A BIG part of Revolution is changing the way you detect enemies. The core game RADAR/Sensors system is fairly sophisticated including basic terrain masking. But the core game only really includes one main rule.

• AWACS, Golfball and Carrier can see all ships and aircraft within range except those that are 100% obscured visually by terrain or smoke. eg, hiding behind a cliff or hovering in a smoke cloud

The HUD adds some additions to this:

• Once scanned by a player camera, contacts will not need to be re-acquired if it goes out of range and comes back in range.

Revolution builds on top of these using the map inspection functions in the game Lua scripting to add an additional model for sensors that the mod uses to emulate RADAR.

We assign different detection ranges based on attachments fitted, unit type, contact type and altitude.

This lets us compute everything a particular friendly unit will see for us, and also tell which hostile units have seen ours over and above the core “is_visible()” functions.

We can’t however emulate terrain masking (but we don’t really need to) as the lua scripting can’t “see” this kind of environment detail, but what we can do, we can feed into the HUD and Vehicle Control Screens and Holomap to create a convincing impression of Needlefish having RADARs and of AWACS having a greater over the horizon range at high altitude etc.

I realised I can also use the same code to obscure radar contacts at longer ranges on the operator screens, so now, when an ECM/Jammer is fitted the Revolution RADAR code knows to hide it from AWACS until it gets closer.