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?
