ET:QW Night combat.


(SniperSteve) #1

Early on there was some talk about night combat, and even had some footage in the first trailer. (Which looked insanely awesome for MP)

However I havn’t heard a word about this from anyone. Will there still be some night maps? or did they get the axe? :frowning:


(McAfee) #2

They claimed that dew to the dynamic lighting system, any map could be played at day or night time.
How far this goes, I don’t know. But it would be really cool if you could set it to ANY time.


(B0rsuk) #3

Three screenshots with varying levels of nightness:



(Fab) #4


Night combat should be really cool. Also i hope they release more urban screenshots like that first one.


(ToonarmY) #5

Yea i had never seen that screen b4. Most of the screens i have seen were all like an american rocky country type region. Would be sweet to have some street house to house combat too. Because if i were an alien attacking this would be a nifty place to start lol


(Gringo) #6

Aye it would be cool to pay at night tbh, especially if it was the wee hours of the morning when u were playin!

@Toonarmy: He is coming for u!

EDIT: He came quicker than i thought!


(SniperSteve) #7

Ahh yes, the first screenshot desolves my fears. :slight_smile: The others arn’t really night combat, one is at dawn, and the other 2 are like overcast days or smoke in the sky.


(fjavier) #8

Hi from spain:

I would like to see at game, something similar to DARK!! darkness, real and true darknes… where only you can see the lighters, the weapons firing… etc. all dark, you dont see nothing… but suddenly !!! when someone is noisy (megatextures is good for that…) a crack on your foot or similar.,… the nearest enemy discover you and begins a very funny battle, as artificial fires (as gucci in casinos does :slight_smile: ).

Isn’t it a great idea !?!

Really darkness… very very intrigating and you have to be in full silence, you don’t see your enemy, but you can hear him… (megatextures helps to do that).

OK, i think that in game server menu, there is to have a control to set level of darknes… this is extreme (full darknes) but in this manner you can see what i say.

PD: I have a big doubt… about game network technology, the books say its the way to develop, but… WHY? Why the client has to know where is the enemy at every moment??? (wallhack) why the server only sends the information less z-buffer to clients??? why dont the server only listen to moves from client and tells it where can he see??
The client only has to know what he can see (which enemies) and not all enemies, despite it doesnt see really.

(sorry by my bad english, well, poor english, but you understand me i think)

Bye.


(kamikazee) #9

It only sends it when the player is near enough, the client does the visibility check.
The problem with visibility is that the visibility check takes some time to complete as it must traverse all surfaces within the player’s view to see if one of them hides the other players, or about any object.
The network traffic would be minimal, but the server would lag to death when he would calculate all those traces.


(SniperSteve) #10

Total dark would be very cool. Well, total dark to a point where you can still see, but it is VERY limited.

It would be a different experience.


(P4nth3r) #11

What would be cool is that the map you are playing has the same " time " as the location of the server.
So when it is night in London and you are playing in London, you play at night, and when it’s day it’s day.

Greetz Panther


(carnage) #12

What would be cool is that the map you are playing has the same " time " as the location of the server.
So when it is night in London and you are playing in London, you play at night, and when it’s day it’s day.

good idea at first though but when u think you are likely to get better ping from bnearby server so about you own time. then since have lives (most of us) our play time if often restricted to sertain hours usulay evening. so you could find that you are mostly always playing at about the same game time and therfore not benefiting from the full capacity of the game and your not getting the full experience and variety of play you could have

i expect that playing a map in full daylight will be a very differnt experience to playing in the darkest posible setting especialy for stealth manouvers etc. i expect infintary would become much more dealdy in night time senarios since they might be able to hide pretty easily and surprise vehicles

thats asuming they offer day night rotation on the actualy game. one trailer made entirely from the same map (canyon map) has day and night settings so its posible


(P4nth3r) #13

Well that’s is not really true, since in the summer it stays light most of the evening.
Also you can play in the weekends during the day.

I think it’s a great idea, (I believe GTA SA had a mod that did something like that)

Greetz Panther


(fjavier) #14

And now, the idea is great, about to play with the same light intensity than in server,
can be full darknes… it will be interesting for cover missions ( but i think strogg can detect enemies biodetection or similar i dont know, i only read it),

But… you have to think, it will be a great idea, in matches that are 1 or 2 hour per map (i think this will be possible with this big strategy and big maps now, as i have seen). The light intensity changes DURING match :slight_smile:
I would like to see as light intensity changes during match.

In relation with server calculation of eye-ray-vision… i think the technique is very old, based on older servers, that could not do and has not a very high intensive calculation capabilities, i think if you do a cheatless capable gameplaying mode of game (in special servers, as dual opteron or quad processors) you can improve bandwidth usage in client, and avoid wallhack cheat at least.
You can get money by renting special servers to that special capability, as punkbuster, but named cheat-buster :slight_smile: the server does a lot of calculations, and the client is very restricted in the data that sends receive.
A simple pc can serve the game as usually, but with cheat-buster disabled, lowcost server rental, but the mode cheat-buster enabled, is very expensive, but more reliable for user.
PD: I think this last can be off-topic, i will try to find the forum where i can post about server technology.


(SniperSteve) #15

I think Joint Ops had lighting that would change as time went on.


(Zyklon) #16

Yes. You’d have a day & night cycle going on (if the admin enabled it, and if the timescale wasn’t too big) when you played one map. It was really fun to see people fighting from dusk 'till dawn, especially as sun was a rather strategic element (you had that little feature that overbrightened your view when you looked into the sun… So when you had the sun in your back, you would be pretty safe).


(kamikazee) #17

I remain with my point that it would require too strong servers just to do this. Allso note that lagging clients might need different VIS checks to make matters worse.

Whilst sounding logical, I think we’re not ready to see such ‘dedicated’ servers.

On topic: The Doom 3 engine allows dynamic lighting, so it could be possible. I only wonder if the whole terrain is dynamicly lit, or only the entities where the terrain uses lightmaps for static geometry. In the latter, changing daylight is impossible with the advantage that the game runs more fluently.


(Lanz) #18

Well the problem is that the old PVS system to determine visibility doesn’'t work on big open maps that well. You can see other players over the whole map. Therfore to bring down network traffic they had to come up with a new solution and that’s why they implemented the new netcode to have different layers of information depending on distance to the player.


(fjavier) #19

PERFECT !!!
ser guth!
gunderbar (wonderbrah?)

PD: Bad english, ,worst german :(, next time i will try in latin.