What I'd Really Like To See On A Ns Map...
nicuss
Join Date: 2002-11-15 Member: 8749Members
Join Date: 2002-11-15 Member: 8749Members
<div class="IPBDescription">and I haven't</div> Out of all games out there I don't think there's any one better suited for forcing players to deal with <b>complete darkness</b> than NS. Just think about it a little, the flashlight is implemented in a wonderfull way: you can turn it on to see and at the same time be seen by aliens, or you can leave it off and hope they won't manage to take a bite at you in the dark. On the other side, aliens got parasites, got hive-sight which shows yellow dots on marines sighted by another alien, and got their "flashlight" which illuminates their teammates.
I think it'd be quite ballanced in the end and would make for some awesome fights. To keep newcomers oriented you could apply some fluo pain strips on the ground along the middle of the hallways so people can walk around without flashlight, and this paint would also help locating players - you can spot their body when it covers the paint strips. There would be some issues with making motion tracking/parasites show up in the dark zone even if direct line-of-sight is present, as the lil circles are usefull there; maybe some transparent walls would fix it? Dunno.
If you want, place a weldable light switch at the other end of the dark zone, etc. A hive whould probably be too unballanced if completely dark, but making the central/critical area on the map dark should make for some pretty intense games, methinks.
Btw, I've heard only good things about the dark foggy tunnel on Hera, but that can be somewhat trashed by turning way up your gamma (hardware settings). On the other hand, an absolutely dark place with no light-source whatsoever can't be "fixed" like that.
Whadaya think?
I think it'd be quite ballanced in the end and would make for some awesome fights. To keep newcomers oriented you could apply some fluo pain strips on the ground along the middle of the hallways so people can walk around without flashlight, and this paint would also help locating players - you can spot their body when it covers the paint strips. There would be some issues with making motion tracking/parasites show up in the dark zone even if direct line-of-sight is present, as the lil circles are usefull there; maybe some transparent walls would fix it? Dunno.
If you want, place a weldable light switch at the other end of the dark zone, etc. A hive whould probably be too unballanced if completely dark, but making the central/critical area on the map dark should make for some pretty intense games, methinks.
Btw, I've heard only good things about the dark foggy tunnel on Hera, but that can be somewhat trashed by turning way up your gamma (hardware settings). On the other hand, an absolutely dark place with no light-source whatsoever can't be "fixed" like that.
Whadaya think?
Comments
lol, Obviously you have never seen how a flashlight works in the Half Life engine. Otherwise you would know it is far from realistic.
When you turn on a flashlight in almost any HL mod, <b>you see</b> a bright spot on whatever object you are pointing it at. <b>Everyone else sees</b> you suddenly appear inside a giant glowing sphere that surrounds your entire body. No, not just a small very bright point coming from your "flashlight area", your entire body is glowing, like a helicopter is flying above with a one million candela spotlight aimed directly at you.
[edit] oh!, I forgot to mention that I do actually like the idea you're proposing nicuss, I agree that the NS universe lends itself well to darkness. In theory. The NS team has proven again and again that they can perform the great love on the Half-Life code, so maybe it can be improved to the point of being fun.. but as it is.. I don't think it'd be good.
I remember SWAT3 had some fairly cool flashlights, and the engine it used certainly wasn't more advanced-looking than Half-Life's. You could for one thing see the light the other's shone. I understand that's.. tricky to do with the Half-Life engine, because the SDK is strangly limited there. Anyway, so they had that, and then the flashlight the units were holding had a big lensflare on them (but in a nice way <!--emo&:)--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/smile.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='smile.gif'><!--endemo-->), so if you looked at it directly it was actually pretty hard making out who was holding it.
Nice and simple and (seemingly) computationally friendly.
Olij, flashlight-cones eh.. hhhhhmmm, you don't say.. do you have some links or something, sounds pretty neat?
Another mod has more flashlight alignment realism:
It moves with the gun, its placed on, during all gun+player animations (reloading, walking...).
This would be nice for pistol... or crounching, if its in the armour.
Using a 3-5 sided cone w_model for a fogy shine could not be that hard. Searched but did not find a mod featuring this.
Of course HL flashlights wont look like doom3 Flashlights to soon, but thy are still damn old.
One thing I overlooked is "enhanced sight". If aliens can make marines glow like lightbulbs with a simple sensory upgrade that's would probably imballance the play too much (or at least _force_ the rines to always use flashlights). Otoh, Flay just mentioned today he's looking to replace enhanced sight with something more useful in general, so this issue might go away in 1.1
And the reason nicuss that no one remembers these maps is cos they sucked.
Anyway, I was thinking of making an object in the power generator area, that could be destroyed, shutting down or exploding the generators (Problem area in the post about my map) and then, caused complete darkness (exept sky light if you were near a window) for 5-6 seconds, before the auxillary generator could kick in and provide emergency lighting...leaving the map about half as light as before.
Im way too lazy to actually do that though.
Totally dark maps are a bad idea, They would give gamma abusers a extreme advantage.
Back to the topic: I think 'complete darkness'='no variation in pixel colors'='no way of enhancing the image'
So gamma abusers will just have an overbright game, hehe.
The point that flashlights do not light enough... (in 1998 a friend of mine told me that hl has the best flashlight he has ever seen) ...simply use texture scales that match the original hl-style (1:1 and larger). I don't know about these -notexchomp compiler flag or whatever it is called, but on a normal compile larger texture-scales produce rough, large lightmaps. This is ideal for such a map... imo.