[REQUEST] More realistic line of sight

Galactygon

I'd like to request (all) characters' line of sight to be adjusted in the following ways:

- The default line of sight becomes much (perhaps even 2 times) larger. This gives an advantage to ranged combat (by countering the effects of increased walking speed) as well as allow you to see more on larger monitors. Taller creatures like dragons or giants might have greater LOS.

- When indoors or during the night, the line of sight decreases depending on the "lightness" of the lightmap of the point the character is standing on. If there are lighter spots (such as near torches) close to the character but outside the characters' immediate visual range, then they can be "lit up" from the fog of war to add to the realism. Perhaps also add an opcode (for spells and items) that grants light with some strength and some radius and some falloff that modders can specify.

- The infravision spell can be more usefull, if it would give you a line of sight equivalent to daytime. Maybe undead and coldblooded creatures would still be invisible outside a much closer LOS? There could be a .2da file with a list of race and class values representing who can be seen from a distance via infravision. Many creatures that lurk the dungeons will have an advantage of seeing you before you see them.

- For modders: at the moment STAT VISUALRANGE is hardcoded so that it never gives you a larger LOS than 15. It would be nice to break this restriction.

-Galactygon

Conphantus

I like this suggestion very much!

Kore

Hmm interesting. It would definitely open some doors for combat gameplay, but it might trivialise exploration and it would be a little bit sloppy unless the zooming feature that trent promised covers it.

Tanthalas

I have no experience with programming to say if what you want is something that would be easy to implement. But I do think that Infravision needs some tweaking.

Currently, it appears to do basically nothing. Instead of Infravision just making other creatures have a reddish colour, I think it would be more interesting if characters without Infravision suffered a THAC0 penalty while fighting in the dark.

I'm not sure how easy this would be to implement though. I know that in Icewind Dale 2 they managed to have Drow specific penalties during daytime, but I have no idea if the coding used for that is easily applied to BG.

Kore

While I'm all in favour of adding flavour and mechanics to make each race different I am strongly against time specific penalties. Having a penalty during day or night for certain classes is just annoying imo and the QoL issues that it would create would outweigh the benefits of making the game more interesting.

I agree that infravision could use a major tweak though.

Tanthalas

I don't think the penalty should make races without Infravision unplayable in the dark (I was thinking that at most it could just be a -1 THAC0 penalty).

I don't know, I just think Infravision should actually do something.

Bhryaen

If this is actually implementable within BGEE, it would be great. The new Zoom would have a lot of new fluidity with a constantly expanding and contracting vision circle. Keeping it dynamic that way also adds more character to the otherwise static visual radius.

O_Bruce

Interesting suggestion. Such details would be so nice for role-playing.

Aliteri

Amazing post +1.

Ilphalar

For me it also seems an interesting element of an environment immersion (and I would really love to have such a solution for ranged fighting). That's a very good idea, I go along with that request

Ravel

Tanthalas said:

I don't think the penalty should make races without Infravision unplayable in the dark (I was thinking that at most it could just be a -1 THAC0 penalty).

I don't know, I just think Infravision should actually do something.

Maybe just on ranged attacks. It makes sense to me that somebody in melee range (even in the dark) would be just about as easy to hit as in the day.

Shooting them with an arrow? Not so much.

shout27

I think the extended sight range should be more like the undarkened fog of war only the individuals can be made out in that range so that you can interact with them but it doesn't lock off things like hide in shadows. Adding a penalty for attacking at that range would make sense as that can be modified to act as the 'fighting in the dark' penalty that not having infravision gets you.

note: probably extremely hard to implement.