Storm in the East - Round 4

[raz_atoth]

I see a major issue is with the spotting and i agree, there are situations when the results are rather odd. I remember i was playing a CMBS campaign - i think it was the russian one - and i managed to sneak a rpg team behind an enemy tank. It took about 8 secs for the tank to be spotted from a distance of 6m or so. Two points i'm trying to make:

a) These LOS oddities might NOT be actual bugs. Thus BFC are correct when they say the LOS works as intended and there is nothing for them to fix. The issue is LOS operations are quite resource intensive. Imagine a 8x8 grid, with a total of 64 cells. Now, let's say you have a squad in a cell. For the spotting to work flawlessly you'd need to check the los from that cells to each of the other 63 cells each second. Now, consider the fact spotting might not be done on a per unit basis, but on a per-man basis. This means, in the example above, if the squad consist of 8 man, you'll have 63 * 8 = 504 los checkings per second. Now, let's consider a typical CM battle with a 1000x1000m map and hundreds of men for each side. As you can imagine the number of los checkings can go quite high. What i'm trying to say here is the los oddities are the result of hardware limitations rather than buggy code.

b) While spotting doesn't work in all 100% cases perfectly, it DOES work as expected in most cases and that's good enough for me.