Underwater mod

My brother and I were just talking about a cool mod concept. I'm busy for the moment, focusing all of my modding efforts on another project. However, I think this is a good idea and might be willing to dedicate some effort to this when I finish with my first project. So, here goes.

What if a mod were to be created focusing on complete submersible combat. With a new tileset, a lot of new doodads, and some properly-animated units, a pretty convincing underwater world could be created. It could be like a race mod, with Naga as one race, and perhaps some sort of whale or shark people as another. Resources could be pearls (workers must harvest clams, which dot the map, and move slowly around) and wood could be coral or rock or something, which could be mined from reefs. This would be a hard mod to make, but it might be very interesting. What do you guys think?


As I said, I'm not working on this. Just wondering how it could theoretically be made.


--TiJiL

That's kind of a fun idea, but you're right, it would take a lot of work.

I think a big dilemma would be making it look underwater. Just placing water everywhere wouldn't look right at all. But, on the same note, making everything happen on solid ground wouldn't seem right either.

You'd have to attach the water bubbles animation to the overhead of units, so it looks like they're slowly letting out air.

A good idea would be to line the skys with very small waterfalls to make it look like water, if developed, this could be very cool, think: Sub Combat.

Another nice feature to have is allow units to swim up in elevation (make all units flying becasu it is under water and eveything.)

Yeah, I thought of that, Titan. Have a GUI enhanced spell that allows you to change your 'flying' height.

What i was thinking is allow every unit to swim higher in elevation, doing this will allow sneek attacks and all that. Alow resorces can be hiddenout of view if you want something t be hard to find. To actually pull it off to that degree you would definatly have to allow change the camera. (allow the Z target offset to lock to a unit or let te player set it, maybe allow changeing angle of attack and rotation by the player as well.)

Yeah, that would be awesome. There could be like 5 preset depths to swim at. Units up high recieve higher damage but lower defense, and units down low recieve lower damage but higher defense. That would add lots of neat strategies. Units would have to have lots of bubbles and such, and seaweed doodads would have to sway in the current. There would have to be a lot of stuff to make it convincing. I think, though, the best way to go would be to make a new underwater tileset, and then use a heavy, uniform blue fog over it, to give it the illusion of being underwater.

Just to show what I mean... I think fog effects (with appropriate doodads) is the best way to go to make it look underwater. Not too good a picture, I was just playing around.

How'd you make that blue-ish fog?

It's bluish... fog!

Environment - Set Fog

If someone would do that it should look impressive. With the custom tile sets, and maybe original models. Would take quite a bit of work though.

Something that should also be put in is things can only attack things that are within say 2 hight levels of it. (something on the sea pottom cant attack something that is at the top) How that could be set up I dont know though.

This could be made "very easily".

Make it so a certain unit can only attack air (which in this case would be about mid-level of the water).

Then make a unit that is air, and when you press a certain key, change fly height to the ground and switch with unit that is the same in all ways except is a ground unit, thus cannot be attacked

It would be cool to have the naga race, except redesigned so it looks correct underwater, and then like a peaceful race of whale-men. A manta ray unit would be very cool. Kindof like the hippogryph, an infantry can mount it. I don't know. Just spouting ideas here.

Maybe a Blue Fade Filter with about 70% transparency would work, with the blue fog, might have to tweek the tranparence between 50%-90% to look right! BTW, that fog realy looked like underwater =)

Using differnt units and differnt allowed targets on the units would be kinda easy doing it that way, but you would need to have several differnt versions of evey unit. Then run a trigger that changes unit, the hp and mana.

However since every unit is flying have stuff like undead, anchient, ward, and that type of stuff.

P.S. I though it would be difficult because i was thinking about how to do it with just triggers (just 1 version of every unit)