Hiding versus Invisibility

@ Owain Seriously, dude, calm down, you are utterly misunderstanding me. I've TRIED putting my head on a swivel in video games by panning the camera. What you actually get is a headache. Maybe when the Occulus and it's inevitable contemporaries become commonplace we will have games that perfectly match our own instinctive head movements and the visibility benefits thereof, but until then we have things like 3rd person.

My attention can still be focused or diverse, the mechanisms that allow my peripheral vision to register in my brain are active on events at the edge of the screen, and I get the benefit of someone who was actively looking around, without having to constantly keep my finger on some "head direction" control joystick.

I maintain that any character I am playing does have his head on a swivel, at any time I think he could be attacked. I think he is using his ears, and his nose, and any other sense that makes itself handy. Unfortunately the physical interface I own and play through can only give me so much of that, so I put up with 3rd person view, and I rotate the camera, and I look for small movements or other telltales. It's not a BAD trade. If someone using a blur effect is visible on the edge of my screen, then if you had put the situation in real life, I wager I would have had a chance to look their way. IF I notice that blur, IF I look that way, then I may register the threat and react. Or not. I'm much less concerned about the minute difference between my eyes spotting a digital representation of camo usage from 1st person perspective with me panning the camera vs my eyes spotting a digital representation of camo usage from 3rd person with me panning the camera than I am with the eye strain and finger workout I'll get doing the panning vs the ease of play and relaxation I'll get from the 3rd person.

 

The discussion goes back not only to the beginning of this thread, but also to the previous thread where I had a similar argument with Mugly Wumple with respect to simulating hiding by invisibility versus obscuration. In a computer game, obscuration is ineffective as a method of simulating hiding, and the problem is compounded with a third person point of view that artificially expands your field of view to encompass 360 degrees. If you are only going to obscure the hider, you may as well not have a hiding skill at all because it would be too easy for a player to spot the hider.

That is bad game design.

 

Magic invisibility, of course is a different animal, but I think the key to typical hiding depends on how perception works. I am a big proponent of skill-based gaming. "Camouflage" can be in the game still, but it would be for the unskilled and easily defeated by the mechanics mentioned (camera rotation, resolutions, contrast/brightness). For true skill-based hiding I think you need to make the player disappear from the client.

In NWN, you have SPOT and LISTEN skills to defeat hiding and HIDE and MOVE SILENTLY to hide. If you were hidden and not moving then you were HIDE vs SPOT. If you win then the other person did not see, but if you lost they saw you. If you were moving then both skills were checked and if you HEARD the player they were transparent where as SPOTTING them made them solid. Without the proper feat (HIDE IN PLAIN SIGHT) you would have to run behind something break line of sight to go invisible again once detected; however, with the feat you could just pop in and out which lead to the feat being banned on most servers.

This was a very good system except you could be walking across an empty field without being seen. Lightness/darkness nor objects had any affect. I would like to see a similar system in SOTA, but I think you either need to be in darkness or behind an object or some logical obstruction. Maybe you could do short dashes between objects without being seen, but walking in the open fully lit is a bummer.

 

I'd prefer there not be any clothing that hid the player. It should be a skill that needs to be trained and worked on like in UO. Invisibility was a mage spell, I am OK with that.

 

I don't mind camo clothing, but if available, it should provide maybe a slight boost to a hiding skill, not an end unto itself, like a mage hat in UO provided a slight intelligence boost at the expense of strength, but didn't by itself make you a mage. So, a tailor made gillie suit might give you a slight boost to an attribute used by the hiding skill, but at the expense of a penalty in some other attribute. There always have to be trade offs.

 

@Owain

Yeah stat/skill boosting gear makes sense. Would add to the fun actually if you could cheaply buy or craft +hiding gear and get the perks of having a higher hiding skill a bit earlier in the game until you train it up yourself (or however that system will work). Then later in the game you could wear other gear to benefit other stats/skills since you already have a high hiding.

 

Obscuration would be roughly as effective in a game as it is in real life. If I am obscured, and DON'T MOVE, then you and many other players, WITH 360 fields of view, large high def screens, and even some mods and hacks, can still run right past me. I just don't stand out, if you don't stop to look, I might as well be invisible. A MOVING target though, even in good stealth gear, is still moving. Movement draws attention. Real world or digital, your eye will be drawn to a patch of ground that is sliding towards you. And camo shouldn't prevent that.

