+1 vote for no third person vehicle camera.
As for Cvars etc, I’d like as much as possible as long as none of it improves visibility. Tweaking to improve the framerate or just to personalize the interface is great, but when people can see through smoke/trees etc. or get rid of shadows by pressing a button it results in everyone having to use shitty graphics.
^^ Tweaking shouldnt be to much allowed in ET:QW. It really sucks in my eyes, its part of teh game adn you will need to deal with it and change your strategy in playing with it. I really want a game that looks like the real world. Real soldiers can shoot without a gun aswell, real ppl dont die really without losing blood after being shot iwth a bullet…
well, if one can get an advantage over another player just by tweaking its graphic settings then I call that a cheat, or at least a very, very cheap tactic…
I can understand people doing this because they have junk machines, but mind it well that most tweakers do that with ninja hardware just because they think they need whatever edge they can only to be able to frag, and then frag and frag again.
and about drawing the gun, blood flash, head bob etc., if they’re distracting for you, they are for anyone else, so as long as everyone keeps those active it’s still gonna be a fair match. The problem is when someone thinks he’s so smart to turn them off to get an advantage over other players who play the plain version of the game.
I mean, if that black smoke is there, it can become part of the gameplay to hide behind it, and it’s unfair (apart from being so cheap that it resents cheating) if someone just can turn it off and thus shoot at a target he wasn’t supposed to see!
people should just remember that it’s not only about killing and getting the “highest fragger” award, it’s acutally to teamplay and achieve objectives (I remember my suicidal-ninja-engy-charges to the obj in siwa and fueldump… :rolleyes: ), but most of all it’s all about having fun!! You don’t actually die if you get killed in game, so why cry so much? just play the game, and try not to spoil it with lame tweakings and cheap tricks (like the self /kill ing that’s seem to have taken place lately, just to deny the enemy his hard-earned xp he’ll need to fight you later when you’re gonna be at lvl3 light weapons and he still at lvl1 thanks to your dumbassness… :rolleyes: )…
again, my .02 
EDIT: I agree with Paranoid, 100%
i wouldn’t need a real world, i want a fun gameplay. but when people can tweak away smoke in order to get an advantage, then i ask myself: what’s the reason for smoke anyway?
Thats more what i mean with it, not being tweakabel to get rid of smoke, gun etc.
Thats more what i mean with it, not being tweakabel to get rid of smoke, gun etc.[/quote]me too.
tweaking should be used to help fps, not to get gameplay advantages.
so, lowering texture details and resolution it’s fine (even if to a degree textures actually make it easier or harder to notice people, but I think it’s something we can stand for), putting away grass and rain in radar isn’t!
and rebalancing all the gamma to make the whole level look as playing in dim daylight instead than in dark night isn’t as well!
I mean, minimum specs are there for a reason, if your pc is SO crapload that can’t handle them upgrade it or wait to play the game till you have a decent hardware…
IMO giving players the possibility to tweak so much the graphics aspect of the game ends ruining the experience for people who want to play default instead than helping those with lacking machines, because such tweaks will be abused by people who just want to overkill opponents, even with high-end pcs…
You don’t really need tags on aircraft in et:qw, because contrary to Bf2 the aircraft on both sides doesn’t look almost identical, and you can’t hijack enemy vehicles.
I just like the way it was in W:ET, yell your function from time to time. It would be nice then that the icon on top of you head changes depending on the class, instead of a general purpose exclamation mark.
Your assuming people run at 1024x768 or greater resolution and with full view distance (if thats an option). Joe Blow with his crappy laptop or 2 year old computer running at 640x480 will likely NOT be able to distinguish flying models until they are on top of him. If he has only a few pixels showing it in the distance, it will be hard to identify by looks alone.
If all friendly vehicles have a damage meter and the driver’s name on top, you can see the difference. 
Well, the profile (silhuet?) of the vehicles are MUCH different, as well as their colors, and they move quite differently too. I don’t think anyone would have trouble finding out whatever’s an enemy or friendly vehicle on his sights. Even from the crappy shakycam videos from E3 you can easily identify each of the crafts even if they’re just a blurred spot. Problems would appear only if the craft is very, very far away, like a very small dot his view.
If Joe Blow is playing on a crappy computer with a crappy screen, what he’s doing playing FPS games anyways? It’s not like you have to dumb down the game and make it full of overlays just because someone doesn’t care about actually seeing what’s on front of him. You don’t drive on real life with overlays telling you what’s the model of the car on front of you just in case your windshield is blocked by dirt and you’re too lazy to clean it.
