City of Heroes: Live Forum Archive

Suppressing FX (Especially Headachey Ones!)

binary11

By binary11,
Posted on: 2007-07-25 22:04 in Player Guides

 

Posted

If you look under your Graphics Options (Menu / Options / Graphics and Audio Tab) you'll see in the Advanced Graphics Settings these two items:

Suppress Extra Player FX
Suppress FX When Close

When you enable these two options you'll find that, THE TOGGLES! THEY DO NOTHING!!

Well, in this guide, I'll show you how to make at least one of them work, namely, the Suppress FX When Close.

What the Suppress FX When Close option is supposed to do is to shut off all the FX (graphical effects) of your character when your camera is close to you. The advantage of this is that when the camera is looking over your shoulder, you don't have to try to see past all blinding FX emanating from your body. The FX just shuts off when the camera comes in close.

However, right out of the box, this option does nothing. Why? Because the default distance between you and the camera at which the FX turns off is zero. That's right, no matter how close the camera pans in, the FX stays on until you finally snap into first person view.

But there's hope to fix this in the form of a slash command called /suppressCloseFxDist whose description is "Within this camera distance, personal FX will be suppressed.'

The format is...

/suppressCloseFxDist <#feet>

So, if you input /suppressCloseFxDist 30, then when your camera gets within 10 yards of your character, all your special effects will stop displaying (the powers will still be working, of course).

This is good news for people who are finding their FX to be too much or headache inducing <coughsoniccough>. Just input a large number, like 300, and you won't ever see your personal FX again.

Now, there are two types of FX that this can turn off: 1. FX on your person; 2. FX on the foes you hit (e.g., a debuff anchor).

If you specify a distance in the /suppressCloseFXDist slash command, then the FX on your person (no. 1 above) will *always* turn off when your camera is within that specified distance. Even if you 'Disable' Suppress FX When Close in the options menu, the distance command overrides that and you'll always turn off personal FX when your camera gets within the specified distance.

So, then, what does Suppress FX When Close do? When you enable this, it will turn off the FX on the foes you hit (no. 2 above) when your camera gets within the specified distance.

Now, you can go into your options menu to enable or disable Suppress FX When Close, or, you can use the slash command, suppressCloseFx, whose description is "Hide all personal FX when the camera is closer than the suppressCloseFxDist." Which, as you can tell by now, is an inaccurate description, since this toggle only affects the FX you throw onto a foe.

The format is...

/suppressCloseFx <int>

Where the integer is either 0 (disable) or 1 (enable).



Here is our Demo Edit Guru, Zloth, plumbing the depths of FX Suppression insanity: suppressCloseFx and Demo Editing



Is this 'working as intended'? Doubtful, but, that's the way it works now.




ADDENDUM:

Now, I said earlier that Suppress Extra Player does nothing. And as far I can tell, it does nothing. I'm a hero and I see another hero with Dispersion Bubble and a host of other powers and, well, I see them. Nothing is being suppressed. And they meet all the requirements set for by poz in this post:
[ QUOTE ]
The intention of "Suppress Extra Player FX" was to reduce the number of "unimportant" FX displayed. This was targeting city zones, mainly near trainers.

With the Suppress FX options turned on, here are the heuristics used to determine if a continuing FX will be shown.
1. If it's not a continuing FX then show it.
2. If it's on you show it.
3. If it's on a critter show it.
4. If it's from a villain and you're a hero (or vice versa) show it.
5. If it's from you or to you, show it. (So you see all bubbles you cast.)
6. If the target or source is on you team show it.

In April last year, a fix was made to the code which fixed a loophole where you may not see some teammate FX (such as when they were debuffed by a critter). This may explain the change in behavior that you've seen.

So, I believe that the suppress code is working as we intended. We decided that anything that happened to a teammate or that you triggered was important. This feature was never meant to help on mission maps; it was meant to help spammed group heals at Ms. Liberty and sundry running around town.

[/ QUOTE ]


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Posted

Thanks for this, something interesting to play around with later.

[ QUOTE ]

/suppressCloseFxDist <#feet>
/suppressCloseFxDist <int>

[/ QUOTE ]

Typo on the latter command?

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Posted

Neat. Thanks a ton, this will help out a lot with some character who have that GFX trail effect (such as Glacial Armor, or the dust from Pistom Boots) and Super Jump. Way too annoying to have that dust fly right into my screen every time I jump.

 

Posted

[ QUOTE ]
Thanks for this, something interesting to play around with later.

[ QUOTE ]

/suppressCloseFxDist <#feet>
/suppressCloseFxDist <int>

[/ QUOTE ]

Typo on the latter command?

[/ QUOTE ]

Yep, good catch. It should be...

/suppressCloseFxDist <#feet>
/suppressCloseFx <int>


Original post edited.

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Posted

[ QUOTE ]
Neat. Thanks a ton, this will help out a lot with some character who have that GFX trail effect (such as Glacial Armor, or the dust from Pistom Boots) and Super Jump. Way too annoying to have that dust fly right into my screen every time I jump.

[/ QUOTE ]

Have you ever tried to see past the inky black contrails of Shadowfall?

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Posted

This is the greatest and best thing ever posted on these boards.

You sir are a gentleman and a scholar. Many thanks.

 

Posted

It's too bad no one posted this earlier. This would've cured nearly all the sonic headaches!

