Wirehead Studios

I think the Earth class armor should be visible.  So you can see when someone is wearing armor.  Maybe even show it getting damaged after being hit... and then eventually destroyed.  And as long as the armor isn't a really bright color (like fluorescent yellow or something crazy), it shouldn't make people playing as Earth class any more visible.  Hell, maybe when Earth class is wearing armor  the armor could be almost translucent or seem that way...  be really camoflauged.  Just an idea....   Earth class seems like the experimental class anyway.
Good, bad, ugly?  Ignite your flamethrowers!

A nice idea, but ultimately unecessary for any actual gameplay purposes.  It'd be nice to see when *any* class is wearing armor, so you know to run from them.  But I don't think it's all that hot an idea myself.

Twilight's right, it would be useful if you could see when your opponent had armor on, but other than that its not really necessary. great idea, though.

hmm, I nice thought from an aesthetic standpoint, but visible armor has at least 2 problems, #1, there are still people with 600-800mhz computers (some slower) that insist on playing generations. And #2 if we add visible armor that's at LEAST 1 more render pass their poor lil computer will have to handle. Beyond that, team games would get weird considering one of the armor colors IS red.. I like the idea myself, but it won't really be feasible beyond FFA mode.

Now if there IS a way of doing it without being a major coding pain in the ass (something similar to quake colors) I could see it, but that's a hell of a lot of alpha-blending you're looking at in the end.

Now I'm not saying it'll hurt everyone's computer all that bad, mine will probably just laugh at it and keep rockin', but there are other people to worry about. I think if it's implemented as a cvar of some kind it might work, but you'll have people bitching about how someone knows how much armor they have when they don't know how much their attacker has. Llamas are still fairly prevalent.  :ph34r:

Feature-wise here's what would be needed to do this:

1)  A set of armor models for EVERY PLAYER MODEL IN EXISTANCE
2)  Skins for said armor models
3)  code to precache said armor models
4)  code to render said armor models and skin based on armor and health
5)  server-to-client transmission of health and armor information about OTHER clients to every client.

Points 1 through 4 are bad from a technical standpoint.  The code would take forever, same with the model work, and how would you handle a player model without armor models to go with it?  Doing "just a skin" still is a pain because you'd have to tell the game to change skins on-the-fly.  That means a hit to the harddisk every time you shot someone.  Bad for gameplay.

Point number 5 is the killer and why this will never happen.  Quake 3 only transmits health and armor data about YOURSELF TO YOURSELF unless you're following as a spectator, then you get the health and armor data of the person you're following.  The reason is simple.  A client-side hack could easily render someone's health and armor as floating colored blobs above their head or colored numbers in the crosshair.  If the client never gets the data a cheater can't use it, that's why you only get that data about yourself and nobody else.

In short, this won't ever happen in Gen, period, end of story.  Topic closed.  :wall: