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#101 Contact Sharing Between Teammates
As per discussion with Fiver (and mentioning in the past in previous discussions), teammates should be able to share contacts lists.
Rationale:
In most modern RTS (and even some FPS), teammates share information regarding the position of opponents. This helps keep the game moving, as groups are engaging groups and less time is spent trying to figure out where on earth everyone is.
In BTMux, this is achieved with radio con callers. This is a bit out-dated, and often you find yourself not knowing where your nearby teammates are without checking seismic or other more penetrating sensors. Taking time to switch sensors or deal with con callers are things I'd like players have to deal with sparingly.
Solution:
Allow teammates to share contact lists somewhat like a C3 network without the BTH benefit. Basically, you hit 'contacts' like normal, and any contacts that your teammates see (but you don't) are grayed out at the top of your con list (it's better to put them up top so you don't have to scroll up to see what's in your actual LOS.) Only teammates within your mech's computer/scan/tac/lrs (or something else) range would be able to share contacts with you.
Contacts out of your LOS but in one of your teammates should be colored something like this to allow for quick interpretation:
- Yellow (not bright) for out of LOS enemies
- Cyan (not bright) for out of LOS friendlies and unknowns.
Further Benefits:
* We'd be able to get rid of c3targets, which is hacky and inconsistent with everything else. It's one less command to worry about teaching people.
* This would make the proposed IDF rewrite a lot cleaner, easier, and ergonomic.
* HUDs would benefit greatly from this in a sense that you'd have a much smoother, consistent view of nearby enemies, rather than having units popping in and out of LOS (and off your map) constantly.
* Recon units would be a lot more useful in a wider array of site designs. Simply send your recon out for a spin and keep an eye on surrounding troops from safety, allow the opleaders to make educated tactical decisions, and increase the value of teamwork.
* Sharing contact data is something 31st century machines should be able to do with ease. It makes sense and it's a lot more natural than the present method.
Implementation Notes:
We're going to need a compile-time directive, "--share-contacts". We'll default it to OFF until we can test and get the opinions of other admins and potential admins out there. I'd like to see it on by default, but not before discussion and testing.
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Compile-time options suck. Runtime options are much better. Otherwise, agreed.
On the HUDINFO front, we probably need to add a flag to contacts to indicate if they're out of LOS or not, so that HUDs can apply the appropriate styling. Something along the lines of the sprint/overheat/etc. flags, so it shouldn't require any real protocol changes.
As for maximum range, it should probably be configurable, perhaps separately from the other kind of ranges. I don't think TSCAN and its ilk are currently limited by any sort of range, and that should be an option for sites, too.