Who has issues with Incarnate graphics?

I haven't had any problems, but then I never did with the old sonic stuff either. I did notice some of the Destiny buffs looked suspiciously like the old sonic bubbles though, and I sort of wondered if some people would have trouble with them since I remember the uproar over the old sonic graphics. At least they don't have the old sonic sounds too...

Hopefully they'll be changed to a less eye-straining graphic.

Since you should be able to customize your own graphics, can you alter your own version so it doesn't have the same effect?

I ask because if it works, that could be the easiest solution from the devs - to allow an override that says "ignore other's cusomization and use my settings." That way it's not just adapting to people who have a problem with one specific graphic, but instead allows everyone to correct the issue for themselves even if they react badly to different stimuli.

On my old rig and even on this one before some unnecessary upgrades stuff like sonic, multiple FF shields, longbow grenades, spending to much time on hero side(WAY to much bright blue, I'm sure some still remember my rants on why I only played red side) and to a lesser extent a dom hitting domination it used to be able to trigger my migranes. It was so bad I kept my brightness/contrast way low just to be able to enjoy the game. Since upgrades and running ultra mode those pain inducing flashes and bright lights are no more and I am alot happier.

Trust me when I say I know that this game can cause pain and I feel bad for anyone that it still does.

Ok, I just got off a TF with a couple of players running Barrier. While it doesn't cause me migraines (I've never had one, and from seeing friends get them I'm really happy I'm not susceptible) it is annoying and distracting with the pulse and spin of the graphic. I can easily see it being a trigger for people who are susceptible. It did cause a mild case of eyestrain for me though.

The graphic seems to fade out quickly though; that's probably tending to mask any symptoms. It's only REALLY bad when it first fires off.

Okay, this is a really long post, and I apologize for that. I'm not specifically asking for any changes here, just giving feedback based on my own, personal experiences and circumstances. I will give my suggestion for changes in a separate post - this is already huge.

My background: I've mentioned it in a few other places, but I figure it's useful to be explicit here. Like many others on the game, I have migraines. However, I also have seizures. Unfortunately, one of the triggers for a (relatively minor, thank heaven) seizure in me is the sheer amount of visual crap that goes by on the screen in a single play session. We think, but can't be certain, that it's the particle effects given off by the FX, but we could be wrong. I'd like to figure it out at some point, in case there's a (working) setting I can adjust. I already have my particle count down at 100; it doesn't seem to make much difference. I also have various suppress fx options turned on as much as possible. I do not have my graphics turned way down - all that does is make things flat and ugly, which causes me to strain to make things out, and then I get eyestrain in addition.

At any rate as a result of migraines and seizures, I have been limited in how much I can play. Previously, if I were solo, I could run for about 3.5 - 4 hours at a given shot, with taking brief stops away from the computer. As the number of people on my team increased, that length of time went down. At the short end, I could barely finish a 35-minute ITF with 8 people before I had to log out.

Once Ultra Mode came out, those numbers changed. I can now solo for a good 6 hours if I want to. I can manage supergroup play with a full team for several hours. Task forces are still questionable, however and mostly depend on the powersets of the team members I'm running with (more coming on that). A reasonably run ITF (not speed-run, but a clear-most with occasional pauses between missions) doesn't kill me now.

That's a lot of background for the rest of this. Sorry. :/

For the BAF and Lambda trials, when we started I was able to run them at least twice in a row, multiple times, without a problem. There are a few sound effects that could cause issues, but that's true about the entire game. I don't know what was different about these trials, but they didn't bother me nearly as much as an ITF has in the past. Now, to be fair, it's entirely possible that this is because when everyone grouped together, the sheer number of FX pretty well turned my screen into so much whiteout and the rest of the time we were spread out, but I really don't know.

The key thing is that despite having more players, a reasonable scale of enemies, and the appropriate number of FX from both, I was able to go for over an hour - up to nearly two hours - and at the end of it, I still felt fine. Heck, one night I even went and played for a couple hours on Live, since it was SG night. That, to me, is impressive.

