Also, congratulations for getting your paper accepted!

The feeling of having your little guys go running to their deaths or running screaming for safety under their own steam (no pun intended) is actually so much more fulfilling than dragging a box around a group of dudes and right clicking somewhere it’s ridiculous. Star Craft is actually a little outdated in terms of squad AI in that the units have a tendency to just do only what you tell them to and shoot things that come close.

The idea of the officers having an effect on their men is also good, depending on leadership qualities. Automated micromanagment of troops, too? Like a guy who’s been in ten battles and missing an arm… he more grizzled?
And what about wounds? Just 100 hitpoints and they’re out or will there be the potential for targeted crippling and the errant headshot to derail everything?

Leaving it open to take punitive action against ineffective officers would also be nice.

Shadows should be sharper, but soft shadows – real soft shadows – mean a higher number of samples taken from the shadow map. That means more hardware taps per pixel you want to illuminate. We can up that, but there’s a speed issue. Right now it’s 9-tap PCF; I will probably add support for upping that to 16 and 25 taps for more blurring and softness.