discourage it either, in my opinion.

I can see why they did it like that too - it's beautifully simple, but to me, having my camera kicked back into the sky, and having the multiwinians i'm trying to command walk out-of-shot is discouragement enough to keep me in the sky most of the time.

To me, Multiwinia is a game which you can play in different playing styles, and while I agree with you that your idea would allow for an interesting type of gameplay, I have to disagree with the point that the current form makes it too impossible to play like this.

Thanks. I suppose I'm still hungering for a really good on-the-ground strategy game, felt that multiwinians would be well suited to it due to their decent level of autonomy, and mostly just wanted to share my vision of that. I'd still be interested if anyone can think of changes to improve my idea, or of smaller tweaks that could realistically be incorporated into multiwinia to aid down & dirty play.

moth