Chaff idea (revival)

[Roberto1223]

I had posted this idea a very long time ago, and I still think it is very good so I am reposting since i don't remember how it was received by the devs.

So my idea was that chaff particles should not only temporarily disable gadgets, but also serve as a "smoke screen" when a merc is trying to view a spy through EMF vision.

This would not affect motion tracker vision.

I am specifically referring to a situation where there is a chaff cloud located between a merc and a spy and the merc is not standing in the chaff cloud. The spy can be either inside the chaff cloud or anywhere behind it as long as the chaff cloud is blocking the merc's direct line of sight towards the spy.
In this situation a merc would not be able to use EMF to see the spy because the EMF vision will simply detect a bright opaque cloud of thousands of chaff particles.

If the spy did not throw smoke as well, then the merc can switch off his EMF and see the spy with plain eye sight. If the spy did throw smoke then plain eyesight/flashlight wont work and merc will need to switch to motion tracker in order to see the spy moving inside or behind the smoke+emf clouds.

[NeoSuperior]

Interesting idea, but what do you mean with motion tracker being able to see through smoke? It shouldn't be able to, IMO. In SCCT motion detector does detect even through smoke, but I think that should not happen. Both visions already give immunity to flashbangs. With your idea EMF would be able to ignore flashbangs and smoke, while motion vision ignores all of the granades from the spy (aside from merc standing inside the chaff field). I think this would cause too much of an imbalance.

[Roberto1223]

Interesting idea, but what do you mean with motion tracker being able to see through smoke? It shouldn't be able to, IMO. In SCCT motion detector does detect even through smoke, but I think that should not happen. Both visions already give immunity to flashbangs. With your idea EMF would be able to ignore flashbangs and smoke, while motion vision ignores all of the granades from the spy (aside from merc standing inside the chaff field). I think this would cause too much of an imbalance.

The way for spy to bypass motion tracker is to move slowly or to not move at all (no grenade is needed!)
Another way for the spy to disable motion tracker (and all other visions) would be to shoot/throw the chaff at the merc. If the merc is standing inside the chaff cloud then he cant use any visions. Also, the merc's helmet can be tazed and this disables his HUD and visions.

We must first understand how "motion tracker" works in order to create a grenade that can counter it. It is not really necessary to create a throwable granade to counter motion tracker. I was just  adding this functionality to the chaff since to me it makes a lot of sense and the chaff already existed in the game.

If you really want a grenade that disables motion tracker then, we would need to create a something like a "Rubber pellet grenade", this grenade will explode and shoot out lots of rubber pellets which will cause the merc's motion tracker to overload thus rendering it useless.

But that is not the point of this thread so i don't know. I just know that smoke shouldn't really have an effect on motion tracker because smoke isn't really something that could interfere with the motion tracker's functionality.

But the ultimate goal of this game is for  spies to sneak so keeping motion tracker the  way it is will help maintain the stealthiness of the game in some cases.

[NeoSuperior]

But EMF can be bypassed by another method as well: By not using gadgets + not standing in front of electronic devices and the other way around, by using gadgets + standing in front of electronic devices, which is a lot easier than sneaking/not moving.

Now that I think about it, chaff should have the same negative effect for the spy when being in the front or inside a chaff field and not having electric devices on.

[Roberto1223]

But EMF can be bypassed by another method as well: By not using gadgets + not standing in front of electronic devices and the other way around, by using gadgets + standing in front of electronic devices, which is a lot easier than sneaking/not moving.

Now that I think about it, chaff should have the same negative effect for the spy when being in the front or inside a chaff field and not having electric devices on.

That is a good point, i agree with part of it. So if this is the situation (where hyphens represent the merc's line of sight and the names of each character or thing represents its position along the same axis)

MERC -------- SPY --------   Chaff Field

In this situation, if the spy comes before the chaff cloud in the merc's line of sight and the spy has no gadgets on, then he would pop out as a silhouette under merc EMF vision!

However if the situation is that the spy is inside the chaff cloud, I believe that it would still be correct for EMF to detect a bright opaque cloud regardless of whether the spy has gadgets on or off.

The thing is that to EMF this Chaff cloud is like how smoke is to plain eye sight. EMF cannot see through this chaff cloud so even if spy had gadgets off inside the cloud, since EMF cannot see through it, then a spy inside of it with gadgets off would not be detected as a silhouette. Unless a limb were sticking out then that part of the limb would appear as a silhouette.


Very good point! This would all be determined by how opaque the chaff cloud would be to EMF I would say that it should be 100% opaque as smoke is to plain eye sight.


Wikipedia also explains that this was the point of chaff all along anyway (to jam visibility of a target in an enemy radar by overwhelming it with multiple returns).

Now that I think about it, perhaps chaff could have a negative effect on Motion tracker (but not as strong as it would against EMF) if the aluminum particles are large enough and move fast enough to meet the motion tracker's detection threshold then it would overwhelm the motion tracker as well. The gas/airborne solid particles of a smoke grenade are too small however. If smoke affected motion tracker then it would be useless because we are surrounded by gas and dust in our atmosphere, so if the movement of gaseous particles and airborne dust particles were enough to set off the motion tracker, then motion tracker would not work at all to spot larger moving targets like spies because it would always be overwhelmed by smaller particles.

[Roberto1223]

So, um Frvge? What do you think?

[Roberto1223]

Can anybody in the dev team give me their opinion?

[frvge]

Maybe. We'll see. It should be a fairly minor change (guessing... I'm not a VFX expert), but we'll be redoing our visions anyway I think. UE4 has way better support for VFX and particle systems.