Warning: Cool Story incoming, bros. TL;DR: Cloak texture is now apparently not rendering for some people; we are 100% visible. So yeah, we all know how finicky cloak is. Lag frequently affects it. There are the old bugs where weapons can be seen (fixed but back in again, I tested this with two accounts/computers yesterday). But after this weekend I cannot recommend stalker to anyone. Even sniping is greatly affected. Run-and-gun still works, but only because if it fails you're already moving and have a chance. So here's what I was noticing. Stalker, crouched in a field. Harassers, tanks, sunderers would suddenly change direction and come right over to roadkill me. Ok, that happens occasionally, but it seemed to be happening a lot. Sniper - shooting, cloaking, moving, and crouching. Kept getting shot by enemy snipers more than usual. Finally, I was in the gen room at howling pass, crouched on a piece of furniture, whole enemy squads would pass through. Finally one guy runs into the room, turns to me, weapon comes up, and he fires into my head as he's running straight into me. Yeah, we've heard this before...but it usually has at least a plausible explanation. And I was really pissed. So I asked him what his trick was. He told me I was just sitting there, completely visible. No cloak. Further questions and then his own tests revealed that he could actually see all cloakers, EVEN HIMSELF when he was cloaked - he said his weapons were normal looking - no cloaked texture. Now, this could just have been a hacker trying to cover himself, but we had a pretty lengthy discussion and he submitted his own bug report (he said), and I'd like to give him the benefit of the doubt. He said his settings were textures HIGH, everything else LOW. Of course I then tested this but could not duplicate the issue. Over the course of the weekend I started asking every person that killed me whenever I was pretty sure I'd been securely cloaked and crouched. Three other people confirmed something similar to the first guy - they plainly saw me, -uncloaked-, no shimmering, just plain old infantry render. I even got a couple of apologies and admitting that they had noticed they were seeing other people that may have been cloaked and were probably abusing a bug. Final anecdote: at one point I was sniping from the hills onto Saerro's tower and *I* was seeing infiltrator heads and various body parts moving about the tower - only parts of their bodies (torso mostly) were cloaked (I of course then verified that their heads were real by exploding them with my railjack...purely for testing). This seems different from what some other people were telling me (i.e not cloaked at all), so I don't know if it's the same issue or just another one to add to the pile, but all together it adds up to bullcrap if you're trying to legitimately play a stalker/sniper/infiltrator. I apologize for this kind of rant post, and I hate posting stuff like this with no actual *proof* - I'm only relying on what others told me and my limited observations since I failed to duplicate the results on my own. SOE is supposedly making a cloaking pass soon. I don't know if whatever is happening here will be tracked down, but I sure hope so. It's of course possible that everyone I spoke to this weekend were hackers trying to cover themselves, and/or it was just my own problem and everyone else is fine, but I wanted to share, as I have never before been so frustrated just trying to play the game.
I personally haven't seen any 'uncloaked cloaked infiltrators'. However, I will say, that those people who managed to spot you, may have just spotted you. You are never completely invisible whilst cloaked. I've played on everything from very low to ultra settings, and on every setting there's some degree on visibility, even on perfectly stationary infiltrators. Graphics Quality and Lighting Quality seem to effect how light interacts with a cloaked infiltrator the most. Usually they will appear as a feint area which is slightly brighter than the rest of your screen (on low) or almost like a glass statue on ultra. Either way, they're not entirely invisible, and no infiltrator should ever assume that because they're cloaked, no one is ever going to see them. Instead of treating it as pure invisibility, you should be treating it as a tool which significantly decreases your chances of being spotted. Also keep in mind that movement reduces the cloaks effectiveness greatly, and it takes about 1/2 second after you stop moving for the cloak to return to full stationary cloaking visibility. So if you'd moved, even just crouch walked, just before someone looked in your direction, there's a good chance that you were significantly more visible than if you had been perfectly stationary the whole time.
