567 replies to this topic

[Aym]

Thank you for the update, and the work looks good. That is my feedback, not very useful I'm afraid.

[Cebi]

Absolutely love these changes.

Night vision actually looks usable now, especially with the changes to thermal.

Thermal vision looks so much nicer. The nerf to range is fantastic; I may be able to switch out of that mode now! Then again, it looks so pretty... so maybe not.

Oh and, "Also we will be masking out the Mechs cockpit from the effects at a later date", ooh yes. This is the kind of **** that will have me spending MC on silly things out of sheer joy.

Great work devs! More like this please!

[Ghost Rider LSOV]

Looks good so far.

[armyof1]

I was getting pretty sick of how you'd get sniped and was spied upon from one side of the base from the very start of the match on River and Forest because the thermal vision lets you see way beyond your sensor range even with advanced sensor range equipped. Now it seems like that problem is finally addressed and night vision will be quite usable too. Nice changes, look forward to testing them.

[Corvus Antaka]

StalaggtIKE, on 07 March 2013 - 07:39 PM, said:

Looks great! My only concern is, how will this coincide with the current implementation of ECM. Currently, thermal was the only way to see a group under ECM bubble. Will this result in more successful base rushes? Also, in the River City picture, I can vaguely tell that's a Jenner, so when IFF is disabled through ECM, there will be further confusion.

This is infact a very good point. Radar may need a more prominent role, perhaps it is time for BAP to get a buff to detecting ECM mechs at range?

[disastrophe]

The new modes look good, although I can only see them on my phone at the moment

As for masking out the cockpit, I assume this means the cockpit will not have the vision filters applied. I think this requires a bit of lore/common sense-based thinking. I always assumed the vision modes were based on the neurohelmet the mechwarrior wears (which is the kind of tech we have now, and is probably available to the lostech future of BattleTech), rather than built into the cockpit glass or projected over/in front of it (which seems a bit too high-tech for BattleTech). following this logic, the cockpit should be subject to the vision modes, no?

I don't have my BT novels to hand, can anyone settle this question?

[Piad]

interesting, my eyes say "thank you" . BUT here i don't see any thermal vision on the mech! should be "a little" white...

[Budor]

Matthew Craig fails to disappoint again.

Edited by Budor, 08 March 2013 - 02:59 AM.

[Super Mono]

Piad, on 08 March 2013 - 02:53 AM, said:

interesting, my eyes say "thank you" . BUT here i don't see any thermal vision on the mech! should be "a little" white...

I think that's the point, it's beyond thermal vision's effective range so it's of no use.

[grayson marik]

Piad, on 08 March 2013 - 02:53 AM, said:

interesting, my eyes say "thank you" . BUT here i don't see any thermal vision on the mech! should be "a little" white...

Well, on a normal military thermal ( technical level between 1985 - 1992, you can switch polarity.
Means you can choose if you want hot things to stick out in white/red or in black.
If you chose the first, the landscape is dark painted.
If you chose second, landscape is white based.
Only thing is, on such a system, you can even tell where the engine is, cause it sticks out. even the ahh.. pipes for the smoke are hot and can be seen running below the slightly darker frame of a vehicle.

And on a infantry man, you can even see where the helmet ends and the face starts.

Normal distances for such thermals on level of around 1985 - 1992 where like this: discovery as "hot spot" 2500m
Identification possible 2000m
Reliable fighting range 1500 and below.

of course one would have to adjust these numbers down for MWO like:
discovery : 1200
Identification possible: 800
Good fighting range: 600 and below

Anything else the image quality in those screenshots is pretty much like it was, when i first used a thermal in my armored infantry vehicle in 1997....*dreaming of old times...*

[Karl Split]

Looks great im stoked for this change.

My one concern is that some people (myself included) still seem to suffer from a known bug where our screens will darken to almost black when up heavy fire from certain weapon types (SSRMS, ballistics etc).

The solution to this has always been to swap to thermal as that mode was unaffected somehow. Will you guys be looking at this issue as well? Im running an NVIDIA graphics card if that helps (I heard it may be card specific - not sure)

[TexAce]

I find thermal too blurry in near distances and it should look further.
The mech should still pop out more on a cold map than it does in your screenshots, especially at just 700 meters. The mech is totally black on the alpine screenshot which is a bit too much.

I still need a screenshot of frozen during the snow storm before I'll say more, since this is the first thing that comes to my mind when discussing thermal.

