2 replies to this topic

[Hobietime]

First of all, great job on the new thermal mode. It looks much better than the Crytec default.

Here are a few tweaks that would make thermal much more visually appealing and situation.

Temperature adjustments of snow maps.

Snow should provide a lot of contrast. An infrared camera can normalize it's range by doing thing like adjusting aperture, adding or subtracting neutral density filters, or adjusting it's gain, but contrast between two similar objects is much more difficult without introducing tons of noise.

Maps like Tourmaline Desert should have mechs blend in at normal operating temperatures, like the do now. Maps like Alpine Peaks should have mechs lit up like a Christmas tree compared to the surrounding even when running a 2% of their thermal capacity.

If this is an attempt to keep snow maps from becoming instant thermal maps, Instead of making mechs difficult to see in thermal, make them have more bloom, have a narrower depth of field, have higher noise overall, and/or have heavy ghosting. These are realistic side effects of boosting gain and integration time.

An alternative to "the black wall."

I understand your balance concerns when it comes to thermal sniping. However the sharp drop off at around 700 meters on smaller maps and somewhere around 1400 meters (less than visual range) on larger ones feels weird and prevents thermal from being used for what it should be, a spotting tool.

I would propose that instead of having this drop off in luminosity, either have a static DoF (for thermal only) so that everything currently behind this "black wall" is visible but blurred or have a limit to the angular resolution of thermal vision. The former would be less obvious, but the latter would be actually quite realistic.

Normal uncooled IR CCDs have to compensate for their lower signal to noise ratios by being less dense. Zoom lenses are oftentimes out of the question due to the higher aperture requirements of uncooled IR cameras. Therefore all you are stuck with is digital zoom. Basically, when you zoom in, it starts to look like advanced zoom does right now. 3x zoom using thermal would give you a pixelized image (not as bad as Advanced zoom though, since there is only 3/4th as much zoom).

Also, you could have a cooled CCD GXP module that would sample the 1.5x zoom instead of the 1x zoom and give you a slightly better picture when zoomed in.


I will test this out tomorrow and post results.

Hobie

[JohnnyisHere]

New thermal vision looks sexy but practically sucks. It's relatively useless at medium to short range because the mechs blend into the background. Normal vision is now better at spotting mechs at medium to short range. I don't use thermal vision anymore and night vision only in night city. So now there's only 1 vision mode - Normal. Bring back the old thermal vision.

[Durant Carlyle]

JohnnyisHere, on 16 April 2013 - 09:16 PM, said:

New thermal vision looks sexy but practically sucks. It's relatively useless at medium to short range because the mechs blend into the background. Normal vision is now better at spotting mechs at medium to short range. I don't use thermal vision anymore and night vision only in night city. So now there's only 1 vision mode - Normal. Bring back the old thermal vision.

lol

Good luck with that. The new thermal and night modes are much better than the old ones, and more realistic to boot.

If 'Mechs are blending into the background, you need to fiddle with your monitor's brightness and contrast settings. The vision modes are working perfectly well on well-calibrated monitors. I've played this game on an Acer 23" LCD, an ASUS 27" LCD (my current monitor), and a ViewSonic 21" CRT monitor. All of them displayed the vision modes clearly at all ranges inside 700 meters.