tilt the camera, that hill is much steeper than it appears on your picture.

Once the looking unit had died, there is indeed no LOS over the hill's edge at the towers.


LOS mechanics sometimes suck, but this case was relatively mild.


I think problem is also with ghost unit shapes.
You had already scouted the missile tower, then lost LOS, so a ghost-shape of turret is made visible:
From ghost shape the player can clearly see the enemy and the enemy is a immobile unit.


If one takes over play with cheats, one sees the Commander could indeed have shot at the turret from there:

It is conflict:
The player sees something (enemy position) but the units do not see it and do not react to it.

quote: [2up]knorke Once the looking unit had died, there is indeed no LOS over the hill's edge at the towers.

Why is there no LOS when the towers are shooting at me? Towers shoot in a straight line. So towers shooting at me \implies line of sight exists. Something has to be miscalculated here.

quote: LOS mechanics sometimes suck, but this case was relatively mild.

My com died!

[Spoiler]

Why isn't it just that if you can see any part of it, and your weapon can reach it, you can shoot it? Is it an intentional limitation? Because I've never felt like I could take advantage of this deliberately (outside of semi-burying my stingers), and it always feels fiddly when it does occur. Like a bug. It's not intuitive and I'm still having difficulty understanding it. You can shoot at radar dots without seeing the area around their feet?

What if the wallhack gave vision over buildings which have been ghosted in addition to shooting units?

quote: Is it an intentional limitation?

The current LOS algorithm is 2D in essence, the calculation is very simple:
If you have a clear view of 5 elmos or lower above ground - that tile is visible.
That means that if my vision is blocked so I can only see 10 elmos above the ground in a specific tile, all units there will be invisible even if they are skyscraper sized.

This issue is very difficult to solve for technical reasons. A visible/non-visible tile system is far easier to calculate and implement than a system where you also have to remember the minimum visible height in each tile.
[Spoiler]

tl;dr: Spring LoS is 2D, making it 2.5D is both complex and performance heavy.

quote: Can this constant 5 be easily made reasonably Lua configurable

Not easily.

quote: boat stuff

I'm happy to say that this issue has already been fixed in latest dev engine.
Organise testing if you want to see 102 released.

You are mistaken, I see no bug. The cliff-reveal in that replay is working correctly. I think your commander can see the LLT in the screenshot in the OP.

• The Commander has just shot, it is still reloading.
• The LLT and Defender have only just started shooting so they were not visible/
• The Buoy is probably too far away regardless.
• You must be able to see the LLT and Defender because I know there are other units on that hill which you cannot see. Therefore this screenshot is taken without fullview.

LoS has a known horizontal offset problem in the current engine. This exacerbates cliff issues from half of the directions. Dev engine fixes this and does a whole bunch of other, unspecified, changes which seem to fix some other things too. It seems to have higher cliff visibility.

I think the dev engine system with the cliff-reveal gadget is a good solution. There will be some cliff cases but:

• It is infeasible to fix cliff cases.
• A fix to cliff cases would introduce inconsistency to the LoS system.

In the current system type of system, if a square of the terrain is dark then you know that any non-shooting unit could be inhabiting that square. If we took the more realistic approach of pairwise raytraces for all units then black squares would lose their precise meaning. The added clarity may make the simple system superior, given reduced edge cases and the cliff-reveal to handle remaining cases.

quote: Would be fair if Defender would at least "uncloak" for the whole of his reload cycle.

No, that would be an inconsistency in the cliff-reveal rules. Everything is revealed for about a second iirc.

Is there anything wrong with this behaviour? It is clearly communicated via the LoS map and creates some extra terrain importance.

quote: There's nothing "wrong" with current behaviour.

I think there definitely is a problem. Otherwise this discussion would not have started. Line-of-sight being very quirky is one of many Spring mechanics that could use a lot of polish because in their current form they can create a lot of frustration. Players should never have a "valid reason" to feel rage towards how the game works (or doesn't work).

Game mechanics that are unexpected and annoying without being a real (competitive) feature should not exist. When I say "real feature" I mean things like sneaky Skuttles/Scythes, Rockos kiting Outlaw forever, etc. which can be annoying to some players, but were designed around this and add something to the game.

I just found another more obvious example in this replay
http://zero-k.info/Battles/Detail/414517

in the third minute at the middle of the map, this half build defender is not visible for the north team, look at the very little hill (not even can be called a hill) that cover it, dat ridiculous.