Flashlight and night vision

Tremulous Evil Genius Think Tank
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There need to be some form of flashlight or night vision, since so many maps are poorly illuminated. Adding that will be another stepping stone to ending the reign of ATCS.

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Also, this will bring out the possibility of Tremulous using its full multiplayer horror game potential.

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I was also thinking about night vision because some maps are dark and I thought aliens would have night vision already and Humans only have night vision when wearing helmets .

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A cheap way to do it would be a weapon that emits an invisible projectile that emits a light on hit.

I would also like to do flares, the same idea but basically uses the nade logic.

As for nightvision, a cheap upping brightness + contrast and texture on top should do the trick for now.

And yes these things are a must in the future imo.

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Funny that you necro’ed this up @code_man 
 just earlier today I visited the Tremulous FAQ page http://tremulous.net/faq/ (which I have never bothered to read before now) and saw:

Could you implement a flashlight in the next version?

Tremulous does not need a flashlight. The maps are intended to be bright enough as is. If Tremulous seems dark for you try adjusting the “Brightness” control in the menu. The use of lighting as a multiplayer gameplay mechanic is foolish as it is very difficult to guarantee consistency across hardware platforms and nigh on impossible to protect against trivial exploits.

The ‘trivial exploit’ here is probably r_lightMap. I feel the ‘official’ answer is a bit shortsighted tho. Some maps are indeed very dark, and some are too (fully)bright, because the brightness of the map is controlled by the mapper to suit whatever style they’re trying to achieve. It’s also possible that the map developer was seeing much brighter output on their screen (when they made the map) than what you or I might see.

I think we could add a flashlight as an always-on dynamic light without too much trouble, the problem then is that not all players have dynamic lights enabled, and also it might be annoying as aliens to be targeting beams of light
 or as a human to get ‘flashed’ constantly by teammates. Just sayin



Maybe it’d be ok if the light was only visible to the player using the flashlight

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To follow up on this, a much better solution to dark maps is to have players adjust their brightness settings:
r_mapOverbrightBits 3
r_intensity 1.2
r_gamma 1.2

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I think we should add a client-side (only) dynamic light for players, like a soft medium-sized sphere that adds a small bit of illumination around them, that they can toggle on/off as desired.

This would solve the ‘dark maps’ problemℱ without adding any light beams or other visible light sources/equipment/evolution powerz.

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