Raid Request: Option for Villain Reticle Always On

[nror]

Dear devs,

 

To start: thanks for bringing this game back to life and keeping it that way. You're awesome!

 

With that out of the way, I wanted to make a small request: that an option be provided to enable Villain Reticles all the time so that we can quickly distinguish between enemies and allies on crowded battlefields (or that the client be modified to honor the setting when the options.txt file is tweaked to allow this, see below).

 

When running some of the endgame raids it can be very difficult to parse visually where mobs are clustered with the default tab-targeting. Tabbing to target an enemy lets you know where that particular enemy is, but it doesn't give a great representation at-a-glance of where groups of mobs are when there's a lot happening on the screen. MSR and Underground are some good examples of this. You could sweep the screen with your mouse or quickly tab through, but this is tedious and difficult to manage in a fast-paced scenario.

 

I've played around a bit with the options file and what I can report is that while forcing Villain Names and Bars to "Always" by editing their values to "1" manually and then loading the options in the client works, doing the same for Villain Reticles does not work as expected. Additionally, friendly NPCs are lumped in with the "Villain" category and are also shown when Names and Bars are forced on using this method (this is probably more complicated to untangle and isn't a deal breaker).

 

I realize that the complication here will be that if Villain Reticles are always on, how will you be able to distinguish which target you're actually targeting from the rest of the mobs? One possible solution might be making the active target reticle a different color than non-active reticles, granted that would probably require new code to realize. Then again, as of right now the active reticle is seemingly larger and brighter than mouse-over reticles, so maybe not.

 

In the meantime, I think that allowing the client to honor this option file tweak or adding it as an experimental or beta setting despite the drawbacks would be beneficial in certain specific scenarios like raids. For the most part the visual cue of which specific mob is being targeted is not that important since we can use which direction our character is pointed and the target window (as well as the aforementioned differences in size/brightness/opacity) as an indicator. Since the reticle is just a 2D transparency, it shouldn't be unduly taxing from a graphical perspective to enable them all the time, or at least no more taxing than turning on player character nameplates might be in the same scenario.

 

Thanks again for all of your hard work and for taking the time to read this!

 

Best,

nror

Edited January 29, 2020 by nror

[Outrider_01]

Suggestion has merit, problem I believe is the game engine has a limited draw range on NPC to show on health bars/names but I am not certain. 

 

What I can confirm is, the game does have a limite draw range and NPC count, I run  a farm by Twisted Visage on that asteroid.  The NPC can sometimes be clustered so damn close from entire map with annoying NPC buddies drawing aggro.  I can't see everything, but as I rotate the camera some disappear while others appear.

 

Being able to see heath bars/names in any situation is counterproductive when you can't read anything thats beyond draw range in tight spaces and clumped up.  Might be more useful in a raid, but things die so fast to incarnate stuff I don't see the point.