Make Overmap exploration more realistic

[KurzedMetal]

Describe the Problem
The issue with the current system is that it's too easy to explore cities.

Player gets a huge amount of information when simply walking on a city, even without binoculars: they can see what kind of buildings are available even a few blocks away without taking into account Line of Sight and other building blocking the view, letting the player easily strategize where to go to pick valuable armor/weapon/consumables.

Describe the solution you'd like
I'd like to see restriction of Line of Sight be applied to Overmap too.
If the player has buildings to the north and south, he won't be able to see more than a single building towards that direction (the tiles behind those buildings should still be unexplored).

An added implementation bonus could be a flag to mark certain type of buildings as "non-blocking", for example: A plaza has no building and few trees doesn't generate Overmap LoS blocking.

Describe alternatives you've considered
Another possible option would be hiding what type of building it is until the player is closer.
That means the player knows there's a building far in the distance, but has no clue what it may be (house, grocery or gun shop).

[CoroNaut]

We already have line of sight affected when coming up to a large forest, even with binoculars you can see less than half as much as just looking over plains. I don't know if line of sight is already reflecting that you see only the facing side of the city, but line of sight is implemented.

[KurzedMetal]

I wanted to do more tests and add some screenshots but I pressed SHIFT+ENTER by mistake and it submitted the issue. :/

You are right, it does have LoS, but I think it needs some tweaking.

Example, here I approached the city directly going south (I initially went diagonal so disregard the buildings closer to me), and I marked some buildings I wasn't expecting to see due to LoS and I wasn't even expecting to identify what type of building it was due to range. (This was with a binocular)

Another example (without binocular), This is probably an edge case scenario because it seems the player has LoS on the block he is in and he acquires vision even when he has a wall in his face:

[KurzedMetal]

Another one (without bin):
The most surprising here is that I got view of the Manhole to the south west (yellow street), since it's behind of a grocery store. So I could efectively see it with 2 buildings blocking me.

After adding binoculars and moving a 2 steps/turn north (to update overmap) from where I left in the video:

Binoculars shouldn't give X-Ray vision. 😄

[KurzedMetal]

As for Forest, I think the player can see like 3-4 tiles into the forest, I think it should be more restrictive (specially if it has high density).

Tweaking all this would have a huge impact on city exploration and I think the way the player approach early days

[KurzedMetal]

Sorry, closed by mistake :/

[CoroNaut]

This would definitely be a long term issue then, unless some genius can figure out all the math behind it 😄

[Phenomphear]

Oh this is a very interesting idea. As a new player I am dying a lot and sometimes I'm tempted to re-roll my map because I see most of the city, what it has, and where the buildings are. I haven't yet, but, other new players may just re-roll maps until they see a city they like, adding this would prevent that and make early city exploring more interesting and maybe even prevent suicide runs straight to a gunshop or fire department.

Little idea: buildings that are considered "large" like a fire department or office building should probably be visible from quite a distance, but, I have no idea how you will implement this.

[Shinino]

My guess on the 'large' buildings: Probably with a flag such as "LARGE" which would somehow show up on map from further away. I absolutely couldn't say on the -mechanics- of this though.

[kevingranade]

We have a very functional LoS system, probably the most straightforward thing to do is to load the immediate neighbourhood of map tiles into an array as transparency values, and run the existing code over it. I'm guessing the existing code does something relatively ad-hoc to decide which map areas you can see.

[ghost]

in similar problem, a player can see what are inside houses without having to go inside and really look. what i often do is to pass along alley of aligned houses, i just walk following the houses lines from exterior and as i walk by whole content of houses is revealed to me, like if there's stairs or not etc .. it would be much more realistic to show houses roof all the time, except when we actually enter a house, only then reveal interior. we definately see too much, that is true for line of sight discussed in this PR which is good, but we also see too much of the buildings interiors without setting a foot inside.

[shahezad96]

you ppl are restricting players but how about monsters and NPC?
if all creatures in the game not get same restriction its gonna get hard to play the game.
right now its still too hard to play.
you should add sneak mode to walk, run and crouch.(i dont know where to say so i am saying here. i am not a dev)

[github-actions]

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