I was hoping all of the Incarnate stuff was going to be like that - then I ran the Apex TF. One run of that, and I had a headache approaching that of what I usually got partway through the ITF (the one that warns: stop soon or you're going to pay the consequences). The first mission isn't too bad. The second mission with the Blue Cloud of Death and the flying swords ramped it up for me from "minor headache due to the War Walker's whine" to "OMG, can I just shut my eyes and walk away now?" I would NOT want to do that one multiple times in a row, even if we had time. It's actually hard to give coherent feedback when that's pretty much your entire impression of the task force.

Then we got the new Incarnate powers, and very quickly thereafter I had to stop running trials on Test. Even now on Live, it’s still difficult for me. Destiny: Barrier is the principal culprit - the initial flash followed by the constant flickering is enough to start triggering nausea within two to three minutes if I'm not careful about not looking at it directly (I've got some techniques for refocusing the camera angle, but I die faster because I don't see some of the stuff around me). I've actually asked people I team with to please let me know if they use Barrier, so I can please avoid teaming with their toons. I won't ask them to recolor it to the half-dozen or so colors that will turn Barrier more or less invisible just to suit me (although many of them do). We've also discovered Clarion has a specific pulse rate that can be somewhat problematic, but mostly it's the initial flash of being set off - if I don't see it, mostly I'm ok (and again, many friends and teammates are recoloring it for those of us with problems). Those are just the default colors for the powers - when you start adding the colors that people choose to make their powers, you're opening a whole new can of worms.

And no, it's not just Incarnate powers. Force Fields, for example - if the colors are set to anything bright, my ability to play drops to about 10 minutes. The Empathy set cannot be colored darkly (pastels is the best you can do), although the worst that can be said about Empathy is that it's concentric rings going out at a specific frequency on a regular basis. As mentioned above, Electric Control's static field is terrible; additionally, all of the flashy-bomb powers (seeker drones, grenades, mines, etc) have a bright-white flash that cannot be toned down by anyone. The Sonic Grenades sent off by the Nullifiers are visually stunning - they stun the player sufficiently to make the character vulnerable to attack. Please note that all of these are visual complaints - I rarely have very much sound playing (there are sounds, such as the War Walker's whine, which encourage me to turn off the noise). Note also that with my own fx suppressed (/suppressclosefxdist 100), I don't see these things on me - I see them either on or cast by the people around me (or thrown at me, as the case may be).

As far as I'm concerned, this has been an ongoing and steadily growing problem and it's one that needs to have a solution presented before it gets out of hand. I have played a few other games at this point, and while this is the only one I've ever bothered maintaining a subscription for long-term, it's also the only one I've had this sort of issue with. I'd like to see a real fix put in for the underlying difficulties, not just a band-aid placed on the boo-boo du jour.

So, leaving aside the thought of what, precisely, causes the issues that some of us have with eyestrain, headache, migraine, seizure, nausea, or other problems for a moment, the other thing to turn the attention to is how to fix it.

Yes, it would be nice if all the devs and all the players would simply realize that simple SFX on powers are a good idea, but the chances of this consistently happening are about as likely as snow on the equator, so let's move on from that thought.

I've seen a suggestion to replace the offending graphics. That's a good suggestion for Barrier, because that's an egregious offender. Alternately, the suggestion has been made for Static Field, Barrier (and possibly Clarion and one or two others) to slow down the pulse rate at which they flicker, thus removing at least part of the complaint about them.

What that does not do, however, is take care of the people who are sensitive to more than just the most egregious of the offenders - of which I am one, but hardly the only one on the game. Most of us who have difficulties limit ourselves to a small group of people we team with, and those people know our difficulties. For myself and the ones I know, we don't like asking people to make special costume slots and power colors to cater to us and are grateful to those who do; by the same token, however, we frequently can't risk teaming with people who don't make those accommodations for us. A number of us will solo rather than risk even a small PUG.

