[chongli]

I don't know how you're supposed to do that and maintain acceptable performance for scrolling the screen around the battlefield. It's one thing for a game like DotA 2 to only send position updates for units that aren't obscured by fog of war, it's quite another to constantly keep track of the scrolling screen of the player and only send them the objects in that rectangle.

[overgard]

This is unlikely to be based on a camera rectangle. Fog of war, sure, but in most rts games the camera can jump immediately from a minimap click. Players would complain about popping and its doubtful a developer would value cheat prevention over standard experience.

[lawless123]

warzone has a fog of war, i think people are confusing zooming out with that?

If you zoom out you will still only be able to see map area you revealed and in that map area you would only see enemy units if your units could observer an area.

[chongli]

No. I'm talking about the unit position data which is sent from server to client. If the designers of the game intend for you to have a restricted view of the battlefield that you must scroll around actively and a mini map showing unit positions within the visible range of your army, they are consciously making a choice to restrict the way in which your game client views the data sent to it. By modifying the client to allow you to zoom out, you're bypassing this restriction and gaining a wider view of the same data.

[lawless123]

OK i see what you mean, i wouldn't have considered zooming out like that cheating.

[cerved]

SC2 does it not problem

[chongli]

Not true. Map hacks have existed for SC2 since beta. They would not be possible if this technology was used.

[erdevs]

What do the map hacks accomplish? Can you see full unit information across the map? I doubt this is the case, except for the game host. For clients, I'd be surprised/disappointed if this were true as it is not costly to filter the information from clients if FoW visibility has already been calculated.

[celdon25]

My guess is that the main technical problem preventing this in SC2 is related to the game's replay-saving system. If you have only partial data, your client can't include the data from the opponent's perspective, which makes the replays suck. Theoretically you could generate the replay server-side but it would be resource-intensive without a costly technical overhaul.

[erdevs]

Yeah, I'm surprised they didn't design for this. Typically replays (in any game) are a log of initial state and then player input commands, rather than complicated state streams. Input commands are simply replayed in the simulation. It seems possible to keep the master log of input commands and then simply replay the simulation on a client during replay. With this design you could filter inappropriate information from each client during gameplay but have full replay information.

I'm sure there are good reasons why the design in SC2 is as it is, but this was surprising! Thanks for the info.

[detaro]

> Can you see full unit information across the map?

Yes. The engine works by syncing the entire game state between all players (and observers, which in tournaments can become an annoying issue) and all clients have the same information.

[erdevs]

Interesting. I'm surprised they took this approach.

[Paradigma11]

It's true. http://wiki.teamliquid.net/starcraft2/Hacking

[erdevs]

Wow, that is crazy! Thanks for the info.