 

Posted

Awesome detective work there Mr Zombie! I think I am going to have a key to toggle my FX on and off now.

BTW, sonic dispersion is now fixed on test (double yay)

 

Posted

Ok, I get the jist of how this works on my powers. (thanks for posting this btw ) now is there a way to use this or something else to suppress the fx on other players?

 

Posted

When using "Suppress FX When Close" does this eliminate the need to see your own toggle powers on your character?

What about the inspiration floating around your character?

[CENTER][U][COLOR=#22229c][URL="http://cit.cohtitan.com/character/53024"][IMG]http://avatars.cohtitan.com/signatures/cit/u53024.png[/IMG][/URL][/COLOR][/U][/CENTER]
[CENTER][SIZE=1][COLOR=white]The #1 True Villain badge collector on Infinity.[/COLOR][/SIZE][/CENTER]

 

Posted

[ QUOTE ]
When using "Suppress FX When Close" does this eliminate the need to see your own toggle powers on your character?

[/ QUOTE ]

The need to see? Not sure what you're asking. Toggle GFX are suppressed.



[ QUOTE ]
What about the inspiration floating around your character?

[/ QUOTE ]

Including inspiration GFX.



The only GFX that wasn't suppressed was going transparent from a stealth power.

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Posted

One amusing thing: if you use this command to suppress your effects, you also have your veteran award staff suppressed (nemesis staff or blackwand) so that the blast from it comes out of your hand instead.

 

Posted

I noted, Zombie Man, that the red "enrage" flames from Assault still show up as well. I'm assuming this has something to do with the leadership power set.

 

Posted

what about the suppress extra player fx ? how do i set the distance? for example i dont want to see my team-mate or not team mate FX, is it possible?

 

Posted

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
Thanks for this, something interesting to play around with later.

[ QUOTE ]

/suppressCloseFxDist <#feet>
/suppressCloseFxDist <int>

[/ QUOTE ]

Typo on the latter command?

[/ QUOTE ]

Yep, good catch. It should be...

/suppressCloseFxDist <#feet>
/suppressCloseFx <int>


Original post edited.

[/ QUOTE ]


anyone try binding it to a key? it wont work man.

 

Posted

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
Thanks for this, something interesting to play around with later.

[ QUOTE ]

/suppressCloseFxDist <#feet>
/suppressCloseFxDist <int>

[/ QUOTE ]

Typo on the latter command?

[/ QUOTE ]

Yep, good catch. It should be...

/suppressCloseFxDist <#feet>
/suppressCloseFx <int>


Original post edited.

[/ QUOTE ]


anyone try binding it to a key? it wont work man.

[/ QUOTE ]

Not sure what you've tried, but I've bound suppressCloseFxDist 20 and suppressCloseFxDist 0 to two different keys and it works great.

she who needs no mic
"You couldn't be more wrong if you were upended in a vat full of toxic wrong by Captain Wrong and his Wrongbots and earned a permanent inherent power called Aura of Wrong."-Lady_Sadako

 

Posted

when I use this, not only do my 33 month veteran award power graphics not show up - my new insect wings on a corrupter don't either.

 

Posted

So awesome!

For anybody who has ever wanted to play an "all natural" or "no glow" character, the "/suppressfxclosedist #" is sweet.

I might be able to play an Ice tanker now, myself. I dislike the ice-block armor look in general, so I have avoided playing one even though the powerset is nice.

Setting the distance at 300 allows max zoom out via the button for zoom out without the toggles showing. Tre cool. (Obviously, you could set the camdist outside that via the slash command, but normal zooming out with the button stays within that range.)

This is the best thing since the silencing sounds thread!

edit: Question: Is this setting per character or per account?

Answer: A quick check on Test seems to indicate these settings are saved by account. A little annoying if you have multiple characters and only one of them you want to use these on. But, still workable and handy.

 

Posted

There's an easy fix for that. You can bind one of the commands to a key to set the distance to a specific number, and then bind the same command to the same key with the Shift modifier to set the distance back to the base number. For example, you could bind u to set the # of feet to 300, then bind Shift+u to set the # of feet to 10. When you are on the character you want to see the effects, hold down shift and press u, then when you switch to the character you don't want to see them on just press u and you are good to go.

If the game spit out 20 dollar bills people would complain that they weren't sequentially numbered. If they were sequentially numbered people would complain that they weren't random enough.

Black Pebble is my new hero.

 

Posted

wanted to give you a heads up that they're fixing bugs with this feature in the new patch on test. Might want to go see the changes to update your info.

Liberty
My 50s:
Hero: Armor Assassin (scrapper), Cross Dresser (scrapper), Surly Seaman (blaster), Defensive End (Tank), Rad Rhino (Cont)
Villain: Beast Infection (Corr), Sweet Zombie Jesus (MM), Milk Weasel (Stalker), Orgullo (MM), Agent Eris (Crab)

 

Posted

[ QUOTE ]
wanted to give you a heads up that they're fixing bugs with this feature in the new patch on test. Might want to go see the changes to update your info.

[/ QUOTE ]

Yeah, I saw it.

The good news is that it really is fixed! Although, slightly buggy in that a few gfx still display. Those should be /bugged.

I created a new guide explaining how it works now. See the new guide here.

Please note the fixed version is still on Test and hasn't made it to Live yet.

Thanks to all for the feedback!

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