So from the perspective of someone who has a broad range of visual triggers, I'd much rather have a broad range solution. Specifically, I'd like to have a global SFX suppression slider (or set of them, really):

- Suppress FX Distance (range)
- Suppress FX Amount (personal fx, percent)
- Suppress FX Amount (ally buffs, percent)
- Suppress FX Amount (enemy, percent)
- Suppress FX Amount (world, percent)

Not that I can think of anything the last one would qualify for that isn't already covered elsewhere, but I tossed it in anyway just in case I'm missing something obvious.

The percent could either be "100 - 0" where 0 is unsuppressed and 100 is fully suppressed, or could be "low, medium, high" like a lot of the ultra-mode is. A little bit of suppression would kill the major flashies (bombs, grenades, etc). Say a quarter gone would get rid of the bubbles type effects while a quarter left would only leave armor type effects (granite, ice, etc).

I'm not saying it's "simple" or "easy" to code. I am saying that it's both a long-term and comprehensive solution.

As long as it's in the options, it's something that can be pointed to easily for anyone who needs it. Yes, they'll need to know they need it - but that's going to be the case for every single FX they run into that's a problem, too, and this covers more of the edge cases.

Stuff like that doesn't bother me Bill but I did have a member of my SG that used to have problems like that. He'd actually have to avoid the base because of some glitch that caused the lights to blink. Turned out he had epilepsy and all that flashing bordered on sending him into seizures even with his medication. He quit the game a while ago but I can check with other members and friends and see if the are having issues or know of anyone that does.

Good luck with the project.

Discovered a new one last night: the center of the Clarion persistent effect. For the most part, it's identical to current sonic shields, but on small models and objects, it also has a rapid "sparking" effect at the very center, rather similar to a miniature Conductive Field (Elec Control). Wasn't too bad til it got applied to someone's Singularity. Almost instant migraine, there.

Is certainly a very "edge case" and easily fixed by toning down the default "gold" Clarion color, but hit me hard enough that I thought it worth warning folks.

This is going to be a long post, but I have a number of things to comment on in a thread of this nature. Most of my friends that I team with on a regular basis are willing to work with me and spend the inf needed to re-color their powers to ones I can team with - but we also like to bring in other players and my issues as well as those of a few others in our group can tend to preclude that being possible much at all.

I also hate asking people to change their power colors to ones that I can cope with and I genuinely feel bad when I tell a group that if certain powers are used with certain colors, then they need to find a replacement for me as I will find something else to do as I cannot cope with certain powers. But sometimes it is necessary.

Until powerset customization, I could not play with a force fielder or traps toons with the dispersion bubble gizmo. I could not handle some nebulous "thing" about the soap bubble effects - they would make me nauseous and ultimately I would have a migraine with exposure to small or large bubbles that lasted over about 20 minutes. I LOVE bubbles, particularly on my blasters but I could not team with them - this made me sad. Custom coloring allowed me to find a color I can cope with and now my friends can play bubblers if they use those colors (if they can't or won't use those colors, I generally still have to leave the team or they offer to change to a different toon). For a bit of clarification, through the use of custom colors I think I pinpointed the issue with those as being the sparkly lights in them - I have to have them colored to "dark colors" instead of bright, and specifically a dark blue shade identical for both color selections - black mutes the bright sparkles, but then the swirly patterns and the opaque black spots give me an entirely different set of troubles, so it is a very very fine line on those.

I don't recall having issues with the sonic bubbles in any of their previous incarnations, but I cannot be positive that I would not have had issues with them if I'd been exposed to them more - I didn't know/team with that many people who used sonic bubbles until the latest incarnation of their graphics.

