Goblin Squad Member
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Racial vision differences could be handled via a debuff that gives you penalties to hit or a miss chance based on range, darkness level, and your vision type. That way, it doesn't matter if the player can see the target due to a hacked client, the character still functions as though they cannot.
Races with darkvision do not typically have penalties in bright light until you get to the ones with a darkvision range beyond 60'.
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Goblin Squad Member
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@kirstov bel
Unless a race has light sensitivity like those that typically live in the absents of light it doesn't suffer a penalty.
@Keovar
Yes Skyrim is single player and thus why I used it as an example. A lot of people are advocating for that type of lighting system, which I agree is NOT a realistic goal in an MMO.
And the point of discussing how is to get everyone including those at GW to consider whether it might be possible. While only they can say if it can be accomplished in the engine they have, the ideas being put out are 100% capable of being created and implemented, just maybe not in their engine.
Ryan says that client side real world lighting effects are not possible. That's fine. But as a community if we really like the idea of having a dangerous night cycle then we ask some follow up questions. We come up with some ideas that get around the hacking (in a vacuum anyway) and show a willingness to compromise to get something beyond just a less bright part of the day cycle implemented.
GW can then evaluate if the system could be done in the UNITY engine. They then toss around ideas of time and money to complete and evaluate whether the added depth of game play is worth the dev time now or in the future. Because we are crowdforging with the devs we know that not every idea will make it into the game because of time or other limitations but that shouldn't stop us from having a detailed discussion about it to help GW vet the idea.
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Goblin Squad Member
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While I think it would be great if light and dark could actually serve a mechanical role in the game, I can understand the problems with doing so.
Mechanics aside, I just want strong use of light and darkness visually. Too many MMOs have flat even lighting or shadows that are barely there, like a 20% reduction in brightness. I want contrast, I want color, I want the world to pop. That's what I want.
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Goblin Squad Member
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You know I'm generally on the side of the immersion/verisimilitude crowd (and I really would like to see Lowlight Vision and Darkvision retain their value) but I'm with Ryan on this.
It's apparently a big programming hassle for comparatively little benefit that's easily sidestepped.
Maybe 'real darkness' could be part of the design of specific dungeons or something, to retain some of that feel but keep it out of the primary world?
Sounds like a solution for me...
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Goblin Squad Member
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Ask yourself if you really want Goblinworks to be that creepy, all for the un-achievable goal of making people have to worry about torches, lanterns and light spells.
After reading this, I honestly can't help but wonder if light spells will be implemented in the game at all if none of them are needed.
It reminds me a bit about Skyrim. Sure, you have some light spells, but the areas are bright enough that you hardly ever need them unless you're using a mod that changes how the lighting works in the game.
If you never really need them, will it be worth it to add them to the game anyway?
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Goblin Squad Member
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My big reason for asking for meaningful night was so roads and inns and towns would be placed and evolve in realistic manners, since all of that is being prescribed anyways, it has become much less important for me. And I agree, light spells will probably be a novelty, RP effect.
Goblinworks Executive Founder
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There's no need for light to be a gameplay mechanic in order to be implemented. If we take the traditional route of having day be bright and night be just bright enough to see, there's no gameplay advantage to hacking the display drivers, but there is the chance for the visual lighting effects to be showcased.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I still think that some dungeons, and/or forests and/or caves, where darkness is fully present would be fun, and make spells like: light, low-light vision and darkvision (spell or race-derived) and would solve all this issue.
Well I believe the key is spells like light and low light vision have to be essentially free. If player A 4 1st level spells, player B gets 4 first level spells, Player B uses one of them on light, Player A uses a cheat program to grant perfect night vision. Both have effectively the same vision, but player A has one more spell.
Same for dark/lowlight vision. If a human cannot get dark vision, or must get it at the cost of something else, than a human who does not cheat, is at an unfair disadvantage over the 80% of humans who will. If getting dark vision requires him to sacrifice an item slot, spend money on X that he could have gotten, waste training time etc....
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Goblinworks Executive Founder
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I still think forcing FoV(Field of View)/Draw Distance limits, as mentioned earlier in the thread, for darkness would be a good alternative to getting darkness to work.
