Is Collision Console Command a Cheat?
f0urt3
Join Date: 2007-07-24 Member: 61671Members, Reinforced - Shadow
Join Date: 2007-07-24 Member: 61671Members, Reinforced - Shadow
Hi all --
First off, I'm sorry if someone has brought this up before but I did a search on collision and it was all game-mechanic related posts.
First, a little background. I've noticed an uptick in the number of times I've been shot dead while a non-moving invisible skulk. Some of them were probably pure luck, sure. Some others of them were probably when I was in common hiding places, of course. I can remember in a couple instances, I was shot from across a map, where I was in the middle of a rock ceiling, and I wasn't moving. They definitely weren't standard hiding spots. Even if there were a "shimmer" it would be very hard to see against the rock texture. It was always the same player shooting me in those scenarios. I can't remember his his/her name and it doesn't matter.
A couple days ago a similar thing happened to someone else on my alien team. One guy was always shooting him from across a room, while cloaked and not moving, or so he claimed. I wasn't spectating so I can't confirm everything there. It sounded like a duplicate scenario.
Just today a marine chatted that he 'could see you when invisible and in dark corners.' He could have been just talking trash. Nobody complained about unfair kills.
All of this made me wonder, I saw the collision display (console command: collision) on a UWE post or e-mail somewhere and I tried it out. I didn't test it out extensively, though. IF it shows the outline of invisible skulks, then it could be used as a counter to invisibility. It could also explain what I saw in-game. That is, the marine in question could have enabled the collision display to see invisible skulks. I hesitate to call out someone for hacking (I have no direct proof and I just want to play, rather than hunting down potential cheaters) and I'm trying to find a explanation for it and the "collision" setting seems reasonable.
The bad thing is it is difficult to see in-game whether collision could be used this way without setting up a friend as a cloaked skulk to test. You really need to be able to toggle collision on and off to check. That's difficult to do in the heat of battle. Can anyone confirm whether the outline of a cloaked alien can be seen in collision? It seems that it would. After all, the game engine still needs to calculate collisions for invisible aliens.
I suggest that UWE prevents collision from being enabled unless developer mode is or cheats are enabled. This prevents someone from using this alternate view to their advantage and keeps the playing field level, unless the sever allows it. Even if it doesn't show invisible players the collision view still makes everything bright, and that alone, is an advantage for marines. (I hate it, personally, but whatever.)
Thoughts?
-d
First off, I'm sorry if someone has brought this up before but I did a search on collision and it was all game-mechanic related posts.
First, a little background. I've noticed an uptick in the number of times I've been shot dead while a non-moving invisible skulk. Some of them were probably pure luck, sure. Some others of them were probably when I was in common hiding places, of course. I can remember in a couple instances, I was shot from across a map, where I was in the middle of a rock ceiling, and I wasn't moving. They definitely weren't standard hiding spots. Even if there were a "shimmer" it would be very hard to see against the rock texture. It was always the same player shooting me in those scenarios. I can't remember his his/her name and it doesn't matter.
A couple days ago a similar thing happened to someone else on my alien team. One guy was always shooting him from across a room, while cloaked and not moving, or so he claimed. I wasn't spectating so I can't confirm everything there. It sounded like a duplicate scenario.
Just today a marine chatted that he 'could see you when invisible and in dark corners.' He could have been just talking trash. Nobody complained about unfair kills.
All of this made me wonder, I saw the collision display (console command: collision) on a UWE post or e-mail somewhere and I tried it out. I didn't test it out extensively, though. IF it shows the outline of invisible skulks, then it could be used as a counter to invisibility. It could also explain what I saw in-game. That is, the marine in question could have enabled the collision display to see invisible skulks. I hesitate to call out someone for hacking (I have no direct proof and I just want to play, rather than hunting down potential cheaters) and I'm trying to find a explanation for it and the "collision" setting seems reasonable.
The bad thing is it is difficult to see in-game whether collision could be used this way without setting up a friend as a cloaked skulk to test. You really need to be able to toggle collision on and off to check. That's difficult to do in the heat of battle. Can anyone confirm whether the outline of a cloaked alien can be seen in collision? It seems that it would. After all, the game engine still needs to calculate collisions for invisible aliens.
I suggest that UWE prevents collision from being enabled unless developer mode is or cheats are enabled. This prevents someone from using this alternate view to their advantage and keeps the playing field level, unless the sever allows it. Even if it doesn't show invisible players the collision view still makes everything bright, and that alone, is an advantage for marines. (I hate it, personally, but whatever.)
Thoughts?
-d
Comments
If this is true then it is an exploit and using it to gain an advantage is no different than a cheater using a hack.
Ive never heard of that collision command so I cannot really comment on that. If it does something stupid like show skulk outlines, then it needs to be a sv_cheats 1 only command.
BUT to address your other point, don't also forget that skulks' eyes glow, and also with the ridiculous sounds that there are now, marines can hear skulks getting into ambush positions from an absolute mile away (to be fixed in the next patch and already fixed in NSL mod).
I find it quite easy to see cloaked skulks. The shimmer is very noticeable on my rig. Also when you know they've gone shade hive, you're really looking out for the effect, too.
The collision command shows the simplified collision geometry in bright, primary colors. That's why I think it must show cloaked aliens.
@Roobubba
1) I've never noticed the eyes glowing, but now that you mention it, I need to look.
2) In my case, I was in place before the marine entered the room and he was so far away (think: one side of central drilling to the other) that I'm not sure he would have heard me if I was moving before he came in. I would have been creeping slowly at any rate.
Try it sometime, though. See what you think. Pull up the console and type 'collision' without the quotes.
I thought the eyes only glowed when alien vision was being used.
Also the range of collision is tiny, ie, it is less than half the render distance of models in the game. I am absolutely certain it would show hidden skulks, but, the drawbacks are so ridiculous as to be not worth it.
Start up a local server and run around with collision on, and if you don't get a headache really quickly, tell me how useful it appears for cheating...
Shades however, provide 100% invisibility while moving your camera I believe.
http://imgur.com/a/tkt77
Dark room, I wonder where the shade is....
Anyhow, I submitted it as a bug report. Can't say if anything will happen with it though; the similar one for nav_debug hasn't been touched.
ftfy
It causes hitching, severe mouse input delay, and a gigantic loss in fps.. Simply adjusting to these conditions while entering into an infested nanogrid room just takes any wind out of the "gives an advantage" sails.
But yea, it should still be put behind cheats regardless, even though that will make it a PIA for testing purposes during our internal games where we occasionally notice a bump in the road and investigate etc. (we do not test with cheats on, due to the high frequency of issues, most notably inconsistent results and false positives)
Can you just have a special play tester/dev build that has all these commands allowed outside of cheats?
Can this be used to cheat? Yes. Is it worthwhile, not really.
Would only take 5 lines on AHK to make a toggle for this, but I doubt anybody cares enough to do that when they can just open up their graphics control panel and bump their gamma up.
With a range of about 256 units, you will have to practically be standing on top of them for collision geometry to show up on the screen. Seriously, instead of saying 'I could do this and that', bind it to a key, go and play a game and see if you gain any advantage whatsoever. If you test it, and DO gain an advantage, I'll accept it can be used to 'cheat', but until then, it's a pain in the ass to use for it's legitimate purposes, let alone cheating with it...
As for its development purposes; this should always be subordinate to what the game play experience is for the player even if that inconveniences MYSELF also.