I'm quite surprised...

Despite Blizzard's valiant attempts in making the game easy to read, which IMO they've succeeded in, some people still complain that they can't tell what's going on in videos. Are people those blind? I mean compared to modern RTS games like RA3 and DoW2, SC2 is very easy to read. They want it as clear as SC1 which is impossible unless they reverted back to a 2D engine. Part of what made SC1 easy to read was engine and graphics limitations. Less colors and textures meant less information for the eyes/brain to process..

I thought it was quite easy to read until I saw the 2v2 game from blizzcon, everything was too dark and the units blended in with the terrain too much.

http://i164.photobucket.com/albums/u...rmot34/sc2.jpg

http://s.sk-gaming.com/image/image/b...f41fb841dl.jpg

Now I understand of course that a lot of the problem is with the video quality, but I think that the game would benefit greatly from an increase in color saturation on the units, creep made brighter, and similar things because units and buildings aren't really distinct enough.

Watch a Battle Report, it's a lot clearer. The only one I've seen that was hard to read was one of the BlizzCon 2008 matches (New Antioch) due to the dark background.

Some of the colours blend into the tileset (like stalkers on the twilight stuff), but otherwise it's fine :o

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Originally Posted by Noise

I thought it was quite easy to read until I saw the 2v2 game from blizzcon, everything was too dark and the units blended in with the terrain too much.

http://i164.photobucket.com/albums/u...rmot34/sc2.jpg

http://s.sk-gaming.com/image/image/b...f41fb841dl.jpg

Now I understand of course that a lot of the problem is with the video quality, but I think that the game would benefit greatly from an increase in color saturation on the units, creep made brighter, and similar things because units and buildings aren't really distinct enough.

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That's an extremely blurry screenshot, and a game should in no way be judged by such low quality images. Consider also that movement affects readability as much as colour, so it's much easier to read the game in animated real-time rather than a static screenshot.

I think that's because most games we got to see are horrid videos that look more like dog's vomit than anything else. I had said sometimes that i don't understand Blizzard's decisions about that.

I still don't like how ground units stack on top of each other. A group of marines (or any other land unit) moving across the screen look like one big blob of units. In SC1, each unit had their own "personal space" with a buffer between them and friendly or hostile units.

The game looks great. This is just a minor pet peave of mine. ;)

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Originally Posted by Pick

I still don't like how ground units stack on top of each other. A group of marines (or any other land unit) moving across the screen look like one big blob of units. In SC1, each unit had their own "personal space" with a buffer between them and friendly or hostile units.

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Goodbye collision factor, hello “micro-less” game engine.

I’m quite surprised that someone here has noticed this at last: hey Blizzard, we have discovered pretty major flaw in your game – do something lol.

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Goodbye collision factor, hello “micro-less” game engine.

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What are you talking about? Units have collision volumes. However, this space is not the same size as the visible space around the unit. That's because it's 3D.

Stand a figure up. Then put another figure behind it, but have the bases of the figures touching. Now, look down at it from a 45 degree angle.

See? Overlap.

Units can't move through each other, but what defines "through" is no longer the size of the sprite, but the size of the base of the unit. And because they're using a perspective projection to render, there will be more overlap on units at the top of the screen than the bottom. This is because the angle from the view to the top of the screen is shallower than the angle from the view to the bottom of the screen.

Eh. Only thing I see as problematic is the Twilight tileset. The units are easy enough to see, but unless the team colour is GLOWING it's completely impossible to see, and some of the units are hard to distinguish from one another.