I'm throwing mine out, but feel free to post yours. Flashbangs: Shorter fuse (I'm sure everyone would agree on this one,) and let the grenade hold it's power for larger distances (It can have the same effect at the very edge, but make the "center" bigger.) Smoke Grenades: Instead of slowly making a cloud of smoke, give it a fuse and make it "burst" instantly into a cloud. When they get around to it make the smoke block spotting, and if you're caught in the burst when the grenade goes off, your character loses the ability to ADS and has jumping hip fire for a few seconds as your character "chokes" on the smoke.
I think smoke is mostly okay, what we need is the ability to see enemies through it without HS/NV scope. Corezor suggested that smoke grenades should constantly do a tiny amount of damage, just enough to make shields flicker. That's one solution, that makes LA useful to the team. Another, personal solution, is to give LAs toggleable goggles, that would function similarly to HS/NV scope. I dunno if making smoke block spot Q spam is possible, but if it is - it should be done. Flash grenades need shorter fuse, shorter than standard frags'. I'd say 1sec is sweet spot. And an indication which enemies got flashed.
A few other possibilities Smoke When the grenade triggers, it causes the LA to become un-spotted (like when a infi cloaks). Block vehicle thermals, but not HSNV. Spot any enemy that is near the grenade when it triggers. Flashbang Slightly enhance range of effect. Slightly shorten the fuse. Cause the shield of someone under the effect to light up for the duration.
It can be, just the amount of coding you would need to implement it wouldn't be wroth doing when there are more pressing things to do, (they've mentioned it's on the to do list but isn't in the pipeline.)
Yeah, that's what I meant by "can be done". Surely in the day of modern programming everything can be done, the question is always "if it's worth it".
Actually, it would be completely worth it to have no latency system in and have real-time fights as with every other shooter out there. The problem is that this simply isn't possible. There's so much that seem so easy but simply isn't possible simply because the computer calculations go up exponentially. Firefall for instance ran up against a brick wall with AI pathing. Normal MMO's bind NPC enemies to a place, the NPC's never have to walk very far, and one game-world can be handled by several servers, where one server handles the game-world and multiple servers keep the NPC's acting as they should. Attacking and stragetics of NPC's comes down more to "is enemy in sight? Is it in range? roll dice, see if there's a hit". But Firefall didn't work like that. First off all NPC's had to be able to walk the entire map, they couldn't segregate the NPC load on multiple servers because of this, as damage calculations would stop once they went into the territory of another server. Second of all, AI pathing takes exponentially more calculations, with every extra meter every option needs to be looked at by the AI server, so one AI unit having to walk over the entire map takes up easily a hundred times more processing power, but these AI weren't alone but walk around in groups. Another problem is that these AI don't need line of sight, they need target velocity, direction, bullet travel time, their own position, possible cover for themselves and their enemy (it doesn't do if the AI shoots the cover even when you stand still), this means that aside from pathing the AI already takes much more calculation to begin with. That's the problem, our processing power might have increased exponentially since the first PC, but there's bottlenecks that you will run into that will cause a lot of problems. That's one reason most games still shy away from volumentric clouds, it simply takes a ton of processing power. That's probably one of the problems why smoke grenades don't work that well, it simply doesn't fit into the current infrastructure of the engine and it would probably mean we were throwing volumetric clouds, imagine a group throwing multiple smoke grenades would be able to melt a large group of PC's.
Some interesting stuff there. But can't this all be handled clientside? I mean, the client already has to decide when to render an enemy or not, to show his dorito or not (if he's behind a wall). Can't be a cloud of smoke just be a temporary wall?
Then you run with the problem of if a person is peeking through the smoke, even though they see, they could still be considered behind the "wall."
I know some bits and pieces of programming, I would instantly say that this is a simple and easy fix. Somehow I doubt it would work though. Looking at walls when you clip through them, you see they are actually 2 seperate 2-dimensional pieces of objects rather than having a thickness, similar to infantry not being "filled". They aren't volumentric things, they are a point in space which has something projected over it (or thats what I gather with my limited knowledge). The fog acting like a wall would probably mean that you can't Q-spot through the outer shell, but once you are inside you can q-spot enemies. Thinking about it, I would say that it would work pretty well. The smoke bomb goes off, and in the first few seconds a "bubble" grows, this bubble works similar to a shield, it's passable but unlike a shield it doesn't have the visual cue it's there (the normal smoke simulates that). The only problem that I can see is that you might be able to Q-spot through smoke that isn't within the bubble, and that once you are within the bubble you can Q-spot other people within.
Smoke isn't volumetric either. It's made of many flat objects (also known as single-polygon objects, or planes) that always face the player and have half-transparent smoke texture projected over it. They can move, grow, clip through each other, and when there's enough of them they create an illusion of volumetric smoke. It can easier be seen in old games, like Deus Ex 1, but you can see it in PS2 as well: Notice how parts of the cloud always remain the same, no matter from which direction I look at them. So each "piece of smoke" can behave like a wall, and not let anyone spot through it. But I guess that could strain the CPU too much. Your solution is also good, Smoke Grenade can just create a box-shape area where no one can be spotted. Game already has "disallow spotting" condition for cloaked players. Just assign this condition to all players inside the smoke cloud.