[quote=“Hakuryu”]
Your assuming people run at 1024x768 or greater resolution and with full view distance (if thats an option). Joe Blow with his crappy laptop or 2 year old computer running at 640x480 will likely NOT be able to distinguish flying models until they are on top of him. If he has only a few pixels showing it in the distance, it will be hard to identify by looks alone.[/quote]
Do you expect to shoot down aircraft with your sniper rifle ? Or do you pretend assault rifle works well on long distances against fast moving targets ?
I see no problem here. Models should be easy to distinguish at medium range. I play W:ET in 640x480, and have no problem distinguishing friend from foe. I have 0 teamkills in majority of matches.
I agree with tweaker bashers: if you can turn all the pretty-distracting effects off, why bother implementing them ?
I remember one of ID people said (more less) they deliberately locked many options in Doom3 so that artists’ hard work can’t be negated and made look crappy just because some 1337 people feel like it.
Well we will see.
If it turns out you can buzz across the map for strafing with flyers like planes in BF2, rather than hovering and trying to fly like the E3 players, then you might see the validity of my point. I’m not talking about identifying something close, but maybe a flyer that is a speck on your screen in the distance, about to come your way… if it takes 2 seconds for it to pass (and kill) you, then an instant ID would be nice.
If however you cant buzz across the map and do this (slow speeds/etc), then it is not a problem and I agree with you, since you will have plenty of time to identify the target.
People do play FPS games with crappy computers… just because it doesnt make sense to you doesnt mean it doesnt happen.
I do NOT like tons of crappy things on the screen obstructing my view (most notably the icons over the heads of the players-I hope you can turn this off), and I dont want identification on players at all, but after the BF2 fiasco of trying to identify flyers, I see the wisdom in using some aids.
And please, come up with more dumb things about sniping or using machine guns… if you inferred that from my post then you need a rest. Just because my opinion differs from yours doesnt mean I want special cases in weapon usage…jeez.
regarding the third-person camera…
It should be disabled for players in game, but allowed for specs taking demos. You can get some awesome action shots of shanking enemies, or possibly of one vehicle overtaking another…
otherwise it’s just eyes on the back of your head for players, who will probably toggle view switches and 180 degree turns so that they can watch for enemies and instanly face rage as you close in for the shank.
well, if one can get an advantage over another player just by tweaking its graphic settings then I call that a cheat, or at least a very, very cheap tactic…
I can understand people doing this because they have junk machines, but mind it well that most tweakers do that with ninja hardware just because they think they need whatever edge they can only to be able to frag, and then frag and frag again.
and about drawing the gun, blood flash, head bob etc., if they’re distracting for you, they are for anyone else, so as long as everyone keeps those active it’s still gonna be a fair match. The problem is when someone thinks he’s so smart to turn them off to get an advantage over other players who play the plain version of the game.
I mean, if that black smoke is there, it can become part of the gameplay to hide behind it, and it’s unfair (apart from being so cheap that it resents cheating) if someone just can turn it off and thus shoot at a target he wasn’t supposed to see!
people should just remember that it’s not only about killing and getting the “highest fragger” award, it’s acutally to teamplay and achieve objectives (I remember my suicidal-ninja-engy-charges to the obj in siwa and fueldump… ), but most of all it’s all about having fun!! You don’t actually die if you get killed in game, so why cry so much? just play the game, and try not to spoil it with lame tweakings and cheap tricks (like the self /kill ing that’s seem to have taken place lately, just to deny the enemy his hard-earned xp he’ll need to fight you later when you’re gonna be at lvl3 light weapons and he still at lvl1 thanks to your dumbassness… )…
It’s attitudes like this that bother me very, very much. There are a couple things that you need to understand.
Servers can place restrictions on cvar tweaks. For example, in RTCW it was possible if you cranked up picmip to yes, eliminate tree limbs, etc. However, to do this you needed an r_picmip value of about 5, and most servers set an upper limit at 3! Really, you don’t need to worry about tweakers getting an “unfair” advantage, because servers can put into place protections against ridiculous tweaks that turn the game into a super-bright, 2 color version of what it once was. Leagues such as TWL also have cvar restrictions for upper and lower limits to certain values, such as m_pitch (controls mouse Y-axis sensitivity) etc. Less importantly, if leagues make their restrictions clear, then none of these 1337 kids you seem to resent will have any reason to crank their settings up even higher, because they’ll then be at a disadvantage when they have to tone it back down for matches.
You’re severely overestimating the effect that cvar tweaks can have within reasonable server limits. I have mine on W:ET set to the limit on most settings appropriate for TWL, and guess what? Smoke is still there and very thick, tree limbs are still there and are quite opaque, and opposing players are still difficult to see under cover or on surfaces near their uniform color.
