Stealth

Hello. I have one question. How does stealth really work. It would be great to have a "stealth" section explaining exactly how is your "visibility" computed. From what i could see, evry sensor detects you at brightness 0.1 so it's impossible to hide. Does this decrease with distance? Why is there the all important 5km radius in stealth missions. Is stealth even implemented in the game?

Most people say the engine takes no account of stealth, but I played around with decreasing brightness for marauder ships, and found I had to get within one kilometer of them to pick them up on the orb/contact list. They, however, had no problem finding me...it was grim, I don't have to tell you.


The reverse is also true. I decreased the brightness of my ship, and could attack a convoy with impunity. As soon as I put a couple of kilometers between myself and my enemy, they lost me off their scans, and gave up the persuit.


So the stealth does exist, and the simple way of looking at it is; the lower your brightness, the closer they have to be for their passive scans to pick you up. At a brightness of 0.1, you have to be within 4 km before they have even a chance of detecting you. If AI sensors cannot track you, they cannot react to you.



Edited by - Shane on 04 Oct 2002 13:03:18

Thanks. I'll try some things and see how they work.
Is there any common algorithm or something. For example...
my brightnes is 0.3
max range for their sensors is 50 k
I'm 40 km away, can they see me?

A really good example is the junkjard challange. I think you get noticed every time you get within 5km without regarding the actual brightness? What's the trick?

Stealth was never really played out in the game. Unless you do some tweaking with brightnesses as Shane mentions, I don't think it will ever make any kind of a difference. It would've been kinda cool to have stealth be important, but it's hard to find the 'right' way to calculate it.

If you're making mods or changing files, you can really get rid of the 'stealth' label and simply call it 'will I appear on their radar?'. That seems to be the only requirement for the NPC ships.

Pilots of AI ships apparently never look out the window.


Best places to look would be the non-player and player sensor ini files and the flux.ini file. If you find a formula, please let us know...it'd be interesting to see what we could do with that information.

Here are all my findings. I don't understand them but i will still list them in case there is someone with more skill in programming.

First i gave AI really crappy sensors (5000/3000/sensed brightness 0.5) (a little mod)
Then i took out the command section and got its brightness below 0.1 (a little more than 0)

I was in free roam mode so i had all the best hardware needed. I actually managed to get within 6 km of mass corvette before i was engaged by it. I don't understand if that was just the max weapon range or it just felt docile.

After the first shot i ran like hell (totally unshielded command section without autorepair)i noticed that when i got 10 km away from corvette it stopped firing (out of weapon range of course) but the interesting part is that when i was 15 km away from the corvete i noticed it wasn't moving. It was just standing there looking at me. I started to approach it and somewhere near the max weapon range i was blown up.

I really can't figure all this out. I do not believe that stealth has any effects on misslies. I did manage to get away from them but still this is a command section and i believe i could dodge them anyway.

I don't understand the engagement script. Did the programm think i wasn't a threat and theredfore didn't attack me or did it actually not see me...

If default setting for scanners is 50 k for the ai, how come i was still followed after geting 80 km away? And the other interesting bit... If my scanners have a range of let's say 50000 (i believe that's the range for level 3 scanners) how can i spot a ship 150 km away, even if it's an interceptor, but can only spot an asteroid base from within range? it would really be fun to be able to have a mod that would make it possible to let's say see a transporter from 150 km away, fly to it and then see that it's actually 5 interceptors waiting for you while you are charging blindly right in front of their guns. It would add much tactics to combat. ( I guess the problem is that once you outrun the ai it wouln't be able to find you but they could probably turn on the active sensors after you engage them and they would be more powerfulll. I don't know how to do all that but i do know it would be fun... I'll keep experimenting and if i find something interesting i'll post it here.

Sorry for such a long post,

Sergej