Alternative proposal: Your suit does not magically know where human beings are and then not tell you. Instead, per a suggestion in another post, we import the tagging from Far Cry (if it’s not already there; it’s been a long time since I played Crysis a little). Cloak works poorly against untagged enemies (reduced but still large detection radius/proc) and extremely well against tagged enemies; fictionally, it mimics your background near-perfectly along a finite number of defined vectors, at the computational/optical cost of imperfect mimicry in other directions. There are various models that could work for the power drain, but off the top of my head I would put it on the order of the inverse of the number of tagged enemies; the suit is routing its effort more efficiently if you’ve done your homework.

This per-enemy bonus is then filtered through a multiplier related to the visual noise within, say, two meters past you on the vision ray (as baked and tagged on object properties; could be number of poly edges under 90 degrees, UV score on an unsharp mask algorithm or both in some combination) and twice those within a meter of a ray drawn from the enemy to you. Like an octopus, be in front of a bush or a pile of scrap and you’re virtually invisible. Be in front of a clean car door or a smooth boulder or worst of all, skylined, and you’re fooling no one but yourself. Be through 10m of dense greenery and the technical line of sight simply doesn’t count. It sounds complicated but I don’t see what would make it difficult to implement; presumably they’re already casting rays at several Hertz for LOS, and the qLOS calculation would only be triggered on successful LOS checks. Actually, I assume they’re already doing qLOS calculations based on alpha mapping or something…

In any case, possible or impossible, this pipe dream would hopefully create a secondary landscape separate from the LOS landscape, somewhat similar to the ‘skiing’ landscape in a Tribes game, allowing players to move and hide ‘in plain sight’, which is badass and surely the point of Cloaking rather than hiding, against intuitively clear sets of objects (‘Could I see the Predator against that?’).

In fact, if you are not being sarcastic, then you are in for a treat. You may well be the only person on the internet not to know about it.

Also, Tom had a link to them on a sidebar once.

Also: that did not have the video I was looking for. That monkey was nowhere near underaged. And I’m pretty sure the dinosaur was a guy in a suit.

I also agree with your stance on the speed mode. It’s generally worse to use sprint while in Speed mode because it’ll only get you a few meters, but it’ll remove almost all your energy which could have been used elsewhere.

But I disagree with your point on cloak mode. I think it’s fine as it is, mainly because it is useful having it when a patrol is going past, when standing still makes it use very little energy. I think that having it reduce more when enemies look at you make it worse, but I don’t know to what extent you would have it reduce when in full view. The same amount you lose by sprinting? Well, I think that cloak mode is fine as it is.

But I do agree with your point on armour mode, seeing as the energy lost through the fire you take could have been better spent using speed or cloak to escape and pick them off from a distance. I believe that some of these can be changed in the console in-game or in the files. I certainly remember there being a command to remove the energy lost while firing in strength mode and speed bonus and energy lost in sprint while in speed mode.

Right now, in the few truly difficult situations – i.e. more than eight enemies on Delta difficulty – no mode is a viable alternative to Cloak. You can’t weather the damage in Armour, escape their fire in Speed or kill them quickly enough with Strength. Certainly you might live long enough to reach cover in some of these modes, but Cloak has them beat on that too: you can stroll to a bush ten metres away without taking a shot. It’s the ultimate armour, the perfect escape, and the most convenient mode to grab people by the throat.

Failing the changes detailed above, my second choice would be to rename the other modes, “Recharge My Cloak Bar” mode, “There’s No-One To Cloak From And I Lost My Car And I’m Bored” mode, “Let Me Jump Over This Low Wall So I Can Do Some More Cloaking” mode and “Cloak” mode.

I’d like to see the ability to stealth kill someone from behind with your hands while cloaked, this would give it more offensive potential, and would let you play like Sam Fisher.

I don’t want to know for sure that I have ten metres of total, impenetrable invisibility. That’s too much certainty. I want some capacity for my plan to go wrong, so that I have to improvise. I want to think “I can make it to that bush so long as that patrol doesn’t come my way,” or “Shit, there’s more of them than I thought, I can’t go that way now.” Or “Don’t turn round, don’t turn round, don’t- fuck!”

Right now all I think is “Sorry suckers, Cloak mode coming through! Good luck finding the cause of that twig-snapping five hundred meters behind me!”

If the energy usage changed wildly from moment to moment, you’d lose all sense of how long you had left. I don’t think it would work.