I don’t buy the whole “if it’s distracting to you, it is to everyone else too” argument whatsoever. I’m purchasing the game, and I’m going to play it in such a way that I can maximize my efficiency within the allowed rules of the game. Headbobbing, drawing the gun, and blood flash are all VERY irritating to me, and I find that by turning them all off, my accuracy rises roughly 3-6%. Along the same logical path I could say “if I can turn it off, so can you”, and it’s equally permissible. Instead, however, you can choose to run headbob if you want, but I much prefer having a straight view that isn’t oscillating in different directions while I run around - it totally screws up accuracy, especially headshots. It’s quite easy to sit down and learn what each command does, you can try them yourself or google a list, but don’t punish me because I get into a game and want to personalize my UI and tone down some settings.
You’re right, it’s not only about killing and it is about teamwork and completing objectives, and that’s exactly what I do in league play. If I’m going out to a pub server it’s to enjoy myself and screw around, be it as a rambo medic, flame thrower, or whatever else. You better believe, however, that if I’m a rambo medic pulling 90 kills in a 25 minute stopwatch round that I’m helping the team complete the objective simply by inhibiting the entire opposing team’s progress via massive amounts of frags.
As for /killing and “cheap tricks” (trick jumping perhaps?), they’re simply facets of the game that you have to deal with. While I will agree that /killing in a pub is completely ludicrous, it has its merits in league play (although not really, because most now run SW matches where you cannot gain and xp-related benefits). However, like I said before, if I can gain an advantage over you by depriving you of xp, then I’m certainly going to do it (repeat: I don’t /kill in pubs…at least not in combat), because it means it’ll be easier for me to come frag you later if, like you said, I have L3 lights whereas you have L1.
Games certainly are about having fun, and people have fun in different ways. If I get my kicks by fragging as many people as possible in a map and you get yours by completing the objectives, so what? As mentioned earlier, they really aren’t much different, considering that many kills of the opposition will keep them down while you go build the bridge, blow the dump, whatever.
In summary, cvar tweaks should still be accessible. It’s just another way of toggling certain effects on and off, in addition to other graphic effects that aren’t as easy to qualify in a simple drop-down menu. Tweaking has been around for a LONG time, and to take it away now would be similar to the weapon spray of BF2 - dumbed down because of whiners (don’t take that the wrong way, I don’t mean anyone here specifically of course:) )
On another note (kinda OT for this thread so just toss in a sentence if you’re replying to someone else<3) how similar is the Doom 3 engine to the modified Q3 one that W:ET uses? I just want to get a sense for how much of an adjustment is going to have to be made.
that being said, ID now officially rocks in my personal greatest-greats-of-greatness ladder…
EDIT:
@Hakka: you bring up a lot of points, some arguable while others IMO just plain biased;
in particular about the “I buy a game so I want it to let me maximize whatever edge I can get in it”, that’s a very big crapload if you ask me (no offense on you meant), what you want is just ANOTHER game instead of the one you just bought, so you should go and buy that one instead of denaturing the one you’re playing.
about server limits you’re right, most servers put limit to cvar values, but they almost always keep said limits where you can abuse a lot anyway (and I know how it looks like about tweaking, extreme and “normal”, and when I rant about it, I always rant at “normal” tweakings, extreme ones would be plain cheating and I don’t even stop to consider them).
btw, when I said “it’s all about teamplay and objectives” and you quoted me, you forgot that right after I wrote about “having fun”, which you seem to have forgotten; well, if you’re gonna answer me that by owning with any measures available - even the cheapest ones - you get your fun, then fine, since they’re most probably gonna implement cvar settings in QW you can just go and get your kind of fun… I on the other end will be the one wondering how the hell did I get killed while hiding in a bush by an enemy who shouldn’t - and couldn’t - even know I was there… …you know, kind of living the feel of the game, playing to achieve fun over l337ness and such…
Looks like someone does drive the Mobile Command Post, on the 12 new screens thread one of the shots is the sniper scope zoomed in one the MCP and it says Empty, just like the ATV is when the guy is aiming at it. I hope you have to have a certain amount of exp to drive it or something, because 1 noob in it could ruin an entire round.
For the having fun part, see #6.
But again, like I said, within reasonable limits such as the ones TWL will undoubtedly lay out, environmental objects such as bushes and smoke etc. don’t disappear - trust me. I will agree that unreasonable tweaking does give an unfair advantage, which puts pressure on server admins to make sure everyone has a level playing field
As long as there are server restrictions, it can’t get too out of control, and if it did, one could always redirect to a different server entirely.
I think we can all agree, however, that late summer/early fall release is too far away! 
oh yeah, sorry about the fun part, my bad…
about cvar restrictions, my say would be that any tweaking that can give a gameplay advantage instead of a performance advantage shouldn’t be allowed;
so drawing gun and small things like that are still fine, while taking out smoke and the eventual rain aren’t…