Oh geez, I'm off Cemetech for eight hours having a life for once, and you guys decend into anarchy and chaos. Sonlen, I appreciate your candor and enthusiasm, but I respect Elfprince's opinions highly, having known him to be a reasonable and thorough coder and designer for a long time. Elfprince, how about this idea: buildings get a decal, units get some symbol painted on the ground under them, and if you hold a particular key, arrows appear over the heads of your units, buildings disappear, and team symbols appear on the ground where the buildings were. Release the key, and everything goes back to normal. I feel this would help in building to figure out what's what, and during combat could help you quickly decide what units should do what.

That is pretty much what I said to him in SAX I am almost positive....

Another benefit of top-down view is that you can simply use a different shade of grayscale for different player colors.

I don't think there will be greyscale because CALCnet takes that ability away.

100% Correct tanner, though if Kerm wants, he can explain the details.

You probably did, but I wasn't here to see it, since I was away all day.

If I understand what you're saying correctly, that sounds reasonable. Would the purpose of the arrows simply be to differentiate your units from everyone else (the equivalent of white/red minimap dots vs full team colors in Blizzard RTSes) or would they convey some other information such as the direction the unit is headed in, or a health-bar of some kind?

I think the way to fix this would be for SirKerm to stay at home all day or at least on the forums all day. That way this doesn't happen again.

Obviously. I can't think of any downsides to that.

I was thinking the former, simple differentiation, but I think that the health bar might be a bit of an important detail

Health is important to know for both your own and enemy forces. Maybe black-on-white for your own, and white-on-black for enemy. So normal rendering would be decals-on-buildings and decals-under-foot. Toggled mode would be decals-on-ground-with-no-building and health-over-head. The question is then whether this should be a press-and-hold toggle or a click-on/click-off toggle.

Kerm: I can't run a grayscale interrupt and CALCnet interrupt together
Sonlen: ohhh, I thought ASM had the ability to do grayscale eitherway
Kerm: grayscale runs via an interrupt
Kerm: overhead is about 60-80%
Kerm: CALCnet runs via an interrupt
Kerm: you can't run two interrupts at the same time without one of them suffering
Kerm: even if you can get it running at all
Sonlen: hmmm.... going to go play cards with my grandmother, I will be back after a while, also, what if calcNET had grayscale built in, is that a possiblity?
Kerm: it's still not possible, I'm afraid
Kerm: the timing that CALCnet requires would make grayscale stutter and tear
Sonlen: I still have minimal knowledge of ASM
Sonlen: ouch
Kerm: or if I could make grayscale work nicely
Kerm: CALCnet would stop working properly

I actually have an add on to that idea, you can have it as an on/off toggle, but make sure decals show with what kind of building/character etc... above it, such as B for barracks, F for a farm, T for troops, etc..

I would hope to make things visually obvious enough that that's not necessary, no?

Well just let me know what I need to change on the sprites so whatever method chosen can be implemented more easily.

Eh, I cant really say I disagree due to greyscale's flickering giving me headache. Tell me if I can help when it comes to the calcnet part. Did I mention I got a new 84 keypad for my nspire?

Qazz, that's great to hear! Sonlen, I looked for those Stables you mentioned, but I couldn't find them.

ikr? Now I can help debug your games and other programing products to work for 84 keypad users

It has yet to even be started as far as I know, unless Kerm started it in secret and has yet to tell anyone.

I am refering to his products in general. Like general CALCnet testing and such

my nspire still needs batteries though.

Not CS2? D: How could you ask for other things here. D:< :p