What do you think about disabled power and darkness at the beginning of the round?
Yar
Join Date: 2012-09-15 Member: 159505Members
Join Date: 2012-09-15 Member: 159505Members
Guten Abend,
(excuse me for my schreckliches english, im from Deutschland)
there is a thing that bugs me a bit and that is the fact that the lights are functioning at the beginning of the round and that the rooms are very well lit even when there are absolutely no power nodes placed.
Why? I think it takes a lot from immersion and atmosphere, as a marine I would enjoy the feeling that I get from exploring a dark unknown room where dangerous skulks or villainous gorges may sit in the corners and on the ceiling and stalk you in every room without you seeing them immediately. I would enjoy this "explore an abandoned station and restore Ordnung and Disziplin" feeling big time, flashlights would be much more useful.
There are also threads where people are complaining about the low usefulness of aliens at the beginning, so this would give them a slight advantage.
Light would become an effective representation of the marines very much like the infestation is now for aliens. The main base should be illuminated from the start of course.
Well, its just an idea and it just seems logical to me that there is no light without power. What do you guys think about it? Can we agree on this?
(excuse me for my schreckliches english, im from Deutschland)
there is a thing that bugs me a bit and that is the fact that the lights are functioning at the beginning of the round and that the rooms are very well lit even when there are absolutely no power nodes placed.
Why? I think it takes a lot from immersion and atmosphere, as a marine I would enjoy the feeling that I get from exploring a dark unknown room where dangerous skulks or villainous gorges may sit in the corners and on the ceiling and stalk you in every room without you seeing them immediately. I would enjoy this "explore an abandoned station and restore Ordnung and Disziplin" feeling big time, flashlights would be much more useful.
There are also threads where people are complaining about the low usefulness of aliens at the beginning, so this would give them a slight advantage.
Light would become an effective representation of the marines very much like the infestation is now for aliens. The main base should be illuminated from the start of course.
Well, its just an idea and it just seems logical to me that there is no light without power. What do you guys think about it? Can we agree on this?
Comments
I think it would be great if the rooms by default (before any power plugs are built) had relatively dark & basic lighting, and when the power is built the lights increase to their current level or higher.
I appreciate what you're saying though, especially the idea of lights being a sort of "marine infestation". I think that would be great. Same with flashlights.
I'd already settle for lights staying out longer before the emergency lighting kicks in.
Though it would also be nice if lights would start to flicker and change to emergency lighting as infestation spreads across an unbuilt power node socket. Removing the infestation would instantly revert the lights back to normal. I simply don't like aliens have fully lit rooms in areas controlled by them, especially Hive rooms.
Yes, I thought about this too and it seemed obvious to me that the station would have only enough power to maintain this red emergency light
This sounds really great!
These are just little details and may be laughable when we concider that more important changes in balance etc. have to be made, but these details are a vital part of the whole picture and deserve attention.
NS2 is not a horror game, its a fast paced multiplayer strategy/shooter, and that requires maps to be at a certain level of light, to make that work well.
This may be true too. To be honest, I expected a more horror-like experience with darker atmosphere, but this is a question of taste of course.
And what do you think about CrushaK's suggestion that infestation should turn off the lights slowly to emergency level?
What I would love to see is lighting/power and alien vision tied to map control. If a room has power, alien vision doesn't work. (too bright) This makes power nodes important to BOTH sides, instead of just to the marines. Game would start with all power nodes socketed and with the power node disabled (as if it had been attacked) in the alien hive and in one or two adjacent rooms. (depending on map layout) With each power node destroyed, aliens gain more map control in a meaningful way.
It would be nice if there was some down side for aliens with respect to power nodes.
This always seemed backwards. Alien start is usually the only room that always has power on throughout most of the game.
It seems the marine power/lighting system was added initially for the atmospheric cool factor and recreate the neato moment from aliens where "they cut the power..". However that aspect has been mostly supplanted by power nodes simply acting as a weak point to end game for marines ..thats mostly very unsatisfying.