[PurpleNinja]

Looks good to me.
What about a sonar mode?

[Jetfire]

Looking good so far, I can't wait to try them out.

Hoping we will see the Magnetic vision mode soon, guessing it will be excellent at finding lamp posts and mechs but terrible at seeing terrain.

[toaster79]

I like the Idea, because right now I run around in Themal almost exclusivly.

However, I fear that the change will indirectly buff ECM again.

[Onyx]

I can say that I've been waiting for a reason to not use thermal vision, because the color palette, while more interesting than this new grayscale one, gets old fast. But, Thermal was just outright superior to nightvision and standard, so why ever use it? I'm very pleased to hear the devs don't enjoy Thermal being the be-all end-all of playing the game and look forward to night vision being useful without blinding you with overly reflective buildings and being able to idle in regular view to shoot mechs again and see sparks fly in glorious detail.

[Lynx7725]

Can I understand why there is a need to force a switch to a different mode? Not trying to snark, but won't it be better if critical information is overlaid over the visual spectrum rather than force the player to switch specifically to NV or Therma?

For example, in therma what we actually look for is "objects with temperature higher than norm". Instead of switching the entire view over to see things which are mostly the same temperature, why not just tag the items that are hotter than the surroundings in visual mode? Given the criteria, false positives like fires and heat vents will still get tagged, and a clever pilot who parks his mech near a heat source will still be hidden.

Using this overlay idea, we can combine additional detection methods such as EM emissions, MAD, seismic, etc which traditionally has been difficult to represent in a visual mode, and we can always use a key to toggle through specific overlays quickly.

[AJ Frost]

The concept sounds good. Especially giving normal vision the range advantage. That actually plays into different camos becoming useful, because at 800 meters in a wood, you'd be even harder to spot.

I'd like to put one point forth for discussion though: Would It be useful/ helpful for the gameplay to implement somekind of adjustment time inbetween vision modes, so that a change takes a second or two? The idea is to keep people from constantly switching back and forth on a night map between thermal and nightvision, to get as much of both benefits as you can. Cause they will switch to nightvision just breifly when navigating a corner, and then back to heat vision, and back, and forth and so on if they can.

[Liquidx]

MightyMeatShield, on 07 March 2013 - 08:38 PM, said:

Question: What does "Also we will be masking out the Mechs cockpit from the effects" mean in laymans terms?

I suspect that this means only your view screens will receive the vision mode effects. So the "cage" of your cockpit will still look like your cockpit. IE: if you're running in low light mode, your cockpit will look normal and not all green (it is unaffected by the vision mode.

[Livewyr]

grayson marik, on 08 March 2013 - 03:13 AM, said:

Well, on a normal military thermal ( technical level between 1985 - 1992, you can switch polarity.
Means you can choose if you want hot things to stick out in white/red or in black.
If you chose the first, the landscape is dark painted.
If you chose second, landscape is white based.
Only thing is, on such a system, you can even tell where the engine is, cause it sticks out. even the ahh.. pipes for the smoke are hot and can be seen running below the slightly darker frame of a vehicle.

And on a infantry man, you can even see where the helmet ends and the face starts.

Normal distances for such thermals on level of around 1985 - 1992 where like this: discovery as "hot spot" 2500m
Identification possible 2000m
Reliable fighting range 1500 and below.

of course one would have to adjust these numbers down for MWO like:
discovery : 1200
Identification possible: 800
Good fighting range: 600 and below

Anything else the image quality in those screenshots is pretty much like it was, when i first used a thermal in my armored infantry vehicle in 1997....*dreaming of old times...*

I miss my Stryker. :
(Although your fighting ranges seem good for Vehicles- Humans weren't that easy.. max fighting range was about 3-400 meters)

----------------------------------------------------------

Good job PGI- looking forward to it!

If you could add one thing though- one draw-back to the military grade thermal was that large sources of heat, while easily defined sitting still, tended to be a little distorted during movement. (how often the devices updated different areas of heat was not necessarily uniform due to disturbances created by the heat movement.. A lot harder to explain than I thought it was going to be. )

If that would be incorporated to prevent the "black and white" equivalent of ocular vision (and present another drawback of spending your entire game in thermal, that'd be awesome)

------------------------------------------
Is their any way of making bright flashes (explosions or JJ's) white out Night vision? Or making Explosions and JJs create much larger heat-blooms than what regular vision sees?

Would add yet another reason to switch from one to the other and prevent staying in Thermal from being completely doable.