Its initial state is pretty good. The only thing I'd argue is it needs to be a bit more effective as I think they'll still be easy finds. The visibility of the bubble based on view distance rather than proximity makes finding it nearly as easy as if it wasn't cloaked at all, most notably at night. At night, a sniper with a 12x scope can see the bubble up to 260m away (with my settings, other settings may vary). It's not very difficult to miss as the bubble area looks like the gamma is slightly increased compared to the surrounding area. It's not at obvious during day which cuts the distance down to a bit over 100m for the same effect. From hipfire, I saw the bubble appear at 50m when moving towards and disappear at 75m when moving away, so there seems to be a bit of inconsistency with the phasing. Aiming with different zooms makes it visible at larger distances. ie a 4x scope could see it noticeably up to around 100m during daytime, more at night. I do think it needs to be a bit more stealthy to have a desirable effect. I don't doubt the player's resourcefulness in finding them with relative ease, especially when exploiting zooms to look.
Couple of fixes needed IMO HS / NV infantry scopes ignoring the distortion from inside Normal High Magnification scopes " looking past " the distortion and lessening it's effect and purpose from inside .. Can see it also giving some people motion sickness, so whether they might need to re-think the whole distortion as a firing deterrent I dunno .. I like the fact the Sundy decloaks when it's own weapon are used .. Musing : Can see it being a Snipers paradise ... As you can fire while cloaked with very little distortion due to the scope magnification , and then Quickly press F after a shot to use your own cloak until the Sundy Re-cloaks you itself ( Firing decloaks you from the outside to ) Could be visible for a fraction of a second per shot ..
While I slightly agree, I also see it as a double edged sword. The other downsides of sniping are not shielded from the cloak, such as the noise and the tracers. You'd basically be telling the enemy where a cloaked Sunderer is sitting. From there it's easy pickings. Example: A Zephyr Liberator glides on in and has a nest of snipers and an un-armoured Sunderer to obliterate.
The bubble's visibility to vehicles seems a lot more reasonable. It's seems to be centered around 100m distance universally, so aircraft don't have an easy task by searching overhead with 2x zoom. At least from what I've tested so far.
After some more testing with vehicles, the phasing for the bubble seems to be 50m with no zoom, 100m with 2x zoom, and 150m with 3x zoom (Lib belly gun, though it's extremely faint until about 120m-130m). So there seems to be consistency. It seems fair for an initial implementation.
I had a play with this last night. One thing I noticed is that you can't repair it while it's cloaked. Not sure if this is by design or a bug.
I feel PS1 had it right. Players inside the bubble should only be able to see the Sunderer and other players inside the bubble. Looking outside the bubble should be like looking at an empty battlefield. When the Sunderer takes any fire, the cloak drops and all is normal, everybody sees everybody. They also need to drop the cloak sound that happens when entering or exiting the bubble. The only difference from PS1 I would make is not cloaking deployables and mines.
Might as well re-post this here: YOU SHOULD REALLY NOT BE ABLE TO SEE THE SUNDERER'S CLOAK LIGHT DIFFUSION FROM OUTSIDE!!! lol, just make it so you can see the dome slightly, the whole sunderer is way to easy to see. PS: This should not be spottable by darklight flashlights. Rather, add spotlights to the base turrets (not hard to do from a programming perspective) and, sorry for deviating from the topic, add generators that could disable the lights on the turrets ALSO: replace the current stealth cert with this, less than 1% of the community uses it...
cloak sundy has a bug. i flipped it while driving. afterwards i cloaked automatically a few seconds later. respawned and it was still acting like i was inside of the cloak bubble.
that's b/c stealth on sundies got nerfed. Undoing the innate auto-spot on sunderers would make stealth/cloak more viable.
I heard they tried this before. The range on the spotlight was just pitiful and ended up being completely useless.
Messing with this by myself today I noticed a few things that bug me. 1: Firing the Sundy weapons disengages cloak. I get why this is, but I would much rather it disables the weapons altogether while cloaked so spam happy passengers aren't forever giving away your position firing at ESF's 1000 m away. Locking the Sundy isn't a good enough answer as its primary role is a transport vehicle and I want to be able to fire back when not cloaked. No passengers = no gunners. I feel this same issue is also true of infantry weapons. Letting every moron with a weapon in his hand try to use the bubble like a spawn room to spam at the enemy from perceived safety and give away position will be a huge problem. Eyeklops and PS1 has it right. People on the outside cant see in and people on the inside cant see out. This solves both problems the best way possible. 2: Distortion bubble not based on proximity. This mechanic should be the same as a cloaked Infiltrator. A 12 X scope should not be able to see the Sundy's distortion but not see a cloaked Infiltrators distortion at the same distance. 3: Cant repair or heal while cloaked. This is not a surprise as this is already true of the Wraith as well as Infiltrators not taking ammo or healing while cloaked. I never really understood why this was ever a problem. Besides, If the the Sundy is taking damage... the gig is up anyways. To make matters worse, while you cant heal others while in the bubble, trying to makes you visible. One thing I did find out was that while an Engie cant repair it while cloaked, proximity repair can. Which brings me to... 4: Cloak bubble effected by other vehicles. Currently a vehicle entering the cloak bubble causes all sorts of obviously unintentional visual glitches. This breaks immersion big time. if this cant be fixed, make the bubble act like a gate shield and block vehicles from crossing but allow infantry and projectiles to pass thru. Things I was unable to test by myself but wonder about. 1: If proximity repair works while cloaked, will Triage? 2: I noticed that if I cloak my Infiltrator while inside the bubble before I run out, I become visible for a second from the first person point of view. Is this true from the third person as well? 3: Can a cloaked Sundy be spotted while a cloaked Infiltrator can't? 4: Does proximity radar see cloaked Sundies? 5: Can lock on launchers lock onto cloaked Sundies thus giving away position? 6: Is 1500 certs going to be the price? Not really worth it at the current level of functionality IMO.