On the basic level, there's literally no way to do that. The video card has to know where everything is before draw distance is applied, because it is the video card which calculates whether something is within the view distance or not. It might be possible to require the vision hacks to be modifications to the video drivers, but it would still be easier to circumvent than to implement. (Lots of people already write their own hacks to video card drivers, so the skills are already available in the amateur community.)
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I hardly think that the community who is willing to pay for PFOL will be the "typical" kind of modding, hacking, exploitative community that pervades the competitive MMO-sphere.
Darkness, or that supernatural darkness should certainly be something that is presented in game as a feature of the engine. Yes, it will only be a problem to players without magic items (As most magic items shed some form of illumination), and yes it will only be a problem to players who choose races without darkvision, but it SHOULD be a problem nonetheless.
Speaking mechanically from a pure PnP perspective, darkvision is statistically equivalent to ANY bonus feat, and I'm sure I don't have to explain how powerful any given single bonus feat is. Simply removing the inherent bonuses and advantages that darkvision provides right off the start from a camera POV or perspective then that leaves dwarves, elves and the like at a massive disadvantage, speaking if only from a lore standpoint.
Even it is boiled down to a mechanical feature like a miss chance in certain lighting conditions, races and players without the ability to see in darkness or below low light vision (Ahem, Humans, Ahem) should take a mechanical penalty to perception, attacks of any sort, and be prevented from using line of sight spellcasting in said conditions. Either that or they eliminate the diversity bonus that humans get as well as some other feature that non-low light/darkvision races get.
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Goblinworks Executive Founder
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I still think forcing FoV(Field of View)/Draw Distance limits, as mentioned earlier in the thread, for darkness would be a good alternative to getting darkness to work.On the basic level, there's literally no way to do that. The video card has to know where everything is before draw distance is applied, because it is the video card which calculates whether something is within the view distance or not. It might be possible to require the vision hacks to be modifications to the video drivers, but it would still be easier to circumvent than to implement. (Lots of people already write their own hacks to video card drivers, so the skills are already available in the amateur community.)
I'm not sure this is 100% accurate. There is functionality within Unity that you can determine how far away things can be before the stop getting rendered by the camera by adjusting the cameras far clip plane.
ALSO, there is a function in Unity called Occlusion culling which stops things from being rendered if they are blocked by other objects. Maybe they could implement a darkness *object* that would cull everything past a certain distance.
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Goblinworks Executive Founder
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But can you hack rendered objects to be transparent?
If that is the case then the whole discussion about hacking darkness to give an advantage is pointless because if they can hack anything rendered to be transparent to subvert the culling mechanic then they get those additional advantages in daylight and in darkness. If they get the advantage no matter what from hacking why worry about people not hacking being at a significant disadvantage in darkness vs daylight?
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Goblin Squad Member
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Guessing: If it is all done on the client's graphics card(s) then it should be possible for anything beyong the radius of, say, twice your range of vision (20'x2=40') exists only as data on the server and is not provided to your client. So as far as your graphics cards are concerned all of that shouldn't even exist to you, until you move into range and the server provides it as it approaches.
Everything you cannot see including LoS vectors could live only server side with only what is within a sphere whose radius is 40' is actually provided to your graphics cards.
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Goblin Squad Member
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WallhackingWallhacking allows a player to see through solid or opaque objects and/or manipulate or remove textures, to know in advance when an opponent is about to come into targeting range from an occluded area. This can be done by making wall textures transparent, or modifying the game maps to insert polygonal holes into otherwise solid walls.
As with the aimbot, wallhacking relies on the fact that a server usually sends raw positional information for all players in the game, and leaves it up to the client's 3D renderer to hide opponents behind walls, in plant foliage, or in dark shadows. If the game map rendering could be turned off completely, all players could be seen moving around in what appears to be empty space. Complete map hiding offers no advantage to a cheater as they would be unable to navigate the invisible map pathways and obstacles. However if only certain surfaces are made transparent or removed, this leaves just enough of an outline of the world to allow the cheater still to navigate it easily.
Because full wallhacking the environment causes problems with navigation and movement. If I just have to hack the texture for this artificial occlusion object with which it is impossible for me to actually interact, then there's no downside at all.