Good hit sounds respect line-of-sight. If one player can't see another, he won't get hit sounds related to that player. That's just an irrational fear caused by exposure to suboptimal implementations.

Try my UTPlus 2 Hit Sounds preview release. (configuration info here)
It doesn't have a client-side GUI for configuring hit sounds yet, and "protected" hit sounds won't work, but you can change those settings via User.ini directly. The INI listing on that link is the default and applies only to clients. Server-side configuration is accessible as usual via webadmin. There are 3 options on the server: Line-of-sight (default enabled), damage-based variable hit sound pitch (default enabled, so clients can decide on their own if they want it) and objective hit sounds (default disabled; applies to nodes, cores and Assault destroyable objectives)

Sounds nice Wormbo, I'd really like to have that implemented on TechCom... Espcially with the optional stuff (so people can turn it off when they don't like it or it annoys them on maps like Spambox)

Unfortunately, and correct me if I read that wrong - users need to change the settings in their user.uni? Damn, that sure excludes like 50% of the people that play on our server... Would be useful to toggle in the ONSPlus-Menu or via console or something...

Let's address the replies first.

crusha_k_rool wrote:
[...]a certain level of stealth belongs to the game (and on some maps to my play style.. sneaking into the enemy's back by using routes where I am harder to spot.. such stuff). I also like about America's Army 3 that you don't get instant feedback about hits and kills. Dead enemies need to be confirmed in order to receive a kill message. It can be a tactical advantage for the one under fire if the enemy doesn't know if killed me or if I just crouched into cover.[...]Those are all nice elements in a realistic war game, but we're talking about Unreal. We have lasers and plasma weapons, toxic sludge launchers, rifles that can fry your head with lightning bolts from half a mile away, characters that can breathe in space, spacefighters, teleporters and sexy ladies that can double backflip in mid-air while with 15kg antivec rocket launchers. How much do you really think we care about realism :p? And, hell, even if sneaking were more important, how long do you think your stealthiness would help? At some point, you'd give away your position by firing at something important, then ppl would be all over you again in seconds.
Even more to the point, this is Unreal Tournament where ppl get wasted fast, hard and repeatedly in extravagant and celebrated ways, so there's never any need to check if you've actually killed your target or not - you'll know it from the message in the middle of your screen in big, blue letters! Sneaking can be fun, yes, but let's not lose perspective of what's more important here, i.e. levelling the playing field by allowing everyone to clearly see everyone else so fights can be fair.

jancsi33 wrote:
[...]This "every skin has different brightness and the one with the darker one has more chance of winning in a fight" is ridiculous to me, even the darkest skin in a minimally unlit area can be seen in this game.[...]Ridiculous? Why do you think brightskins was created in the first place? Many people have been having a problem with skin visibility since day 1 of UT2004, it seems, myself included - people both playing casually and much more seriously (pros). And if the popularity of brightskins is any indication, I doubt it's ridiculous to all who've used it for years on all the servers that feature it too. Finally, no, the darkest character cannon always be seen in this game (assuming so is probably ridiculous), which is the root of the problem.

jancsi33 wrote:
[...]Pegasus, you think that every player chooses skins based on their brigthness and/or how stealthy, how "good in battle" they are? Every skin is the same in battle, the outcome is based mostly on the player. And players choose skins based on their liking.[...]I didn't say *everyone* uses that reasoning when they pick a skin, because most are at the beginning of their UT life when they make that decision and are unaware of any related practical issues and many others just don't care enough to switch (or have been associated with a certain one for years, so changing would seem odd to friends). For another group of people that are both skilled and long-standing in the UT communities... well, you just can't be sure their darker skin is the one they built their entire "career" with or a choice they made later on for obvious reasons. Point is, let's not be naive here, skin brightness matters.
Also, please read again what I wrote: between "two players of equal fighting skill,[...] the one with the darker character will always have an advantage." Not that the latter will automatically win, since other important factors play into the equation as well (like hp/armour, ground elevation, weaps/ammo, luck, etc.). Still, if you're harder to tell from the background, it follows that you're harder to aim and harder to hit.

jancsi33 wrote:
[...]you chose Xan because you like that skin I guess.[...]Correct. Except for the fact that my skin is Axon, Xan's obnoxious. And even though I consciously refuse to change my skin for something darker because my choice was driven by taste, the fact that I could be enjoying the benefit of better stealth with a darker character is not lost on me.

