Not really sure I follow your argument. The minimal infestation appears to be rendering incorrectly, this isn't subjective.
Its a bug, but the point of minimal infestation is function over looks. Its like complaining that the low-quality textures look bad.
I can sympathize that the patchy nature of the bug makes it difficult to know the extent of the infestation for hydra placement, but I've never had many problems with it in practice. There is almost always enough patchy infestation around for you to make a good guess how fair it extends.
It definitely is a bug, because minimal looked absolutely fine before whichever build this bug crept in... since then it's been streaky and broken in horrible ways. Regardless of function over looks, there is a functional element (ie knowing when infestation is actually there), and this NEEDS to be fixed for those of us who don't run the game on full infestation for performance reasons!!
How is that a bad idea? It evens the ground, although I agree with more of the rich shouldn't block things such as windows.
It creates unfair advantage simply by using minimal infestation. I like to run with it on rich, because it is more appealing and aesthetically appealing, its just not reasonable to have windows blocked by it. I think the biggest issue I have with it is on ns2_veil in west junction on the glass. I can't even see through it when its cysted, pushing me to minimal infest just so I can be aware.
Well, yes, actually, you do need to enforce shadow consistency between clients. Atmospherics are another problem too, they are significantly obstructive if you turn them on, and the FOV slider is... well some people feel ill with wide FOVs unfortunately so I see it more as a support feature for people who have a problem playing the game as you really should play it if you can.
But, with regards to atmospherics and shadows, those are both actively addressed, a few patches back they cut the atmospheric intensity of flashlights because they were causing the exact same dichotomy, visibility for visual appeal. Shadows are also important to consider which is why mappers are (or should be) careful not to rely on shadows to make their lighting work. If lighting looks drastically different with shadows on and off, you need to redesign the room to change that, you cannot use shadows as a component of gameplay-affecting lighting because players have the option to turn them off.
The problem is that you're suggesting that gameplay and visual appeal somehow should be opposite ends of a scale, rather than unfortunately so as a limit of the game developer's ability, which is a silly argument, what possible benefit is there to separating them if it is possible to not do so?
In an ideal world, where performance is absolutely sublime and everyone has equal gaming rigs, I'd have no problem with what you're suggesting.
For most games however, including this one, it's not very practical to force equal graphics for everyone. You can tweak these things as much as you want, redesign your maps if necessary, but forcing shadows on for instance will still have an impact on your visual clarity AND performance nonetheless. So if you want to level the playing field on a visual level by forcing on all the nifty graphics, you will just skew it more in favor of people with better gaming rigs instead. You could of course force low visuals on everybody as an alternative, but that would just make the game less attractive overall.
When you make these kind of things optional, you're giving the players a choice to either play with full visuals if their PC is up to it, or the choice to play with the best performance possible. Sure, optimize is as much as possible, I'm all for it, just don't take away any options before it's actually significantly optimised. There's probably a reason I don't see anyone suggesting to force ambient occlusion on for everyone. You understand what I mean?
JektJoin Date: 2012-02-05Member: 143714Members, Squad Five Blue, Reinforced - Shadow
It's not for performance reasons I don't use rich infestation. It's because of frustrating vision obstruction, of which this game already has plenty. I'd be extremely disappointed if a minimal infestation option was removed due to a rendering bug. How about fixing the bug that is causing this to happen for people who don't want infestation to be so intrusive?
JektJoin Date: 2012-02-05Member: 143714Members, Squad Five Blue, Reinforced - Shadow
edited July 2013
Here's what infestation used to look before 1.0 launch and current minimal / bubble variants. Pretty sure it got tweaked a whole lot more before it got scrapped. If I recall, Max got the rich infestation in the game a week or two before launch..
The second screenshot in the original post 6 or something months ago was just a bug someone had and posted in tech support that I liked.
JektJoin Date: 2012-02-05Member: 143714Members, Squad Five Blue, Reinforced - Shadow
Tried replacing it with a transparent dds, just made the infestation white unfortunately. Alpha layer just doesn't seem to work for it like it did for the crosshairs. ; (
IronHorseDeveloper, QA Manager, Technical Support & contributorJoin Date: 2010-05-08Member: 71669Members, Super Administrators, Forum Admins, Forum Moderators, NS2 Developer, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Blue, Subnautica Playtester, Subnautica PT Lead, Pistachionauts
Because Rich infestation broke the old system, and as such the old system cannot be used anymore. (not a simple matter of changing a few lines of code)
It would take time and money that could be spent elsewhere - like OpenGL, DX11, Mac and linux rendering and optimization efforts.