I'm sorry, maybe you did not read my ridiculously long post in full, or check my player stats and see that I have played for 1,874 hours as infiltrator. Those are all valid points you make in your post, which have all been made even by me numerous times. This, however, is a case where CLOAKING TEXTURE IS NOT EVEN BEING APPLIED AT ALL - THEY SEE YOU AS A NORMAL, PLAIN OLD INFILTRATOR. Sorry for yelling. Is my frustration evident? Lol
Ive been running Infiltrator today and didnt have that issue. I saw infiltrator without head, but next to him was HA without head and tank without tower so its not that I think
I actually bumped into this issue today. Seemed like no matter where I hid, they'd just double back and blast me in the face. Now I won't brag, but I'm a pretty good Stalker. It just felt like my luck was horrible, until someone in /yell said "Protip: Cloakers can cloak, don't just sit there", and of course it was directed at me. It was a bit frustrating (until I got pissed and finally just pulled a skillsuit, then logged off), and I hope they get this fixed soon.
Yeah, I've seen that. What I saw myself yesterday was actually the exact opposite - uncloaked heads and limbs (only torso cloaked), but that was from a distance in a highly populated battle. Still, it shouldn't be happening since it was easy kills with a sniper rifle. What I've been hearing from people I talk to is even worse though - after they kill me when I *should* be fully cloaked/crouched, they said that I wasn't cloaked -at all- on their end. And this has happened at all ranges, from 200m down to 20m. I wish I could reproduce it.
So based on his /yell it sounds like he clearly did not see you as cloaked at all. Next time try to send a /tell and confirm it wasn't just a "I saw you before you cloaked" or "I saw your shimmer". If he actually saw you fully visible that would be the bug I'm trying to pin down. Ask him what settings he runs for a start. Or anything else he can think of that he may have done to cause it.
Pics or it didn't happen. I'll try on my end to trigger the issue again, but I would have no clue which variable to test. Ping? (you ruled out range) Suit slot? Motion Spotter/Recon Darts? Maybe it only happens with something specific equipped. I've run into that bug before as well, and it seems to be getting more and more common. I feel so bad dropping otherwise-decent snipers for the sole reason that their cloak is bugged out. I just attributed it to either a bit of lag, or an intensely populated battle, but now I'm not so sure. After seeing it more than once at different ranges (Although long range seemed to be the worst by far), I'm starting to think it's more than just a bit of lag.
I wish I would have. I just sort of shrugged it off, like a fool, and let my frustration get the best of me.
If you need help testing this I can try and round up some folks. I have been avoiding this game until things get fixed personally. The SMG has come out because like you said sometimes inexplicably cloak doesn't get applied to your body. Makes for a really crap stalker session.
Thanks, but I can't test unless I know how to reproduce. Been talking to people in-game to see if I can find any similar threads. Hopefully something materializes! (Instead of us... har har)
I've had this problem recently, too, I kept getting sniped while cloaked, and eventually started accusing people of hacks until I got a tell saying that I was uncloaked and "shimmering as if I was a light source". It's obviously a ****** up shader or something, just like most gate shields and virtual bridges have been screwed graphically lately, after the valk patch. Hossin, for example, has a LOT of shader issues ATM. I play with everything on absolute maximum settings. Also, the Wraith cloak is bugged, people who have shadows on can see the shadow even if the Flash is cloaked. Fix your ****, it's frustrating as all hell and I don't pay a sub to get pissed off and rage when I play because of idiotic bugs that other games have fixed or never had in the first place since 2005, I pay a sub to support the game and have fun. Broken **** is NOT fun. It's bad enough that you made this game look like dog barf with all your "optimizations" for people with garbage computers that are too dumb to lower graphics settings. It looked SUPERB in Alpha and Beta, and night fights were a sight to behold.
Right we are focusing on this bit! Did you happen to be wearing the tech camo? That glows massively sometimes, if you were we might just have somewhere to start with reproducing this bug. - it could be that when you decloaked you were just glowing because of the camo so they looked your way and took a guess... Now other questions, Where were you? What gun were you using? Was it day time or night time (game obviously I don't care if you play this at 4 am -.-) My feeling is though you got a different bug from the OP Now to the OP I have a sneaky feeling I might know what has caused your experience! So we all know this game is a awful in the way it deals with rendering cloaked infis (https://forums.station.sony.com/ps2...-catch-esp-hackers.173770/page-3#post-2852398) So we are going to go down that route, couple of things come to mind here The first one is, in big fights the render range can come right down and I've seen people pop out of thin air 20 m or less in front of me - if the game treated rendering them the same way as shown in the linked post, then this bug could happen easily and would be pretty explainable actually. I hope the game doesn't work like that so we'll move on to my second thought They changed the way the game deals with rendering things which are obscured by other things recently (valk patch, maybe?) with a view to making the came less cpu heavy when it was fully implemented. Now if the game wasn't prerendering you crouched and cloaked and they came round a corner then again we have you sitting there not cloaked and an inviting target. Both of these would be pretty easily tested tbh.
