Goldenflame Dragon posted this in the Ultima Dragons Facebook group a few days ago, and I have been remiss in getting news posted about it. He is looking for advice as to how to handle line of sight blocking in The Dark Unknown:

Here’s a question – in Ultima IV, let’s say, mountains blocked your vision on the main map, but they did _not_ do so on the hill terrain’s combat map. How weird would it be to not be able to see all of the combat map? I’ve already made a separate “forest” that doesn’t block LOS for use in towns, so I can easily enough do that for combat map mountains, or I can just not use the style of hill combat map that 4 did with the passes that channel the monsters (and so avoid the entire issue), or I can leave the mountains as they are and have U4-style hill combat maps but block your vision so you can’t see what you’re fighting at first. Any opinions?

(I started working on combat maps tonight because I was doing AI work and when the bandits tried to attack me it actually crashed the game because I hadn’t made a forest map to zoom in to for combat yet.)

If you have any useful insights to offer, be sure to hit up the discussion thread on Facebook.