crusha_k_rool wrote:
[...]I sometimes have situations in UT where I am around a corner and an enemy tank shell explodes right in front of me. I usually survive that and with a not too little chance won't the enemy fire a second time. However, if the hitsound tells him that I am behind the wall although he surely could not know about it from his location, then the system is more than just feedback about the hit of your Shock Rifle and especially with the modded vehicles and their large damage radius a kinda bad feature to me.[...]jancsi33 wrote:
[...]About hitsounds: Let's see the situation in which there's a Goliath, a corner and a Pedestrian. The Pedestrian turns in the corner while the Goliath shoots at it, but doesn't kill the Pedestrian. The Goliath doesn't even know if the Pedestrian is injured or not. The hitsound would help the Goliath in this case. BUT, the Goliath already has more chance to win the battle than the Pedestrian so hitsound would make this fight even more uneven.[...]You both seem fixated with this scenario and I think that's because you believe you've discovered a case where hitsounds could provide "unfair" information. Even if this is a 0.1% case in your daily UT experience (meaning, you'd die 1000 other deaths before this happens to you again), I don't see why you're thinking like so.
If a tank driver is clever enough to proactively shoot around a seemingly quiet corner in an effort to weed out possible threats (which is also a sign of a good player with whom you'd have other problems even if you did manage to approach their tank), then good for them for hurting you and they're entitled to the audio feedback as well. Not to mention that even without any hitsounds, after having a tank shell landing near you, you wouldn't remain stealthy anyway: all characters grunt in pain, start smoking/burning and get flung quite away when a tank fires at them, you know - if they even survive. So, no, not even in such a case hitsounds swing the outcome more towards your enemy, mainly because THEY HAD A TANK AND YOU WERE ON FOOT to begin with. Even more so with minos. If you find this annoying don't blame the mutator, blame the vec.
Btw, this line-of-sight "directional" hitsounds feature baffles me. I am a firm believer in deserving to know if my projectiles hit something, whether I'm looking at that direction anymore or not; they're mine, I fired them, why shouldn't I be aware of such an event? Why is it unfair that I'm aware that the charged bio goop I fired down a shaft hit someone? I'm the one who anticipated the enemy and fired in the first place, it's not like it's "awarding a newb pro info" or however you're conceiving this. Or, how about a standstill between two shomboers spamming around the same corner, waiting for the other to come rushing? One will make the mistake and come closer at some point, why shouldn't the other know they've hurt their opponent? That's what they've been trying to do already.

jancsi33 wrote:
[...]Also, note how stupid would it sound if you'd shoot an enemy with minigun/minigun turret.[...]If any kind of hit feedback sounds stupid, users can disable it, simple. Also, as Wormbo said, his own mutator has settings that let you disable those sounds too.

jancsi33 wrote:
[...]About the situation with the fleeing flyer + Pedestrian with Shock Rifle: What's the point if the flyer flees anyways? This doesn't change the outcome of the battle and your score ehem ehem =P[...]False. A) I want to know how many hits I've landed and if an avril's enough to do the rest of the job or not and b) it helps with ping/latency-related aiming. For ppl with low, stable pings this isn't a big issue since they just learn to lead the flyer by a bit. For me, pings tend to vary from server to server from 90 to 200ms! They also tend to sometimes jump around during a match, so knowing if a specific barrage of hitscan shots landed helps me mentally recalibrate for that particular period.

crusha_k_rool wrote:
[...]Offtopic: I play with this skin because I like it, because it's cute. Not because I could potentially be harder seen with it. And my music is always at half volume and don't really care about enemy footsteps. I don't think I play worse that way than I would without music.jancsi33 wrote:
[...]Oh, another thing is the "turning off music in order to hear footsteps". I'd never turn off the precious musics of maps in order to hear footsteps. I can be succesful even without hearing them.[...]You don't know how better you'd play if you did something you've never yet done. Sitting there guessing isn't very convincing as an argument, especially when weighed against the collective experience of many clanners suggesting this. Personally, I only let the music play if I don't find it annoying, which is on very few maps now (Silva mostly).

jancsi33 wrote:
[...]This potential increasing with skins and music is stupid I think. It's like winning at ANY cost.No, that's cheating. Don't confuse pro-fairplay tools (everyone has them) with cheating (only cheater has them).

PS: During these HS/BS discussions, I've been having UTcomp 1.7a (extensive readme) in mind. Does anyone else have practical experience/feedback with it, or has tried Wormbo's as well and can present a comparison? It'd help.

Back to the topic of rating the maps: UT2Vote has a feature for users submitting a rating of the last played map in %. I think the server admin and maybe even the other players can see ratings of maps.




That would not be an exact pro/contra list, but it would allow more players to share their opinion.


(Of course is this just another blatant try to get the mutator on the server, but you asked for it.)

crusha_k_rool wrote:
Back to the topic of rating the maps: UT2Vote has a feature for users submitting a rating of the last played map in %. I think the server admin and maybe even the other players can see ratings of maps.




That would not be an exact pro/contra list, but it would allow more players to share their opinion.


(Of course is this just another blatant try to get the mutator on the server, but you asked for it.)

Yes, i asked foib to see the ut2vote, and i totally prefer it to. It brings new interesting features. Screenshots and rating/ notes.
I hope that u consider this, it is a step forward. I vote yes.

vote yes too (don't think I need to quote one more time ^^)

There's a fundamental problem with asking players to rate a map they just played for the first time: most of them will vote emotionally based on how much fun they had and how well they did that first time. As you can imagine, chances are ppl won't be able to immediately find the best main/alternate routes between nodes, the spawn locations of the best vecs/superweaps or even understand the map's design, theme or other features to begin with. All that, plus the fact that one team's bound to lose (so that's half the players dissatisfied with their experience to begin with), leads to a peer-pressure/network-effect of low majority rating even if the map might have gone through extensive beta and playthrough testing in other communities and has been deemed adequate by even more ppl. In the end, this process does the opposite of getting you closer to an objective "truth" about the map's worth and distorts the results you might've gotten if you asked everyone to evaluate the same map later (as in not ingame) with a cooler temper (or simply after playing it 4-5 times first).

This is why I'm advocating we settle on a voting/rating method based around a generalized php form that ppl can submit in a matter of seconds (or minutes if they care to mull longer over it) along with their nickname (GUID?). Voting like this would surely cover more of the map's aspects than one would ever think of to bring up during those 20-30secs the post-match voting lasts. It also guarantees that the opinions you'll get will be those of calm and collected individuals since whiners usually don't bother to follow up their protests, so this way you're weeding out pests that don't have the community's benefit as a long-term goal in mind as well.

PS: Although it seems to have twice as many buttons as I'd ever need, I have no objection in trying out the UT2Vote mutator n' see how well it might work for us.