Helmet Scanner

Request new features or present your ideas.
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Chomps123
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Helmet Scanner

Post by Chomps123 »

The scanner is great and all but the rate that the scanner refreshes is a little to slow.

I figure that the refresh rate should be a little faster in stage 2 but once the humans reach stage 3 the refresh rate is almost instant.

If you think about it aliens already have an scanner that constantly refresh.

But to counter it aliens at stage 3 have the ability to see thru the walls, somewhat similar to Blacklight Retributions H.R.V. minus the recharge time.

That or only certain aliens have the ability, specifically the adv mara, adv goon, and tyrant.

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Viech
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Re: Helmet Scanner

Post by Viech »

Now that we have a minimap I don't see a reason to have the old radar occupying screen space, so I would really appreciate a redesign of both human radar and alien sense.

I have some ideas floating in my mind to allow for greater flexibilty in human equipment. I'm currently in favor of decoupling helmet and radar. As a seperate utility with additional cost we have the chance to make it more than just a bonus to the mandatory head protection. I imagine a real time display of enemys on the map for yourself and close teammates as well as some form of in-vision recticles (think of Battlefield >= 2 or any space shooter) that show position and additional info (health) about aliens and their buildables. This would bring two advantages: One is that aliens can continue to use stealth as a weapon, even on HS2. The second is that the general awesomeness of the radar increases. For the helmet which has lost some value but is still mandatory at this point, I would like to see alternative equipment. One utility that I can think of is a gas mask, that has little head protection against melee damage but makes your nearly immune against the acid tube gas and other forms of volatile weaponry the aliens might come up with. Plus gas masks are awesome, too. Pretty much by definition.

The alien sense blips must die. Name any solution (give aliens some form of wall hack, make them completely blind and require players to use 5.1 headsets) and it's guaranteed to be better than status quo.

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ViruS
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Re: Helmet Scanner

Post by ViruS »

I like the alien sense blimps as they are.
However if you're really keen, like mentioned, we can try a wall-hack type, where for example the further the human is the less they'll glow.
You know how in Q3: CPM people set bright skins on enemies? Something like that, but only applies i the human is within x units (that fade as x gets bigger) and that glow in particular can be seen through walls, but the raw models can't. Like a fusion between bright skins and left 4 dead's through-wall outlines.

I think I got a little to complicated there so i'll summarize it:
Humans (and other player/buildable entities) will have their normal models + a bright skin that can be seen through walls and fades with distance.

For human radar, I guess we can just shove the alien blips into the minimap if a helmet is given.

Only problem with these ideas presented is that before, aliens couldn't tell how high or below them the enemies were, only direction + distance whereas humans had a line that gets longer with vertical distance (i.e. if used right, you can find any stationary alien if you stood still).

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Saliva
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Re: Helmet Scanner

Post by Saliva »

Viech wrote:

The alien sense blips must die. Name any solution (give aliens some form of wall hack, make them completely blind and require players to use 5.1 headsets) and it's guaranteed to be better than status quo.

What's wrong with the current alien sense? In my opinion it's intuitive and works well. It's also useful without being too useful. Something like a wallhack for example could potentially be too powerful.

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Viech
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Re: Helmet Scanner

Post by Viech »

They are ugly and often misleading, you can't tell if an enemy is in front of you or behind you. I guess most games that use such kind of targeting don't display blips but recticles as soon as the enemy is inside the vision frustrum. I'd be OK with such a solution, if the blips as such look significantly better than now.

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ViruS
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Re: Helmet Scanner

Post by ViruS »

I have some feedback about radar - AFK players - when they're the last one remaining, it's a real pain in the ass because they're invisible to both radars.

Viech wrote:

They are ugly and often misleading, you can't tell if an enemy is in front of you or behind you.

You aren't using it right. The minimap works the same way, it'll go nuts and spin like crazy if you're on walls at certain angles.

The (Old) radar only told directions, while the new one tells direction AND distance.
The human radar tells direction AND position (including Z value) but only refreshes every 0.75 seconds.

AlienSense is very useful for me, as I actually very often, don't look at the enemy in combat, but at my aliensense to navigate myself. You'd probably wonder how I tell which one is which with multiple enemies, but you just have to get used to it :)

My opinion: Humans can print their minimap on their radar. It probably requires the dots to spin with the minimap though.
Aliens can keep their aliensense and the minimap to be shown when they for example, hold 'TAB' (scores) and the map becomes transparent behind the scoreboards or something similar. This kind of reminds me of NS's navigation system, just google a few gameplay vids of it. The map doesn't rotate on it afaik though.

Maybe we could have a new button for the minimap to enlarge, and we can use that instead.

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