 

My point, Owain, is that HAVING the 3rd person perspective REPRESENTS constantly turning my head. I don't have to wiggle the mouse back and forth all day long, the devs don't have to design complex head facing algorithms, I just get the visibility benefit as I move around. So just standing there, my head is on a swivel. If I the player look away from the screen, then I guess my character got distracted from his vigilance. If I the player am watching the screen, it represents my character glancing about, INCLUDING BEHIND HIM, and having a decent chance to spot something. I can look over my shoulder. I just did it. The world did not end. But representing active head movements and surveillance in a game is really freaking hard. Why does it have to be so complex? Why can't we just simplify?

Sometimes less is more, dude.

 

Imagine you are standing by a wall, and another player is on the other side that wall. Seen from the side, it looks like this:

0 || x

You have no line of sight to the other person in a 1st person point of view. They are hidden. But looking at the crude symbology of this text example, you as the reader have no problem seeing both you, the 'o', and the other player, the 'x', when seen from a 3rd person point of view. This requires no effort on your part, no having your head on a swivel. It is passive. It's lazy.

This represents good game design to you? You think this makes the game more challenging?

 

The only thing we know about the camera is that it is above and behind the shoulder and can zoom to first person view.
Edit to add:
As originally proposed camoflage hiding was based only on player position while invisible hiding is done by activating a skill. In the first instance the game has no clue whether a player is hiding or not, in the second instance the game knows.

It has been implied that from the overland map a hex may indicate if it is occupied. If so than the game would indicate occupation in the first case but may not in the second.

 

Exactly. I didn't see anything suggesting that I could see through walls. Now, if it turns out that I can, say, zoom back through the wall and see what's on the backside of it, and thus peek into your airtight bunker, well, that's a clipping issue. The devs should add some camera impact so that can't work. If, on the other hand, it's a short wall, say, 3 feet high, such that he's planning to jump across and attack me, then just having the camera set on a wider angle isn't what's really getting him seen. Being in a position that has potential line of sight and line of effect is what is getting him seen. IF I actually notice him, which is still open to debate.

 

Technically, I think you meant "seen from ABOVE, it looks like that". And yes, if they give us an overhead "God's Eye" perspective, that could get bad for players who think standing on the other side of a wall counts as hiding. Last I checked though, our arguement about 3rd person perspective was in reference to how it handled hiding. Actual hiding, where the person did something that made him hard to see. Not just standing behind a wall. Line of sight breaks still work with 3rd person, you just have to adapt your placement a little. And you can then check it by rotating your OWN camera view.

 

Only if they don't darken blindspots.

 

And darkening blindspots, or line of sight shadows, wouldn't be super hard, and could really help resolve it all. I still have a lot more respect for someone who made himself HIDDEN so that I could look right at him and not see him, than for someone who stood on the other side of a building to avoid being seen. One of those suggests skill, risk taking, and some serious adrenaline. The other can be done by teenage vandals with neither virtue.

 

If the hiding person is only obscured, then they are visible, so the analogy holds. The line of sight for your character is not your line of sight sitting in your chair in front of your monitor. Essentially, you are performing overwatch on your character. Military units have individuals on overwatch because they can see things the individuals they are watching cannot. Same thing with the 3rd person view in SotA.

 

I still think you are assuming a more powerful version of 3rd person perspective than is justified, Owain. The line of sight is fixed at forward from the camera, the camera MUST face my character, I can rotate around him. That's all we've seen. We don't know if we will be able to zoom out to a good overwatch position or not. An overwatch operator who is forced to use only your helmet cam will be damn near helpless, one with satellite view will seem godlike. That's a matter of camera zoom. IF SotA lets us zoom way out, AND it doesn't black out areas our character wouldn't be able to see from his or her current position, AND someone is trying to hide by putting an object between us, then A) yes I'll be able to see him unrealistically, and B) that person wasn't paying attention.

I suspect however that the devs won't give us God's eye views. From the demo play, there was very little zoom out, and I think we pretty much had the character's available field of view.