567 replies to this topic

[3rdworld]

Thontor, on 03 April 2013 - 10:37 AM, said:

Thermal is totally usable... Just not for what people are used to using it for, long range spotting... Its still great for distinguishing mechs since they stand out from the background a lot more than they do in normal or night vision.

there definitely was something of value gained. Limiting thermal as "sniper vision" for seeing targets at long range. That was never the intent of thermal and it was detrimental to gameplay. I'm glad they implemented the new thermal as soon as thy could...

Thermal itself is pretty close to finished, as far as coding goes. Now they have to update the map files to include temperature so that cold snow is dark, not bright. Technically that isn't part of thermal vision.

The purpose of thermal is to distinguish hot objects from the cold objects. They are both the same color, so thermal is a failure.

Want to limit sniping from thermal? cool fine you did that. But if you are trying to make thermal contrast hot/cold. Nope.

You could have limited blue vision's range and done the same thing, and it would be superior to what we have now. So, nothing of value has been gained. Only a bad vision mode, that thankfully is only needed on one map since they fixed normal sight.

[Mechteric]

3rdworld, on 03 April 2013 - 10:28 AM, said:

no, no it isn't.

Thermal was usable, now it isn't. nothing of value was gained.

It was so "usable" its the only thing anyone ever used for just about the entirety of every match. It was absolutely a broken mechanic and needed to change for the sake of balance, fun, and aesthetics.

[3rdworld]

Thontor, on 03 April 2013 - 11:02 AM, said:

Changing the old thermal to limit its range would've been a waste of time, since it was going to be replaced anyways. The new thermal is a huge improvement over the old one... Not only in the fact it no longer is sniper vision, but because it is simply much more aesthetically pleasing.

They put it in the game when it was done. The whole thing about cold snow being white hot is a seperate issue, dealt with by seperate people, with seperate priorities.

I disagree. I had no issue with how mechs looked in blue vision.

But they aren't multiple companies. 1 company releasing 1 product. Would it be okay for a mech to come out with no textures? the animators aren't the artists. It is a broken system, and should not have been released until it was correct.

[Custom3173]

What a vast improvement. Before I was playing blue whackamole at the beginning of every match. Now I'm looking for movement, trying to spot snipers hiding in the trees. Much, much more fun than before.

And seriously people, the effin snow is the wrong color, get over it. That's about as minor a bug as they come. Do you yell at your mom when she doesn't cook your mac and cheese just right too?

[Gibbers]

I don't understand thermal vision. White = Hot, and white also = cold? On a winter map, you're looking for White on White. It makes no sense.

I had thermal vision on and didn't see a mech literally right in front of my face. It's 100% useless. Using Night Vision on a winter map is more useful than using thermal vision.

I don't understand the change whatsoever.


Night vision = improvement.
Thermal vision = unusable.

[Eric Generic]

I really don't get the point of changing thermal vision. I also don't get why it's been so limited when modern day IR can distinguish rather good detail at much further ranges than 700m. Also, why is snow covered ground white? White is supposed to be hot, not cold. The ground on frozen city should be black. Limiting vision so substantially makes direct fire weapons far less useful and forces everybody into a brawl. I enjoy a good brawl, but I don't want it to be the only viable option outside of lrm spam.

In other words, thermal should outclip eyeballs and frozen things should not show up as White Hot. If it's 3050 tech, there really isn't a reason why thermal vision would be limited to 700m except for the convenience of the nerf bat and I really don't believe that's a good reason at all.

[Karyudo ds]

Custom3173, on 03 April 2013 - 12:28 PM, said:

And seriously people, the effin snow is the wrong color, get over it. That's about as minor a bug as they come. Do you yell at your mom when she doesn't cook your mac and cheese just right too?

Considering in this case she used string cheese and skipped the macaroni noodles?

YUP

The one big situation where thermal should be useful it is actually 100% useless now with mechs on snow at best being the same color. May as well eat your Mac & Cheese with a knife while you're at it.

[Faded Karma]

havent played in a while i was waiting for analog control love the thermal in gray scale mostly because im color blind in the blue color spectrum. i would love more color blind options though

[Shiro Matsumoto]

Im very happy with those modes!

[Sangue]

It seems that I'm the odd one out on this topic, but I find the new modes to be very boring. It's just normal mode with a white or green filter. It takes some strategy and skill away from night maps in my opinion.

It's no big deal but I liked the old night vision, it looked more authentic - all that would have needed to be done was to tone down the brightness a bit.

I also liked the old Predator style heat vision better.

Modern day gamers want everything to be easy mode. The new modes make the game look less like a simulation and more like an arcade game - one could argue if that's a good or bad thing. I'm not a fan. River City night and day play exactly the same now.

[Kaemon]

I guiess my feeling is that vision modes should be for specific scenario's, not just a 'night' map or a 'cold' map. Rather have maps with dynamic lighting, where pockets of darkness or visually abnormalities (tourmaline should really mess with magnometer view when it comes in, for example).

So you're forced to adapt to a situation on a map, not just flip a switch once a map loads and you're done.

Forest colony cave was a first step in what I thought was going to be the direction, but there's alot of strategy that could be ingrained into the maps that is left out, and for instanced combat, that's too bad (cause we need all the strategy points we can get).

