28 August 2013 - 13:55 EDT
I would like to discuss the possibility of white listing alien vision mods for competitive play.
This is specifically in response to the changes in build 252, which renders it useless in any lit room by design.
For example (courtesy of Kalopsia):
http://i.imgur.com/uma7PYZ.jpg
The default vision for aliens does now have a red outline for marines and marine structures, but you are now subjected to all the various annoying particle effects and things are a lot less clear and too disorientating in my opinion for melee combat. A nice post by Virsoul best summarises my thoughts on what is wrong with it ( http://forums.unknownworlds.com/discussion/comment/2142174/#Comment_2142174 ).
There are a few examples of mods already:
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=98879398
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=114057687
They are of course not commonly used as they would be disabled almost everywhere. It should also be possible to restore the old vision if someone could retrieve the shader and update it to the new format.
There are however two issues that I can see.
1) This would become a compulsory mod for competitive play as anyone without it would be playing with a significant disadvantage on aliens. This is obviously far from ideal and previous posts about white listing various files have emphasized this problem.
2) I wonder if it is possible for people to go too far if these files are white listed and make a mod that would essentially be too good and thus effectively cheating. Perhaps someone can correct me on this, but I do not think it is possible for servers to only allow certain alien vision mods that were considered acceptable.
Those negatives are pretty considerable, but I do think the b252 vision change has made the game objectively worse competitively and if it can be fixed then that would be ideal. Of course maybe I am over reacting and people would rather just adapt to it.
This is specifically in response to the changes in build 252, which renders it useless in any lit room by design.
For example (courtesy of Kalopsia):
http://i.imgur.com/uma7PYZ.jpg
The default vision for aliens does now have a red outline for marines and marine structures, but you are now subjected to all the various annoying particle effects and things are a lot less clear and too disorientating in my opinion for melee combat. A nice post by Virsoul best summarises my thoughts on what is wrong with it ( http://forums.unknownworlds.com/discussion/comment/2142174/#Comment_2142174 ).
There are a few examples of mods already:
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=98879398
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=114057687
They are of course not commonly used as they would be disabled almost everywhere. It should also be possible to restore the old vision if someone could retrieve the shader and update it to the new format.
There are however two issues that I can see.
1) This would become a compulsory mod for competitive play as anyone without it would be playing with a significant disadvantage on aliens. This is obviously far from ideal and previous posts about white listing various files have emphasized this problem.
2) I wonder if it is possible for people to go too far if these files are white listed and make a mod that would essentially be too good and thus effectively cheating. Perhaps someone can correct me on this, but I do not think it is possible for servers to only allow certain alien vision mods that were considered acceptable.
Those negatives are pretty considerable, but I do think the b252 vision change has made the game objectively worse competitively and if it can be fixed then that would be ideal. Of course maybe I am over reacting and people would rather just adapt to it.