Personally, i think the move would be to make rich infestation's blobs much smaller in size, not able to cover structures or powernodes or players, and as fast as possible to render as minimal infestation.
Because Rich infestation broke the old system, and as such the old system cannot be used anymore. (not a simple matter of changing a few lines of code)
It would take time and money that could be spent elsewhere - like OpenGL, DX11, Mac and linux rendering and optimization efforts.
Personally, i think the move would be to make rich infestation's blobs much smaller in size, not able to cover structures or powernodes or players, and as fast as possible to render as minimal infestation.
Its a real problem that infestation blocks the view and you cannot peek behind corners etc.
Rich infestation will never be as cheap as minimal, for various reasons but the largest being that on rich your forced to render additional polygons - it will always add a decent amount of GPU load. Minimal can completely negate that as your only overlaying an additional texture. While not a huge deal currently there is no good reason why minimal shouldn't be fixed at some point, there's no sense removing options that people can use to improve their FPS.
IronHorseDeveloper, QA Manager, Technical Support & contributorJoin Date: 2010-05-08Member: 71669Members, Super Administrators, Forum Admins, Forum Moderators, NS2 Developer, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Blue, Subnautica Playtester, Subnautica PT Lead, Pistachionauts
There is if it's buggy, ugly, and misrepresenting what the devs wish to display for their product.
Also I didn't say equal, i said "as fast as possible"?
Given the rendering attention the engine has been receiving lately, and that the GPU side has rarely been an issue for NS2, i really don't see further optimizing infestation being an impossible goal.
Doesn't bug me... Wish it looked better, sure, but I'm completely used to it. Ironhorse is right in the sense that it's not as important as other issues.
Comments
It definitely is a bug, because minimal looked absolutely fine before whichever build this bug crept in... since then it's been streaky and broken in horrible ways. Regardless of function over looks, there is a functional element (ie knowing when infestation is actually there), and this NEEDS to be fixed for those of us who don't run the game on full infestation for performance reasons!!
"or low infestation needs to start doing it" "or low infestation needs to start doing it" "or low infestation needs to start doing it".
This is how shit gets jinxed, please refrain from writing in any form a bad idea on any forum anywhere.
It creates unfair advantage simply by using minimal infestation. I like to run with it on rich, because it is more appealing and aesthetically appealing, its just not reasonable to have windows blocked by it. I think the biggest issue I have with it is on ns2_veil in west junction on the glass. I can't even see through it when its cysted, pushing me to minimal infest just so I can be aware.
It was annoying enough having retards telling me to turn off my torch because it blinded them, thus forcing me to cater to their love of immersion.
EDIT: Also, I don't use minimal infestation for performance reasons (I've actually heard Rich can give better FPS sometimes).
I would be happy with that, yes.
Why not both! \o/
In an ideal world, where performance is absolutely sublime and everyone has equal gaming rigs, I'd have no problem with what you're suggesting.
For most games however, including this one, it's not very practical to force equal graphics for everyone. You can tweak these things as much as you want, redesign your maps if necessary, but forcing shadows on for instance will still have an impact on your visual clarity AND performance nonetheless. So if you want to level the playing field on a visual level by forcing on all the nifty graphics, you will just skew it more in favor of people with better gaming rigs instead. You could of course force low visuals on everybody as an alternative, but that would just make the game less attractive overall.
When you make these kind of things optional, you're giving the players a choice to either play with full visuals if their PC is up to it, or the choice to play with the best performance possible. Sure, optimize is as much as possible, I'm all for it, just don't take away any options before it's actually significantly optimised. There's probably a reason I don't see anyone suggesting to force ambient occlusion on for everyone. You understand what I mean?
Mine has always looked like the top image though, that bottom one is actually kinda nice and i think makes more sense atmospherically
@hivelord It looked a lot better during the beta, more like the pictures on the first page.
The second screenshot in the original post 6 or something months ago was just a bug someone had and posted in tech support that I liked.
Meanwhile, in Docking.
It would take time and money that could be spent elsewhere - like OpenGL, DX11, Mac and linux rendering and optimization efforts.
Personally, i think the move would be to make rich infestation's blobs much smaller in size, not able to cover structures or powernodes or players, and as fast as possible to render as minimal infestation.
Also I didn't say equal, i said "as fast as possible"?
Given the rendering attention the engine has been receiving lately, and that the GPU side has rarely been an issue for NS2, i really don't see further optimizing infestation being an impossible goal.