While I also don't want to play in the dark 75% of the time, the threat of darkness should be reasons to keep the powernodes up for marines and down for aliens. And why not inject some actual reasons to have this thing in the game. I like savants idea of alien vision being disabled in powered rooms.
Of course this all goes back to how the power system is under utilized and currently very boring and tedious.
Imo the main reason powernodes are so annoying is how long it takes to destroy an repair them. Of course its been made this way due to powernodes being so critical in ending games (and they shouldn't). This only applies in marine bases, everywhere else they are a pain to bother with.
TLDR - Change powernodes so they are easier to repair and destroy, but reduce their importance in ending games.
Allow emergency lights and partial power to stay up if CC or Res tower is still up. Essentials like IP and armories are still powered, but PGs and obs are down. Full darkness once everything is cleared. Alien structures in a dark room should activate a form of "emergency lighting" but orange and more creepy. This represents the light emited by alien structures, which they don't seem to do on their too well, atm.
Faster turn over of power will allow for more skirmishing with the power/lighting being on/off in contested rooms, but without it acting as the deciding factor on who wins or loses. Marine rooms should be with power on 90% of the time, and with emergency lighting if under pressure. Alien rooms are light up by alien structures, mimicking a creepy, orange "emergency lighting". Contended rooms in the battle front should be equal parts full power, emergency power, full darkness and "alien lighting" depending on who has the upper hand.
Start games with all power nodes up, except alien start. Allow aliens to force darkness by taking down powernodes (its an odd game mechanic that they first have to wait for marines to build a power node). Since powernodes are now easier to take down and rebuild, interacting with them won't be such of a time waster for players ..as it is now.
that would realy soften the darkness aspect to not screw balance so much.
the notion that unpowered rooms shouldnt be lit comes up every few month and everytime i give my vote to do it, but until now no one ever made a mod...
i realy think about learning some lua to give it a try but my time is so limited it would take me months to get to the point where i could start a mod...
If you had alien buildings giving off faint orange glows (like in the mod), then that, imho, is enough light for the marines to be able to see, but still give aliens the advantage. I'd say that this should only occur in hive rooms (something like you need the strength of a hive to override the power or something for lore) and just have the rest of the map with maybe a combo of emergency lighting/normal lighting until a power node is built.
The combo could be something like 5 seconds red light/5 seconds normal light and this would only be needed if the devs feel a lot of red light is painful on the eyes or something like they've said in the past. That way the non-claimed rooms are kind of a neutral room that doesn't really favor either side, but the alien hive rooms favor aliens and the marine rooms with power nodes favor marines.
An added bonus to having mostly dark rooms is you get to enjoy the awesome lighting effects from FT/exos/etc. more often
This would give aliens and marines something to do as they explore the map at the start of the round.
its pretty simple to give a unsocketed powerpoint the lighteffects of a destroyed or damaged(low power) powernode.
i have to say the destroyed lighting is pretty bad, the whole map is covered in red light.
but the low power lighting is a slowly pulsing white light which when combined with a lower minimal light setting(0.1 instead of 0.4 intensity) is pretty nice and atmospheric. aliens wouldnt realy get an advantage because its never pitch black dark.
of course it should be put into a seperate "lightstate" and not borrow from the damaged powernode but i think even i could do that.
ps: if someone wants to take a general look:
always make a backup kopie of files you are tinkering with!!!
just open the PowerPoint.lua and search the text for "self:SetModel(kUnsocketedSocketModelName, kUnsocketedAnimationGraph)" or as its one of the first functions just go down to "local function SetupWithInitialSettings(self)"
there you have the line: self.lightMode = kLightMode.Normal just change the Normal on the end to NoPower or LowPower.
and if you want:
for the reduced intensity in LowPowermode open PowerPointLightHandler.lua on the first page you find local kLowPowerMinIntensity = 0.4 , just change that to 0.1
i actually tried to write my own "lightsetting" for unsocketed powerpoints, but didnt get it to run. now im trying to highjack the lowpower-setting and just reduzing the minimal light intensity if its the first time lowpower-lighting is used, because in a running game i dont want the damaged powernode to darken the room so much as if there was no powernode at all.