Upgrading Light aug.

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chris the cynic
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Re: Upgrading Light aug.

Post by chris the cynic »

Yeah, presumably it would look like a flashlight as filtered through sunglasses.

A better solution might have been to have the flashlight put out infrared light and have JC's augmented vision pick up infrared. It lets you see without giving away your position. (It is how we monitor nocturnal animals that don't see in infrared because it allows us to see them without them being influenced by a giant shining light.)

Unless JC was meant to be a flashlight for an entire strike team it seems somewhat wasteful to have him shine out visible light when he could have an invisible flashlight.
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Jaedar
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Re: Upgrading Light aug.

Post by Jaedar »

Well, infrared is basically heat, and there are technical problems with having ones eyes emit heat. Seeing infrared would let you see people in the dark, but not your environments, and shooting out heat wouldn't work well either...
At least, I think that is how it works.
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bobby 55
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Re: Upgrading Light aug.

Post by bobby 55 »

Is there a mod around so you could upgrade your light in Deus Ex? Playing TNM with that feature has spoilt me and constantly running out of energy in Deus Ex is painful as there aren't as many bio-cells around without cheating .
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Jonas
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Re: Upgrading Light aug.

Post by Jonas »

Um, I would think there'd be similar technical problems with having your eyes emit light...
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chris the cynic
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Re: Upgrading Light aug.

Post by chris the cynic »

Infrared is, in fact, a form of light. It is a form of light that is useful in seeing heat, it also produces heat (but then again, so does visible light) but it is not actually heat.

As for seeing your environment, infrared really can do it. Watch a show about lions, or some other nocturnal animal, and you're likely to see scenes shot at night in well lit black and white where you can see not just the animals but also the ground, trees, and bushes around them. They do this by having an infrared camera and an infrared spotlight.

Wikipedia image showing a picture of a person, and environment, in darkness and what the same thing looks like using active-infrared:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/e ... Vision.jpg
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Jonas
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Re: Upgrading Light aug.

Post by Jonas »

Fairly sure my garden-variety camcorder actually does that - it has an infrared torch beneath the lens and then I can switch the camera to IR mode to pick up the light from that torch, and the image comes out all green, ghostly, and pleasingly creepy.

Combine with large cream-coloured cat with reflective eyes as cats tend to have, and you get TERRIFYING GHOST CAT :o
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chris the cynic
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Re: Upgrading Light aug.

Post by chris the cynic »

It probably does. It's a rather simple system.

A simple system which it would make sense to install in "vision augmented with flashlight eyes" man.

-

Actually a lot more effort has historically been put in trying not to pick up infrared than has been put into doing it on purpose. Apparently a lot of clothing is transparent to certain wavelengths of infrared and certain early video cameras could see through clothing by mistake. A similar thing recently happened with cell phones in Japan, though I'm not totally convinced that was a mistake.
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Jaedar
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Re: Upgrading Light aug.

Post by Jaedar »

Hmm... I wonder if my teachers would accept that as my project assignment; finding which wavelengths of IR are best used as Anitclothing cameras :) Probably not.
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Re: Upgrading Light aug.

Post by Trestkon »

chris the cynic wrote:Apparently a lot of clothing is transparent to certain wavelengths of infrared and certain early video cameras could see through clothing by mistake.
Yep: http://www.kaya-optics.com/products/experiments.shtml
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Re: Upgrading Light aug.

Post by bobby 55 »

Thanks Trestkon. I think I'm with Chris on the doubts about a mistake.
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gamer0004
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Re: Upgrading Light aug.

Post by gamer0004 »

As to infrared: there are two types of infrared camera's: passive and active. If you have a passive one it just registers the infrared your body emits. If you have an active infrared camera it is basically equipped with an infrared flashlight.
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Re: Upgrading Light aug.

Post by chris the cynic »

And, just to be clear, what I am saying is that if I were designing the flashlight aug for an agent whose vision would be augmented anyway I'd see if I could use an infrared flashlight and then use the augmented vision to allow the agent to see that infrared. That way only someone else augmented to see infrared would be able to see the flashlight, since most people aren't augmented that would work out nicely.

[Added:] And to return to what brought this up, a flashlight aug done like that would look like absolutely nothing to an individual without the ability to see infrared, you'd never be able to tell whether it was on or off.
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Re: Upgrading Light aug.

Post by DDL »

regarding actual game implementations, the IR thing is tricky: I've done something similar, in that you generate a reddish beam instead of a whitish-yellow one, and it's a different beam class, so doesn't trigger AIs to go LOL BEAMZORZ! *shoots*

..but there are concessions, and it's not perfect. The original DX light aug essentially uses a very rough and ready method: this is not a game with actual dynamic lighting, after all. One way to do it would be to spawn in a light at eye height set to LE_StaticSpot, that constantly updates to point in your viewrotation. The problem with this is that lights spawned in at runtime (i.e. ones not using precalculated light tracing) completely ignore geometry (and actors, but then precalc lights do that too). Sure, they'll light it up, but won't stop when they hit it. You could watch your magic eye beams go straight through walls, doors, tables, etc. It would be..odd.

So what they do instead is spawn in two 'beams': beams are a subclass of light, and are subclassed pretty much just to have a separate light-aug specific class so that NPCs can do a check for them: only the player's light aug makes beams, so only beams should cause suspicion.

One of these beams is placed right where your eyes are, this is to represent the light 'source': quite handy for lighting up your immediate surroundings, too. The other is placed at a point calculated by tracing an invisible line from your eye location, in the direction of your view rotation, until it hits something...and then about 64 uunits back from that, so it's actually lighting the wall/door/person or whatever up, rather than sitting inside it.

This is a slightly more convincing fake, since the radius of the beam is fairly small, so while it DOES shine right through walls, it doesn't reach very far, so you rarely see it doing so (also, of course, there's usually a wall in the way, but you get what I mean). If you look down at a table, it hits the top of the table, and thus is placed 64uunits above the tabletop, usually high enough to not illuminate the floor, and thus almost look like the table is blocking the light. Also has the advantage that under this method, actors like chairs and people 'block' the beam of light.


So, for my IR thing I made the traced out beam a red, non AI alerting beam, so..so far so good. BUT: I had to remove the eye-location beam entirely, because while the beam itself wouldn't alert the AI, it still makes YOU more visible, so the AI would still detect you if it could see you, coz you'd be all red and lit up. This still means that if you turn it on and then immediately look at your feet or something, they'll spot you, coz you're lit by the traced beam. But such is life.

Don't think it's possible to make the AI discriminate based on light-source, so ...yeah, I'll just have to go for "umm..feature, not bug!"


Anyway, that's how the DX light aug works, ladies and gents.
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