View Issue Details
| ID | Project | Category | Date Submitted | Last Update | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0007221 | Valley 1 | Suggestion | Apr 23, 2012 5:19 pm | May 2, 2012 10:37 am | |
| Reporter | Penumbra | Assigned To | Chris_McElligottPark | ||
| Status | closed | Resolution | not fixable | ||
| Summary | 0007221: Replace "Detection Line" with an Aura | ||||
| Description | This line, while very useful, has been mistaken at least once as a Debug feature. I think this is because the line is always pointing at the player. This makes it look like the monsters know where you are already, even though you aren't in range. If it were instead an aura around the monster, this misconception would go away while losing very little of the functionality. This could be either a light source or just a circle. The light source would go towards assistance in not being surprised by enemies, and is easily explained in the story by the monsters just using the light to find the player. This would feel more like the vision cone in Metal Gear, a mechanic players are already accustomed to. | ||||
| Tags | No tags attached. | ||||
| Internal Weight | Feature Suggestion | ||||
| related to | 0006230 | considering | Stealth - A visible view range on the mini map | |
| related to | 0007201 | closed | Chris_McElligottPark | Enemy with a bright white "line of sight" line in a dark room |
| has duplicate | 0007316 | closed | Chris_McElligottPark | Change "Stealth Line" to "Stealth Circle" |
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I like the idea of a "hostility aura" on enemies, possibly faintly visible through dark. The lines now don't fit the visual style of the game all that well, and honestly I find them a bit hard to read --- I really want to know whether an enemy is active when I look at it, not look at my character and follow lines to see who's chasing him. Not having seen this feature in multiplayer, are all player's lines visible, or just your own? If you can see whether enemies are aware of your allies an aura would lose that functionality. |
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I think the problem with doing it as circles, let alone vague circles, is what happens when they overlap? especially once enemies have already detected you where one circle can cover the entire region, it could quickly degenerate into the circles obscuring each other and making it hard to tell what is going on. In defense of the lines themselves they are pretty easy to read, if the line from the enemy is blue they haven't detected you, if they have it turns red and sticks to the centre of your character. Now just for clarity I do agree that the lines look like a debugging tool, and would prefer a nice light radius-esque effect as well, it just needs to provide the same level of function and clarity that the lines do. |
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That said, do we really need all the information we're getting now? Supposing we had a system where an enemy just turned red when it detected a player, and it wasn't very clear in stacks. Wouldn't that communicate the basic information that we've hit a sneaking snafu and need to do something about it? |
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Doing that is almost the same as it not displaying the info at all, as an enemy that has detected you is probably trying to kill you in one way or another. |
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Having the light radius would tell you "how not to be seen" ;) If two or more monsters double up, well, so be it, don't stand there! |
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The performance impact of those would be immeasurably larger. 1000% more GPU load? Something like that. It would vary by the range of the enemy, and actually would be something like... logarithmic increase by detection size? |
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Ah, yeah. That's probably why, in multiplayer, other players don't give off light. Should have seen that. |
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The light thing in MP actually isn't a performance issue -- counterintuitively, other players giving off light would actually increase rather than decrease performance. That one is just a logical limitation that we need to address at some point before long. |
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Hmm, and now I have to ask why. That's really interesting. Is "darkness" the overlay? How is light around players different from light around players? Sorry, lots of questions :) |
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Drawing darkness is expensive. Light is never drawn -- it draws less darkness overlay. Darkness is of a fixed size and density per screen resolution, and few people wander around in the complete dark. Enemy detection rand overlays could individually be several screens wide and that overdraw will kill most graphics cards. Not mine, but quite a lot of players would be unable to play stealth missions suddenly. |
