The human radar prevents ambushing and fleeing, both of which are crucial to alien gameplay.

[Stooberton]

Sensor providing 100% real time and accurate position overlay is insanely overpowered. It completely neuters the primary meta of the alien, which is ambushing. Aliens are almost completely incapable of running away from humans and showing themselves for a picosecond results in getting shot. This is worsened by the already very slow healing.

The way the helmet displayed data in Tremulous was far better. It gave rough positional information and it only updated once a second. It didn't turn the humans into aimbots, it just let them know something was there.... and that was enough.

[illwieckz]

At this point the radar does not show you anything (sometime even if on screen) for yourself, see Unvanquished/gameplay#1. The radar weared by others is expected to tag you what others see with their radar.

One downside is that bots that are basically aimbots just tag you everything perfectly as soon as they roam the map with a radar. :-/

Maybe we can do a non-moving beacon that would be keep the position of the detection, the same way it works with the manual beacons?

What makes the radar a wallhack is that once an alien is tagged, its real-time position is disclosed for some seconds even if out of sight, maybe we can keep the same time-limited visibility but don't follow the alien position, just indicate the last seen one.

[illwieckz]

@Gireen what do you think about that suggestion? Radar beacons just displaying a static last seen position for N time, not following the alien everywhere for N time magically.

[Gireen]

I don't know jet how the radar works in detail, but from the name and experience i would expect that it shows every aliens in its range, independent of line of sight or not. Else it wouldn't be a radar. 😅

Personally i also prefer if it gives more a rough estimate about the alien position or movement. possible ways to change it can be

• lower position update frequency
• only show moving aliens
• show radar beacons only on the minimap

witch could also only apply depending on distance. that you get live alien position if they are running around your feet but the farther away they get the harder there current position is to tell. 🤫

[DolceTriade]

I think the radar in it's current form amounts to a wallhack. A radar in the old days where it showed general direction was really cool.

[Viech]

On IRC I voiced the idea that the radar could tag closeby aliens' current position every few seconds but that the tag would not move but fade out in its place over the course of the refresh interval, similar to (the cliché of) a real radar blip. This would give you positional information but not enough to pre-aim reliably.

[illwieckz]

Yes, something like that would be good.

[Viech]

I've taken the liberty to make the topic more specific and I've hidden a propsal from @illwieckz and myself each. I'll post mine as a separate issue.

I agree that the radar is too strong in the sense that I've changed the title to. @DolceTriade, @illwieckz and @Gireen seem on board, too. So I'll flag the notion that the radar should not give a real-time wallhack as accepted now. (You can still disaggree with this and the state can change again. However proposals may now be opened on how to change the radar accordingly.)

[ghost]

At this point the radar does not show you anything (sometime even if on screen) for yourself

Small update on that quote. It happens that, today, I was a human with a radar in map chasm. Some alien players tried to ambush in computer room, and since I was almost certain there would be one in there, I stopped for few seconds. Radar spotted aliens hidden behind computers, no bot was around. And showed them is those nice beacons so that I could kill them. So, yes, given time, radar will even help it's wearer. Or, at least, something with humans auto-detects hidden aliens. I hope it's the radar, because otherwise the issue is a lot more severe.