Low Settings and Cloaked Units

Is that anything like "Wax On" and "Wax Off"?



I take it nobody here knows what a stippled alpha effect is, or you would all be agreeing with my earlier suggestion.

 

Something to do with a shadow?

 

I explained myself clearly and correctly. Enough said.
And as you said "The wavering affect gives the opponent or you a chance to react to any sort of attack or cloaked detection unit." That's an advantage that I think should be able to be turned on or off at the begining of a multiplayer match. I think all players should have an option to have it on or off. And it's only on if everyone chooses it to be on. If one person chooses to ahve it off, then it should be off for all. I think that would be fair.

Maybe Blizzard thinks low end computers can't handle this effect. Actually that's not a bad idea. Someone should post on the official forums about adding it to the low end computers. And then I'm sure Blizz will tell us if that is possible without taking too much of a graphics hit on the low end computers.

 

Don't confuse lack of agreement for lack of caring .

 

Alpha is the transparency channel. The 'a' in 'aRGB' colour space.

If the dark templars were drawn simply with low alpha, they would be partially transparent. But shimmering is less definite than partial transparency.

Stippling alpha, is an insanely fast way of approximating alpha effects, and it was commonly employed in the early days of direct3D. The method is that we draw the sprite normally, but with a fraction of the number of pixels ~ lets say around 2%. The pixel pattern used can either be a fixed repeating pattern, or random. Random would be better here.

The effect is the DT being invisible, but there would be random glints / fuzziness / temporary imperfections in the cloak through which random pixels of the unit could be seen.

This is a much cheaper effect than the resampling done at the moment for shimmering in higher quality settings.

 

Interesting Jasmine, are you some kind of Graphic Designer? or something

 

I make computer games.

 

Jasmine that assumes Blizzard uses the RGB workspace for SC2. They might use the CMYK or another workspace. But assuming you're right, I think you should really post this on the Beta forums. It soulds like you have a good idea Blizz could use.

 

Yeah that actualy is a good idea, and a game maker? I smell a blizzard spy.

 

This guy should just update his computer. Enough said.

 

I'm so glad Blizzard don't feel like this.

 

As I already stated, cant update a laptop without replacing the entire board since everything is fused together. Only upgrade that's possible on my laptop is the RAM cards since they aren't attached to the board like all the other cards, but I've got 2GB of that already.

Considering that I can render the see-through effect of my own/detected cloaked units just fine, I fail to see why low settings would have an issue with the distorting effect of non-detected units.

 

I play with the maximum settings even if I have not the best computer. It is in maximum settings automatically. But I like this idea and fear it that when you play in low settings you can't totally see some visual effects.
Blizzard will fix this.

 

Did I mention how fail the "competitve game play should be balanced around the technical limitations of low-end PC users" argument is?

Oh yes, I see I did.

Note I'm talking strictly about the balance argument. The idea of adding a way for lower-end PCs to visually display cloaking effects is good. The idea of stripping out game features to alleviate competitive disadvantages to lower-end PC users is absurd.

 

Thank-you for liking my idea

But It would be really odd and inefficient for a computer game to describe colour in CMYK coordinates.

CMYK is convenient for printed images because that's how coloured dye combines, like in your printer cartridges. CMYK is used in photoshop because stuff is usually printed out. Graphic designers have to think about the dyes they're using because not all colours are possible from mixing these four dyes. This why some printers also carry Light Magenta, Light Cyan, and Bright Red inks in addition to CMYK.

But computers and monitors (and our eyes) all use RGB. All other colour spaces are fake on computers; they're all described in terms of RGB.

 

jasmine you do make a good point there. And yeah I've seen those printers with like 6-7 dofferent cartridges for all the colours you mentioned, CMYK + the others.

But if you use the a in aRGB as you say then the units would just be trandsparent versions of the same unit. Still clickable and attackable even when not detected. Blizzard needs to put soem effect on the units that makes them unattackable when cloaked. And of cause this effect is removed when the unit id detected so it can be attacked. And maybe the shimmering is just this effect to make cloaked "not detected" units unattackable.

Sure the a can be used but Blizz would still need the marker on the cloaked units so they can't be attacked. That marker could just be invisible. And the units are transparent unless detected and then they are dull strength (with no invisible mark). That would work to just change the transparency vales on the units. So they become much less transparent when they are detected.

 

Graphics and game logic are separate entities. How the graphics are drawn has no dependencies on nor implications for whether things are clickable, or attackable, or trigger auto-acquire, or appear on a minimap., etc

 

That's actually not entirely true. I used to manage a photolab. Every minilab (aka the big machine in the back of a walgreens that spits out pictures) I've seen, used CMYK. That would be Fuji and Noritsu(which is actually a split off from Fuji due to anti-trust laws). Agfa is another company and I honestly don't know much about those machines or the software they run on... but that's because everyone uses Fuji and Noritsu.

You might wanna say, "Well, you are printing pictures so, duh."
Most people don't realize a true photo printer does not use ink at all. It's entirely a chemical process which always begins with a digital image that is in CMYK.

 

not gonna lie. that ripple of invis units are very much harder to see now, at least for when it comes to ghosts, banshees or DTs, they attack so you do notice that something is there. But as for the observer without any type of detection they are very much invisible in the game imo

 

Yes it is very hard to see, but the issue is that on low settings, there is no ripple period. So if the guys cloaks his banshees during an assault, I dont know what direction he is moving in(ie. going to attack another part of my base or pulling out to retreat) meanwhile, if the situation was reversed and my opponent had it on higher settings, they would be able to tell exactly where my banshees are going by following the ripple effect.

Thus, higher settings had by default a better gameplay mechanic and an advantage over lower systems when it comes to cloaked gameplay.