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So, wouldn't not drawing darkness around around enemies to represent their detection range help performance? |
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It wouldn't be remotely clear or granular enough I wouldn't think. |
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Hmm. True. I don't know. I keep harping on stealth, sorry about that ;) but I will probably continue to both harp and be apologetic ;) That being said, I'll continue. What if stealth were based on darkness. Then, the light sources of enemies would be obvious danger. The player would need to avoid light. Casting light orb all over the place would be bad. Casting flash of light would immediately attract all enemies, which it should. The lights hanging from the ceiling would have to be destroyed. Shooting out the lights in a stealth mission is an awesome thing! Platforming in the dark is hard, so maybe there could be a minor "see in the dark" enchant instead of reduced detectability. There could be darkness spells, the opposite of light orb. Would be a terrific balance of how, currently, casting light everywhere is always the right answer. Maybe "see in the dark" would instead add a glowy wireframe around floors in a limited radius to allow navigation. Ok, that's enough stream of consciousness for a weekend ;) |
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What you're suggesting entails basically redoing an existing functional mechanic to be less clear in UI terms, and encourages walking around in he dark which is literally impossible depending on your monitor brightness. As a general rule, thigs that require hours of dev time to recreate something that we already have are something that I view with great skepticism to begin with. That dev time could be spent on far more interesting things, I think. |
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Consider it dropped.... For now. ;) I'm just going to go back to enjoying the game. |
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Just to make the observation I made before in the forums, if we eventually get full ambient sound effects for all creatures (that increase in volume as the creatures come near), this mission could even have the visual marker be optional. |
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I know I said I would drop it, but I just had an idea. As to this: "encourages walking around in he dark which is literally impossible depending on your monitor brightness" The "detection rating" could dictated how bright a spot you could be in and still be invisible. That, coupled with some other creative "see in the dark" spells, would only require people to be in complete darkness when at 0% stealth. Stealth Missions, which give the innate 50% would just be darker, not pitch black. |
| Date Modified | Username | Field | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Apr 23, 2012 5:19 pm | Penumbra | New Issue | |
| Apr 23, 2012 5:19 pm | Penumbra | Relationship added | related to 0006230 |
| Apr 23, 2012 5:20 pm | Penumbra | Relationship added | related to 0007201 |
| Apr 23, 2012 5:21 pm | tigersfan | Internal Weight | => Feature Suggestion |
| Apr 23, 2012 5:21 pm | tigersfan | Status | new => considering |
| Apr 23, 2012 7:24 pm | martyn_van_buren | Note Added: 0022622 | |
| Apr 23, 2012 8:15 pm | Terraziel | Note Added: 0022624 | |
| Apr 23, 2012 8:27 pm | martyn_van_buren | Note Added: 0022625 | |
| Apr 23, 2012 8:27 pm | martyn_van_buren | Note Edited: 0022625 | |
| Apr 23, 2012 8:42 pm | Terraziel | Note Added: 0022626 | |
| Apr 23, 2012 11:00 pm | Penumbra | Note Added: 0022629 | |
| Apr 28, 2012 10:22 pm | Penumbra | Relationship added | has duplicate 0007316 |
| Apr 28, 2012 11:20 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Note Added: 0022952 | |
| Apr 28, 2012 11:20 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Status | considering => closed |
| Apr 28, 2012 11:20 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Assigned To | => Chris_McElligottPark |
| Apr 28, 2012 11:20 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Resolution | open => not fixable |
| Apr 28, 2012 11:22 pm | Penumbra | Note Added: 0022953 | |
| Apr 28, 2012 11:23 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Note Added: 0022954 | |
| Apr 28, 2012 11:27 pm | Penumbra | Note Added: 0022956 | |
| Apr 28, 2012 11:29 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Note Added: 0022957 | |
| Apr 28, 2012 11:32 pm | Penumbra | Note Added: 0022959 | |
| Apr 28, 2012 11:35 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Note Added: 0022960 | |
| Apr 28, 2012 11:50 pm | Penumbra | Note Added: 0022961 | |
| Apr 28, 2012 11:51 pm | Penumbra | Note Edited: 0022961 | |
| Apr 29, 2012 12:04 am | Chris_McElligottPark | Note Added: 0022967 | |
| Apr 29, 2012 12:11 am | Penumbra | Note Added: 0022971 | |
| Apr 29, 2012 1:45 am | Bluddy | Note Added: 0022980 | |
| May 2, 2012 10:37 am | Penumbra | Note Added: 0023271 | |
| Apr 14, 2014 9:28 am | Chris_McElligottPark | Category | Suggestion - General Idea => Suggestion - General |
| Apr 14, 2014 9:30 am | Chris_McElligottPark | Category | Suggestion - General => Suggestion |