Moving sun (or suns), changing conditions, weather fronts moving in, now that we have some optimization passes and the game isn't burning a hole in our GPU's (and they're looking at 12v12 and a lance centric battle focus), it's time to get map strategy some dev time (beyond stand here and shoot there).

Elevation, gravity, lighting, sensor nerfs, heat (different heat variances on different parts of the map, like Caustic but moreso) would add more immersion and require someone to actually look around once in awhile (heck you could even add some environmental modules).

But most of my argument is centered around I want to see what happens when a spider gets hit by lightning.

Edited by Kaemon, 04 April 2013 - 06:11 PM.

[MuKen]

Sangue, on 04 April 2013 - 09:57 AM, said:

I also liked the old Predator style heat vision better.

Quote

Modern day gamers want everything to be easy mode.

Old style heat vision was easy mode, your post doesn't compute. Turn it on, instantly find everyone in a huge radius regardless of visibility, background, or cover foliage, etc.

People wanted them to tone down the easiest vision mode, and you're accusing them of wanting things to be easy mode?

Edited by MuKen, 04 April 2013 - 11:05 PM.

[ToxinTractor]

I like the new heat vis, havent tried out the night vis yet tho but it doesnt blind me which is good.

[TechKnight1337]

Night vision has always been pointless, IMO. You can easily navigate the terrain by heat vision and even on the night maps, night vision makes it harder to see enemy mechs. I can't think of any situation where it's useful.

The new heat vision doesn't seem to take into account ambient map temperature. On the snow maps, everything is still relatively "bright", making it difficult to see other mechs. I'd think the thermal difference between Frozen City Night (-85°C) and a thermonuclear reactor (conservative estimate +100,000,000°C) would be rather more extreme than a slightly lighter shade of grey.

Edited by TechKnight1337, 06 April 2013 - 02:47 AM.

[MuKen]

TechKnight1337, on 06 April 2013 - 02:47 AM, said:

Night vision has always been pointless, IMO. You can easily navigate the terrain by heat vision and even on the night maps, night vision makes it harder to see enemy mechs. I can't think of any situation where it's useful.

In the old version, it was useful in close-mid range at night for targetting specific portions of a mech you were already engaged in combat with and already had a bead on. It's a lot harder to find the cockpit or shoot a side torso on an XL build when you're fighting a fuzzy blob of colors.

It's easier in the new thermal vision to see the details of a mech, so yeah even though night vision got better, I think it has less use now strangely enough.

[CnlPepper]

I've got a thread open where we are discussing a redesign of the new thermal mode. Many of us are unimpressed with the direction the vision modes are taking and I've put together a proposal for a different design:

http://mwomercs.com/...om-a-physicist/

I would appreciate any support you could give.

Here are some teaser mockups (2 of many in the thread) of the proposed modifications:

Edited by CnlPepper, 06 April 2013 - 08:01 AM.

[Fides]

1. Thermal used to fix poor visibility and give some colour, now that visibility is dreadful.

2. You don't have firefights in nightvision, because one flash of real light or a flash bang would leave you blind, but you are trying to be realistic by adding a new nightvision for combat which is clearer than heat vision which is dreadful.

3. Black and white game play is the evolution we are working towards? So in addition to requiring high gaming specs we get to play in black and white and lose all the beautiful colours?

I may as well go play the previous Mechwarrior titles because at least they actually had colour in them.

4. As to the whole heat issue, while I am with you in part that sniping people at long range was tiresome as people just shot the blue blob, there are other ways that you could have improved on this than completely nerfing sniping altogether, now long range sniper weapons are entirely useless as even the zoom module does not give a proper zoom, doesn't it seem better to fix the weapon ranges, and weapon drop offs rather than fixing the heat vision?

5. Canon lore, you can track heat signatures using dropships, satellites, command consoles etc. heat plays a pretty important aspect in the whole MechWarrior universe and now with this black and white aspect you are killing that.

6. Instead of going for a full nerf on heat signatures, why not go for a time drop out in heat signatures, say an intermittent heat source as satellite passes over, or some way of masking it with a module etc. and bring back the blue heat detections, seriously black and white, you are killing the game!

Edited by Fides, 06 April 2013 - 11:56 PM.

[Dobromil]

There is one thing that is bothering me in thermo vision. Destroyed mechs are still visible in this vision mode as if they are active. It's not possible to differentiate between shut down mech and destroyed.

[HighGround]

Night vision is so much better.

Thermal vision is worthless, it does not behave like real thermals. Snow is white in MWO thermal vision? Isn't snow cold? Thermal shows everything in a black is cold, grey is warm, and white is hot. Thermals in this game does not act like this now, terrain is just converting to greyscale instead of actually showing heat readouts. It needs fixed.

[ShinVector]

My feedback but this is probably been covered by other people but I will repeat it:

Testing in River City Night, the darkest map in MWO.

• Night Vision works ok but when you fire lasers. The flash is so, bright I can't aim at targets anymore using sight. This may be intentional but it makes night vision unreliable to me as an alternate vision mode in a night map. QQ
  
• Thermal vision which is the alternative to night vision. There is just something wrong with it in River City Night, It seems the darkness is afffecting the Thermal vision darkness which should not be happening. Simply put, Thermal vision is too dark to me in River City Night that. I even have problems seeing the building which is very confusing in high speed light mech fire fights.
  
• Thermal vision of the future should be in HD not it's current blurry state.
  
• Lastly.. Bring 'Enhanced Imaging' back ! We want that. ;p