Can you have too much visibility? Or, let’s put it another way: should there
be a camouflage aspect to Counter-Strike’s player models, where in the right circumstances
they can blend into a bush, or hide in a dark corner?
Or do you think they should they be clearly visible, at all times?
If you think they should be clearly visible, then what do you think of this? What do you
mean, this is going too far? Are you now claiming that you CAN have too much visibility? Are
you saying that the game would be better off striking a balance between visibility and
realism?
This example is a cheat. But it isn’t wallhack or anything like that. Just well lit, colour-coded
models. The ideal playermodels for a game that’s about nothing other than competitive
play and high readability!
You can achieve a similar effect with the console command, r_modelAmbientMin . Enter
a number higher than 0 and it will make the character models glow brighter than their
surroundings. Suddenly, they’ll be well-lit in dark corners, and easy to spot even when
there’s just a pixel of them showing. This only works on servers with cheats enabled.
But this was a solution that I proposed last year when the game got custom character models,
as a way of keeping them while keeping readability high. But as I’ve mentioned many times since,
Counter-Strike has instead opted to change and to brighten its environments, rather than
the way it shows its player models.
I won’t keep going on about it. Just wanted to let you know that this was an option, if
all you cared about was good player model visibility.
I don’t know about you, but I’m kind of excited for Half-Life Alyx, which Valve has
gone to great efforts to make as easily accessible as it can, having a high brightness option
for epileptic players, and even making the game playable for those with just one arm.
I accept that in a highly competitive game like Counter-Strike, you can never truly level
the playing field for all players. You can only try to. One group of players I feel are
often neglected are those who are colour-blind. The Battlefield series has been a lot better
in accommodating for them, by having options to shift the colours of the HUD to make things
easier for them to see.
But it can still be done in Counter-Strike by using third-party software. If you have
an Nvidia graphics card and Geforce Experience installed, pressing alt+f3 ingame will load
up this menu, which will let you apply filters to the screen. You can have up to 3 different
presets, so you can even tweak it for different levels.
One of these is a colour-blind option! As an all-colour seeing person, these options
actually make it harder for me to see player models. But then, it isn’t intended for
me. This option might even flip it all in favour of those who are colour-blind, actually,
since I know some who seem to have been bestowed with a super-human ability to distinguish
between different shades of what I assume is the same colour.
And even if you aren’t colour-blind, you can use these filters to up the contrast,
the saturation, the CLARITY. This option is similar to AMD’s FidelityFX feature which
intelligently highlights the details in the image, which is a great way of undoing the
smeary looking mess that post-process anti-aliasing effects can cause in games like Red Dead Redemption
2- even though you’d think that blurring and then sharpening the image would kind of
return it to how it was originally, wouldn’t you. It certainly makes the image in Counter-Strike
sharper.
To my knowledge, all of these effects are merely post-process effects, so they shouldn’t
create any information that isn’t there already. Depth of Field might have been able
to, but this has smartly been disabled for this game. It doesn’t take long to load
this tool up and to mess about with it- I’ll let you find settings you’re happy with.
To my knowledge, AMD doesn’t have a comparable feature just yet, but they do still have options
to alter the brightness, contrast and saturation- which are the main ones. And aside from that,
I’m not going to vouch for third party software that I haven’t used. So for now, the rest
of you may be better off sticking to saturation and brightness options found in Windows or
your monitor’s control panel.
What are your thoughts on player visibility in a game like Counter-Strike?