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Markers disappear in End Game spectator free camera mode
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Description

The little markers and nametags floating over the heads of units disappear in End Game spectator, when Free Camera mode is used.

According to SilentSpike of the ACE dev team:

The commands for drawing icons/lines in 3D have no visible effect when the current cameraOn unit is not alive. There's a bit of weirdness to this in that it never seems to happen in respawn modes 2/3 where the player is still associated somehow with their corpse for the duration of the respawnDelay mission attribute. However, in other respawn modes where the player dies permanently they seem to become disassociated with their corpse after a seemingly random time (some kind of engine garbage collection) which is when the icons stop drawing (I'm guessing what's actually happening is that the AI brain associated with the unit is no longer present - and yes, players have an AI brain of sorts).
That's the reason why it only fails in free camera, because behind the scenes the view is switched back to the player unit. The way I've fixed this in ACE is to have a temporary agent unit which I switch the view to while in free camera.

Source: https://forums.bohemia.net/forums/topic/185591-end-game-spectator-feedback/?do=findComment&comment=3261564

Example image: https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/101675731175636992/399670503654031390/unknown.png

Details

Severity
Minor
Resolution
Open
Reproducibility
Always
Operating System
Windows 7
Category
End Game - Gameplay
Steps To Reproduce
  1. Play an MP match with end game spectator enabled, respawn disabled, and End Game Revive enabled!
  2. Once player is dead, if you do have unit markers in free camera, hang around for some time and observe the markers disappear.

Test on a dedicated server.

Additional Information

Only happens in free camera mode.

Event Timeline

sh4dow added a subscriber: sh4dow.Jan 11 2018, 12:17 AM
Wulf added a subscriber: Wulf.EditedJan 12 2018, 2:32 PM

Do you mean these markers for the units?

I waited for 30 minutes and nothing happened they are still there. Could you please create a video so that I can see what is happening when they disappear.

Thank you.

Yup, those ones. Will create a video tomorrow hopefully and put it up. Sorry about the late reply, didn't see this.

SuicideKing added a comment.EditedJan 29 2018, 11:26 AM

@Wulf

Markers disappear at around 2:30. The freeze after I die is because of me alt tabbing and switching TeamSpeak channels.
https://youtu.be/Zmk7n7WIqFw?t=141

Another person didn't get markers at all: https://www.dropbox.com/s/18fnpbzza1ipuuq/nomarkers.mp4?dl=0

And here the markers disappear at the 4 minute mark https://www.dropbox.com/s/6ezi59wh6uj86om/nomarkers2.mp4?dl=0

Notice that the disappearing markers are accompanied by a pulsing vignette effect (at the edges).

BTW, I don't know if you tested with End Game Revive enabled?

And here's a test mission:

Wulf added a comment.EditedFeb 1 2018, 4:39 PM

Interesting. It seems that it doesn't always occur and for me it seems that it more doesn't happen than it does. This would be great if there is a 100% way to reproduce this, because right now it is pretty much random I saw some instances of this, but I also have seen games where it didn't happen at all.

Will have to test it during our bigger MP tests and see if there isn;t something specific that triggers it.

Thanks, I hope you manage to isolate it. For us it seems to be pretty consistent - at least on the dedicated server. Haven't tried while self-hosting. Will try testing it from a spectator slot during our sessions and see what happens in that case.

Still seems to happen post 1.82, although I've had at least one mission where the markers did NOT disappear for me, but they DID for another player.

I'd like to point out again, that an exact description of the (likely) source of the bug is given in https://forums.bohemia.net/forums/topic/185591-end-game-spectator-feedback/?page=2&tab=comments#comment-3261564
and that ACE3 have fixed that exact same bug in their copy of the EG spectator system here a year ago: https://github.com/acemod/ACE3/pull/5868.

Might it be possible to simply use their fix (which is using a dummy agent for the camera in "free" mode)?
Because otherwise, as it is now, people are forced to write their own spectator systems or copy the EG spectator code and apply ACE3's fix. This kind of defeats the point of having a spectator system in the game in my opinion.

Can confirm that this doesn't happen when slotting a Virtual Spectator slot from the lobby. @Wulf