Topic: Fog of War for large engagements
In another thread, it was mentioned that distance calculations for many bots simultaneously might be causing crashes in the clients of some people. I basically just made a new suggestion post and cut and pasted my comment there in here.
About those massive PVP battles: Why are we precisely calculating all of these distances anyway?
If more than X robots are within your detection and ranging radius, switch modes to a fog or war mode.
Fog of war mode would only tell you the precise distance between you and anyone targeting you, or anyone you have targeted. Everyone else would be an approximation. Zero range, short range, medium range, long range, extreme range.
Ranges could then be refreshed occasionally rather than continuously, and ranges would be based on each individual ship's targeting range. Ewar robots might have the ability to track all distances precisely, but make it an option, not a feature. If someone tries it and it crashes their machine, then next time they won't try it.
This would add a lot more realism to larger group PVP, and reduce the server / client range calculation issues as well.
Faster mechs might be able to move far enough that you might not see where they went - provided they were not in an engagement with you.
Perhaps allow mechs two size classes larger than other mechs to mask signatures, letting an aske hide under an assault class robot. This would immediately be revealed by targeting the assault mech and isolating it's signature.
I could really see the fog of war adding a LOT to PVP combat.