Two recent developments in ArmCom2: I’ve re-done the spotting system, changing it from a deterministic system (units are always spotted given a set of conditions) to a roll-based one with a couple automatic cases. Each crewman has a chance to spot unknown enemy units in his line of sight, which depends on his position in the tank and his hatch status. The roll is based on the crewman’s Perception stat plus modifiers such as range, intervening terrain, etc. This means that all units in the game will need fully modeled crew so that eventually all units will use the same system. In addition, there’s a couple situations in which units are always automatically revealed, such as moving in the open, or firing within close range of an enemy unit.

I’ve also added a new pop-up message window system, initially for use with spotting messages. I think it’s a big improvement on the pop-ups in ArmCom 1, since the window only appears in one of two positions (top half or bottom half of map viewport) rather than popping up anywhere on the map view. My plan is to use this for most messages during scenarios, with additional details logged to the message log.

I need to do a bit more work first but I should be able to compile a new Windows build soon for players to try out.