Improvement: Make cloakers more cheat-proof.

[Traak]

As important as it seemed to be to make cloakers visible from sanctuary when doing anything other than crouching at the bottom of a well, motionless, and even more vulnerable to exploits like cranking up the gamma, I suggest better implementation of invisibility/near invisibility:

Make the cloakers' avatar a matrix of dots that vary in color between dark blues, browns, grays, and black, so a hack can't target one particular color and turn it into glowing spiky balls with waypoint following overhead.

Overlays that uncloak anyone/anything: don't know how to counter that, other than to make it so any cloaker, regardless of activity level, is completely invisible, as in, no visual data is sent whatsoever, past 20 feet. Before you shriek and gibber that this is impossible, remember, how we looked varied with distance in PS1. TR with MCG always looked like a stick man holding his gun in one hand aiming at the sky, for example, from a great enough distance. It's possible, and it is needed. So even people with cheats won't see us because there will, literally, be nothing to see/amplify/exploit/gamma tweak.

With whatever they have to replace darklight, I do not know how to code it so people don't have the ability to cheat and use it when they don't have it, but I bet the devs do.

A running cloaker should be invisble from beyond about 50 feet. Sorry, pilots, if you don't like it, get DL, get on the ground and hunt for them. Having any visual data available past that distance is just too exploitable.

I don't know how the avatar/location/direction/position data is done, or how the cheat overlays do whatever they do, but I am hoping some ideas may help in making cloakers truly cloaked, not just cloaked to the people who aren't cheating and exploiting.

I used to travel around a base to call in flail fire for an hour or more. But, with the preponderance of cheats and a surfeit of CR5's, that was no longer possible. I say make the invisible truly invisible.

[BorisBlade]

There are plenty of ways to do the "more visable when moving" thing that arent transparency level related like ps1. The much more modern graphics available could simply do somethin more like most cloaking devices in games now do which looks more like the "predator" cloaking shield. Its basically just fully transparent but bends light, so shifting gamma wont do squat. You just adjust how much of the warping effect happens based on movement, the more you do the more visible is is. If its done right simple graphic tweaks shouldnt make it visible. Obviously you could hack perma DL, but thats an issue their anti-cheat software could handle. Honestly it shouldnt be that big of an issue as it was in ps1 just due to far better cheat detection and efforcement. I had much more probs in ps1 due to every dude and his grandma havin cr5 once they basically gave it away with the insane cexp boosts and them constantly spammin their reveals. Not to mention whatever other bugs that made you visible on radar when you shouldnt be.

In otherwords, it should be massively better from a variety of standpoints. However i have watched them do all kinds of really screwed up crap i wouldnt have dreamed they would do in ps2, so anything is possible. =P

[Traak]

post-edit: Remember how every non-permanent thing just vanished beyond a certain visual distance? Cloakers could have that, too.

But, there are men who are far more in tune with what it takes than we are. I'm just trying to think of some angles of attack on this whole issue.