Lo-Fi Games

Again, playing Kenshi tonight and struck by another idea. Again one that has been mentioned across many threads but I don't think it has its own full suggestion thread. *Apologies if my search checking is inaccurate.*

My idea was to have a tracking skill that would have several features of its own. The aim is to highten the tracking skill to a point where you know direction, number and speed etc of a group of foes and how long ago they were at a certain point. You could have some sort of item or skill button to trigger the track, in which the character kneels down, looks around etc and can then indicate a variety of information based on their skill level. skill level can increase the more you attempt tracks and more for a successful track.
This would mean that it would be wise to only have one or two trackers in the party to maximise level rather than lots of general trackers (which would be realistic) The idea can be expanded with other ideas too! But mainly my thought process for this was the ability to hunt down bandits / traders etc. Especially if the game receives some woodland as it's quite hard to find bandit groups as it is.
Hope this idea spurs some thought for development!

Or we could just have footprints. THen you could track them on your own yet not know who laid them down. Would add to the unknown of it

My vote is going for the footprints. I guess I never really understood whole tracking thing you said there but it sounded hard to make.

A la Mount and Blade.

I definitely support Tracking. I would like it in a map based form. For example, a filter on the full map that shows your best trackers estimates of where groups are after crossing where they have been. At first it would be something as general as people have been here, but as the character gets better more details would arise like you mentioned. Things such as amount of people, weight, direction, etc.

Traking would be very nice!And i dont know about you guys but headhunting with tracking is a must!

How about, footprints with a useable skill that tells you :

-How many ppl the group has (aproximate and depending on the skill level)
-How heavy they are (loot or no loot?)
-How fast they are going
-How far they are (taking in consideration footprints i a desert would last tops of 12 hours with no wind at all).

Hvizeu wrote:How about, footprints with a useable skill that tells you :

-How many ppl the group has (aproximate and depending on the skill level)
-How heavy they are (loot or no loot?)
-How fast they are going
-How far they are (taking in consideration footprints i a desert would last tops of 12 hours with no wind at all).

I think that can be easily told without a bunch of stats by

Footprint opacity (tells weight AND footprint lifetime)
Footprint spacing
and obviously the amount of prints to tell party size

Resurrecting this thread as it was referenced in a more recent thread on the same topic located here:
http://www.lofigames.com/phpBB3/viewtop ... ing#p35449

+1 to adding a Tracking skill

Taking into account what details have already been suggested about this topic (on both this thread and the linked thread), I would definitely enjoy using this feature to find NPC patrols and trade caravans, but I'm leaning more towards realism as opposed to M&B's style of tracking (which tells you exactly whose footprints are these).
I like the functionality of tracking being a toggle to some extent. Almost anyone can look around them and see footprints in mud, sand, or other soft terrain, but it takes a trained eye (and some time to examine, hence the toggle) to decipher the weight, or speed, of a body just by examining the footprint left behind.
The toggle would also be useful to discover tracks (such as disturbed earth or an unusual color of sand that could be covering up tracks) that an untrained eye could not see.

In the linked post, I like the possibility of covering tracks through intentional (and unintentional whenever weather is implemented) means in order to reduce the chance your outpost is "noticed by <insert faction name>".

Thinking about this from an implementation perspective, it would take a LOT of work to get character models to leave footprints exactly where their feet are stepping (possibly make footprints appear as a part of the character's animation, and the footprints could be separate polygons that will remain in the world for a flat duration value that is dependent on other values such as terrain type, weight, weather, etc.), so I was thinking it might be easier to just have a function, let's call it generateTracks, that is called every (magical arbitrary number) 0.8 seconds that produces a new footprint polygon (dependent on values such as weight, terrain, blah, etc.) underneath the character model so long as boolean IsWalking = true, and it will generate two footprints next to each other the moment isWalking = false.

This hypothetical function generateTracks would then be able to generate footprints that have an opacity value (formula for original polygon's depth / deterioration rate) and a spacing value (distance between footprint polygons. Since they are generated at a flat rate of every 0.8 seconds, running would make footprints farther apart than walking), but what this function doesn't answer is:
Sand People ride in single file to conceal their numbers

+1 as well