my wishlist (you may either like my ideas or not)

[criptos]

The server side about lligth.

For the map:
Outside/Inside properties.
Ligth conditions.
Maybe we need more properties for tiles. Solid, Transucent or transparet of the wall..

And the hard part, is to have the amount of ligth for a specifi tile.
Ligth decreases at a exponential rate (a decay function works)... So, each source of ligth covers a specifed permeter, when 2 perimeters intersec, the value of ligth sould be recalculated for the intersected tiles.

And this must be done server side, and reported to the client. And this could be easily avoided at the client also. A simple patch to avoid taking in count the ligthing properies, could be easily done...

Why ligthing should is needed to be processed at the server. Easy, for property challenges, for example. Hide of a thief vs intelligente, seek, of the other player... those thigs are evaluated server side...

HOW is redered, and if shadowing is done, or not, that stuff, is CLIENT side issues, So, keep the topic about SERVER things And this stuff, is more related to map properties and ligth sources.

[AndyG314]

If we have a client that supports color conversions (I think this is on a to do somewhere) then it would reduce the amount of work that would have to be done by artists, certainly it coul help reduce the day/night problems.

Seasons would probbly have to be done from scratch however.

[biggeruniverse]

The server side about lligth.

For the map:
Outside/Inside properties.
Ligth conditions.
Maybe we need more properties for tiles. Solid, Transucent or transparet of the wall..

And the hard part, is to have the amount of ligth for a specifi tile.
Ligth decreases at a exponential rate (a decay function works)... So, each source of ligth covers a specifed permeter, when 2 perimeters intersec, the value of ligth sould be recalculated for the intersected tiles.

And this must be done server side, and reported to the client. And this could be easily avoided at the client also. A simple patch to avoid taking in count the ligthing properies, could be easily done...

Why ligthing should is needed to be processed at the server. Easy, for property challenges, for example. Hide of a thief vs intelligente, seek, of the other player... those thigs are evaluated server side...

HOW is redered, and if shadowing is done, or not, that stuff, is CLIENT side issues, So, keep the topic about SERVER things And this stuff, is more related to map properties and ligth sources.

I know what you're worried about- clients ignoring shadowed/dark regions to get an advantage, but I question the feasibility of processing lighting on the server-side and updating every client in realtime.

It would be safer not to have abilities based on how much a player can see in the dark. Too much room for cheating. Same thing goes for LoS visibility checks.

[maci]

no problem..

if the being shouldnt be in sight of the player .. the server just sends no message about the being

[bahamutian]

From all of the games that I've played before, I am not sure if I have seen a top-down perspective game that used Line-of-Sight to determine whether you can/cannot see an enemy.

Now using stealth or some other skill to hide would make sense, because they are trying to blend in. For this to work as it would appear that it should, there are a few things that would need to be coded in. Certain actions that completely cancel out the stealthing like: attacking someone, casting spells (some or all?), and some skills. Other actions, like movement would have a chance to cancel the hiding. Faster movement should have a higher chance of canceling stealth mode.

Logically, if you think about it, you are watching the player from above in a top down game, not from the player's eyes. You have the ability to see what is within a certain range of the avatar. If you want to include LoS, then the game should be switched to a first/third person POV.

Yes, I agree that decisions reguarding the passing of information must be performed on the server side.

Enforcing the client to use/display the day/night changes would probably be difficult, unless you forced everyone to use the most updated version to the server. This would make it difficult to do testing though, unless the person had another server that they could connect to to upload their client version for testing purposes. For a final release of the game though, this would probably be perferable, ensuring less cheating. A test server could be setup also so that anyone can log in with a different version to be able to test it.

[Bjørn]

From all of the games that I've played before, I am not sure if I have seen a top-down perspective game that used Line-of-Sight to determine whether you can/cannot see an enemy.

Most RTS games use line-of-sight and so did RPGs like Diablo and Nox.

The Mana World doesn't use LOS at the moment cause it would need to be server-enforced, thus it would cause an increase in server CPU usage and be sensitive to lag. This is why we probably won't do real LOS checking, but maybe we could at least have the crowd in a closed room be hidden from the client as long as the door to it is closed for example. That's a bit of speculation.