[Feature Request] Smooth out the rounded edge
in General
With 1.101.3, a new rounded cutoff was added at the edge of the visible map. As it is right now, that cutoff is very abrupt and frankly doesn't look good. I'd love it if the edge could be smoothed out a little so that it doesn't go from map to edge within a pixel, but gradually fades into black. See below for two examples I threw together really quick.
Before:
After:
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Before (without the edge actually being visible here):
After:
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Comments
Honestly, "smoothing" would create even more of the effect of:
You're standing in a singluar puddle of light, in a world of darkness. Beyond the reach of your torch lies the grue.
Just remove them
I hate how is shortens how far: your scanner shows, your drone can see, and that you can reach remotely from a key.
Drone exploring is already made difficult by portals not loading in the next cell, even when they're less than a kilometer away. Why reduce its sight further by taking off the edges??? Is this Niantic's way of saying they really don't want us to expore with drones?
Often I'll take pictures of a portal to upload from home. If the portal doesn't give me a key, I just need to a nearby key, to submit photos and/or edits from home. Now that's much less likely to work - my target portal can be cut off from the key I have.
EDIT: It also makes the graphics look more primitive and low tech - just plastered, white on black, off the edge of a smaller map.
Before, with the map under the portal name (etc) - it looked like the info was hovering over the world.
This seems to be more of a viewpoint from above if it's the same range displayed. I wonder if it's similar to the normal view to remote view and the "blur" transition at the screen edges if you watch the change.
It's just the circle being displayed instead of a square of x range looks worse.
So far, I can see just as many portals in drone view as I could before (not using keys) - do you have an example I can look at on intel of a portal you can no longer see in drone view?
If this only applies to portals you need a key to see, how far is the portal that is no longer visible? I cannot readily look at this myself at the moment as my drone is not local to me.
Thank you for the kind offer. I'd DM you the coords if I could. But based on the guardian hunting of the past, I'd rather not share where my drone is right now. It's not harming anyone, off hacking in the hinterlands. But neither were anyone's remote guardians. Yet they were hunted.
Nah stop it. Just revert back; there was nothing wrong with it. Phones are getting more powerful, not less powerful. So why this is done is beyond me.
its to make less stress on the server they did this change
I don’t believe that, if so they should make the client cache the tiles, they hardly change.
Perhaps in a few days when your drone has moved on? I would still be interested. But I understand your current concerns.
The circle indicates what portals are "nominally visible". And all the tricks to see portals outside that range still work, and the portals appear in the floating black.
The biggest issue with this is that it makes the game look janky and reduces the feel of the "expansive world" because it hides the tiles. All the game stuff outside the circle would not be visible anyway (except for fields extending through it) or is still visible (because portals sit above the gameboard and the black circle.
It's a purely cosmetic change, but it's a change that makes the game feel worse.
The tiles are still loaded, the data is still retrieved. They just stamped a black circle down for aesthetics.
it's even weirder with fields as they extend beyond the circle
If anything, they are testing something and it's no question it will be modified again next update.
either way it just looks ugly now
Having it just black out looks weird, embrace the "scanner" add static beyond what we can see and allow us to turn it on/off like the scanner ping should be.
It would even explain seeing portals beyond the normal view range, the raw XM power of portals is strong enough to be detected beyond normal scanning range.
The current ciruclar cutoff looks terrible. Would it be possible to have a "fog" effect at the border instead?
I don’t get it. When Brian posted the screenshots with the kinetic capsules, it was clear he was on other servers; they didn’t drop but he had 8 of ‘m.
this just gets tossed into production, launch the game once with this “feature” and it’s clear how stupid it is, it’s laughable.
how about getting a group of 100-ish players that actually want to test stuff and actually test things before they go live. How hard can it be.
Maybe he just put them in his inventory without making them hackable?
i thought this is what they have XMA for
As yet, the "What XMA's do" document is still in alpha development, and XMAs only get the Beta version of stuff.