I would love fog of war in RWR. It would alow multiplayer stealth missions and no seeing through wall

fog of war has been suggested multiple times before, even i had suggested it. I think the answer is still the same,
i think it would take more performance as game needs to render every single soldier vision if there is anything plus the area around. And you need to see you and your mates through the wall if needed to, i was thinking same way as you at beginning and later realized how much it would least hit the performance.

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co-owner of NEWA

FOW would be an interesting thing, sure. About the performance, I am not sure if it hits the performance at all, depending on the technique used. It could be a LOS rendering similar to the game "Monaco".
This would give the game a completely new approach and force the player to a different playstyle.
Even if we have loads of stuff to finish for the final release I am confident that pasik might get a look at it at some point as the work on it shouldn't be too hard but I prefer to let him confirm that himself as I might be wrong

Indeed, it has been suggested before. I think I said back then that while it is possible, I don't think it's going to end up made for 1.0. Or maybe I did say the opposite, but that's just me.


Anyway, I also think there are roughly 3 ways to achieve what fog of war is about, occluding sight to stuff your character wouldn't see.

1) keep the game as it is, but add the same visibility checks the AI uses for sight to detect if e.g. the most primary elements of game are visible to your character: other soldiers, items, vehicles. This is the easiest of the solutions as everything is ready, but at the same time the one that causes most confusion - you don't see from the surroundings if your soldier can see there, so your FOV is not actually visualized.

Similar way was in e.g. Jagged Alliance, the enemies just vanished when they went out of sight, but you could still see the whole environment. Well acceptable for a turn based game, but not that great for a real time shooter.

2) I at some point was thinking that one option would be to replace the existing lighting & shadows techniques with point based light originating from the local character and compatible shadow casting, to make every element cast shadows outwards from the player's character, effectively hiding where the character can't see if the shadow intensity is high, but that's not quite what would happen if it used texture shadow maps like the current system.

The shadows wouldn't appear volumetric, but just showing sight occlusion on nearby surfaces like on ground and walls, so it would have inaccuracies.

It would work great at least if the game was straight top down like Monaco. It might be good enough anyway, but it wouldn't be perfect for the intention. Also it's a fair amount of work I believe.

3) One way to achieve what fog of war tries to do could be rotational camera. The camera would orientate to your character's facing, so you wouldn't see behind you, also you wouldn't see behind obstacles in front as they simply occlude what's behind them. As the camera would still be so high, there might be some ways to exploit it, so e.g. by turning the camera 90 degree right, you might catch a glimpse of something you normally wouldn't see, not sure, just a hunch.

Rotational camera is otherwise almost easy to do, I already tried it a while back and made that video about it, but it would need some adjusting of tree foliage and grass rendering. Also it changes the game completely and with the quick hack I had, usability was pretty poor handling it with mouse.


4) Shadow volumes, so like 2 but actually constructing the shadow geometry from character point of view each frame.. not getting excited