Odd behaviour of line of sight from tall buildings

[anjin]

In the Commonwealth add-on there is a map 'Linking Up & Breaking Out', which has a 5 storey castle. If you place a unit in the northeast turret on the top floor, and look out northeast over nothing but farmland, low hedges, and fences, for the most part the LOS is blocked when there are no obvious obstacles. In fact, moving the LOS line a mere millimetre or two to one side or the other can result in a clear LOS being blocked. Again, there is no obvious reason why this should be given the relative empty nature of the terrain. A 5 storey building looking out over farmland should be a great location to place observers, but it is of limited value because of the way the game calculates LOS obstructions. It doesn't even come close to simulating the real world - which is a shame given how much attention is given to other aspects of simulating the subject matter.

[womble]

Windows? If the unit has a "significant weapon" (SAW, MG, ManPAT etc), the LOS is drawn from the exact location of that weapon. Sometimes, in any building, the team will come to rest with that weapon having a very restricted LOS, due to the position of the weapon operator relative to the apertures available to shoot out of. So if it's a turret with few, narrow windows, that might explain what you're seeing.

[Bulletpoint]

I suppose they forgot to assign "hotspots" to that building, for the game to know that when you are in that tower, the LOS-guy should place himself at the window?

[Michael Emrys]

I don't know what the building specs are for that castle, but the medieval real deals had very thick walls, which means that even standing at one of the narrow windows one had a narrow viewing angle such as you describe. Various tricks of construction were used to alleviate this problem without making the occupants more vulnerable to return fire, but it was still a problem. As I say, whether this has the slightest bearing on what you are seeing in the game I can't tell. Just an idea that occurred to me.

Michael

[anjin]

The first thing I thought about was the position of the unit in relation to the windows, but unfortunately, that is irrelevant in this tower case - it is a fairly tiny room and you can't actually move closer to the windows. Oddly, you can see furthest on the diagonal - not directly out either window. I suspect the problem is due to an exaggerated impact on slight variations in the ground elevation (ie not significant enough to detect with the naked eye). I guess I will have to get the map editor out to examine it. I did make a similar tall building on an absolutely flat map and could see perfectly well in all directions. Those leaves of grass must have got in the way, despite being 5 floors up.

[anjin]

Doh! There wasn't a problem after all. I had accidentally turned off the display of trees! Not sure how that happened, but what I was looking at was the treeless landscape. Once I turned the trees back on I could see exactly why the LOS was blocked. My apologies for being such a muppet.

[womble]

"D'oh," indeed We've all done that.

[Michael Emrys]

"D'oh," indeed We've all done that.

One thing to watch out for is if you have more than one battle going at the same time. If you turn off the trees in one battle and then go to a different battle, the game remembers your last setting and it carries over. A useful check is to press Alt-T going through the full three part cycle just to make sure you have the setting you want to play in.

Michael

[c3k]

LOL. I've done that more times than I can count. I've also done the Alt-K smoke toggle and forgotten about it.

I blame all my losses on errant toggles. I sleep better that way.