I was using the Railjack, it was night time on Hossin somewhere in some hills, had the digital camo and i was completely cloaked all 3 times i got sniped. The guy that killed me was BR 11 and he is the one I called a hacker and who told me that. he could have been lying. He killed me 3 times in a row while cloaked. THis is not the only time that happened to me, though. It started happening after the Valk patch that screwed up gate shield and nanite bridge shaders and made smoke look as if it is in front of a shader instead of behind it. Cloaking in general needs a complete overhaul. It should work more like it did in the game's CGI trailer, or like the cloak in Crysis 1, 2 and 3 does. Using cloaks in Crysis 3 multiplayer was fun as hell and they never were as ******* broken as they are in this game. I also forgot to mention that after the Valk patch, my weapon and/or arms randomly do not cloak when I have my cloak active, I have to move around a bit or just wait and after a few seconds they pop into cloaked mode.
I created a little video showing what I have collected so far. I have spent allot of time testing, and a few things keep creeping up that I think we might have been overlooking. Specifically Certain animations gave cloak a harder time. (Ex: 2:08 in video) I first noticed this when I asked my friend to try cloaking and uncloaking on slopes. At first contact with the slanted surface cloak bugged out for a fraction of a second and his head was floating. It soon stabilized along with his character animations and went back to normal on the second and third cloak, but this got me thinking about animations. Specifically I noticed when my friend would ADS his head was floating totally exposed so MAYBE this has something to do with the floating limbs bug we are seeing on snipers. It would also explain why snipers seem to be affected by it more consistently then others because they are more likely to being ADS'd while cloaking, AND possibly also standing, or coming into contact with slanted surfaces throwing off animations. I need to test this later with a friend, and I will also be testing at different ranges using higher powered scopes. My logic is game animations also change at a distance. So i'd like to make sure the distance factor can isolated as either part of the problem or insignificant. It does not fully explain what is happening with the full body - no cloak being applied to specific players clients issue. This one I cannot understand. We might have two different bugs on our hands here. I keep thinking back about that one drop pod kill... I keep wondering if this was a legit bug. Even if the guy was a whiny player who called hacks on everyone why would he just stand there like that? Unfortunately this video really can't be 100% accurate because the subject has been known to cry wolf so many times against other players. It leaves the video open to the possibility he was just that bad.
Holy crap, good work. I've known the Cloak was buggy, but I never seen the extent of it from the viewpoint of watching an Infiltrator up close. As for the second video, he was probably Cloaked and presumes you were hacking instead of the more likely conclusion that the Cloak is bugged. It seems to sometimes render us Cloaked on our screens, but completely visible to everyone else. I've been the unfortunate Cloaker in that instance a few times.
Well that was a fantastic post! Thank you! That is a lot of bugs to retest! Guess I've got my weekend planned out! Quick question, second video (ignoring the bug that was either the worst cloak bug yet, or he forgot to cloak... could be either frankly) but on the stairs in the building, was that a tr infi you completely ignored? It is pretty hard to tell on the screen I'm watching on but looks suspiciously like it... He takes a shot at you outside, cloaks, you both run in, he is a bit ahead of you on the stairs, decloaks to shoot the turret engie just before you place your stair mine, then you past him in to the other room. Ahahah that is epic, this is why in depth teamspeak convos get you killed . Watch from about 2:22
Yes it was, I saw his blur at the end going to the roof and ran into the cubby. I like to think he missed on purpose
...and I'm wondering why I get killed so often when Im cloaked and crouched... this BS with the cloak bugs must have an end finally - ALSO the different textures with different settings (Shadow in low - hard to see at all, distortion effect in high - very easy to spot) Get the rid of the distortion effect and make it all Shadow texture (the same low setting texture) and make it work finally SOE - thanks!