For current or new powers that give me issues:
1. Barrier on default color - I can mitigate it by using the bright color palette with a dark blue or purple shade that makes them almost entirely invisible in most play environments. It seems to be the pulsing/static-y flashes - even the alternate color doesn't help with the application of Barrier though, thankfully it is a short enough "burst" that I can generally cope with it (if I am on the threshold of a migraine, I can generally tell and I will avoid situations with Barrier even if colored to my "this is generally okay" color or will ask the team to give me 3 seconds warning and I will look away while it goes off - it helps that my husband is generally teaming with us and will tell me when it is safe to look back at the screen, thought teamspeak helps immensely there too). The default color and flashing light frequency is the particular issue with this one - other colors that are particularly bright have a similar effect, but the default color is actually the absolute worst for "instant migraine" for me, even a bright yellow that a friend uses isn't as instant of a migraine for me though it isn't better by a while lot, I can still only handle that for about 5 minutes beyond the normal 10 minutes I can cope with the default colored one before I simply have to quit the group and go to bed/dark room. Black or dark colors used from teh dark color palette also do not seem to have a positive effect on my ability to cope with them, the flashing is still obvious though on the opposite end of the "bright" spectrum and still causes me issues.

2. Barrier (yes, again - but this is a different issue) also has a sound that does bother me, though it is a very very low-grade concern as far as issues go - and I generally play with my music on "3" and my sounds on "5" so that I can hear teamspeak over my sounds but I can still play with sound effects ingame turned on (so many years of no audio issues ingame it is really hard at this point for me to play without sound on - I tend to get almost disoriented from the lack of sound, not sure how to explain it). The sound is a problem, but it generally is obscured by the other sounds/powers going off enough that it doesn't cause issues unless I'm sitting around in a zone and a group of people is nearby just randomly activating barrier within sound-range even if I cannot see the graphics as they are offscreen - as has happened a couple times during dev events on test such as the 7th anniversary event where I had to leave after a short while due to so many people in the area in and out of visual range activating barriers for the heck of it.

3. As others have said, the sonic grenades and the trick arrow disruption arrow (I think? They use the same ringed animation - but the trick arrow one is actually worse for me because of the whistling sound that precedes it adding to my issues with it). The frequency of their flashes or something about them is problematic though I can cope with them fairly well, they don't tend to be an all-out severe migraine for me, just a lower level headache with some low-grade nausea after about 20-40 minutes of them - the timeframe being largely dependant on their frequency of use - if I see them once every 10 minutes, I could likely cope with them indefinitely but most TA players tend to use theirs a lot more often than that and with the high pitched whistle that precedes the graphical effect my threshold is lower for that as the sound induces more nausea and the graphics just stack onto it making the overall effect on me a lot more severe.

4. Another that isn't graphics for me is the high pitched orbital lance sounds from the war walkers. Some of the other war works sounds seem to use this same sound as well though as the sound is not /always/ accompanied by the large red targeting circle, though it is the most commom source of it. I'm working on getting the name of that sound and will post it in the sound suppression thread as soon as I have a name on that sound.

5. Clarion - the one that has the ongoing effect that looks similar to the current sonic shields but it is a bit tighter to the toon's body than the sonic shields are - but it has about a double rate on the rotation speed (at least that's what I call it - the rate at which the brighter "outlines" do an outward pulse from body mass to extreme outer edge of the power before disappearing/starting over at body mass again) as well as the circular pulses from a "neck-central" region - since I generally play with my camera zoomed out to max camera distance (and would LOVE to be able to double that distance, particularly in the larger outdoor maps we've gotten for BAF and Lambda, Hamidon, Eden trial indoor map, and similar larger scale maps or larger scal eteam events) this power isn't generally a problem for me unless we're in the lab or warehouse and the camera gets pushed in due to occlusion, so I would say the impact of this one for me is very very small, but it is something that were I using it in indoor maps a lot I could see this one being a larger issue for me - lately all I've been doing is logging in for a couple trials a night, but that is largely because as people unlock destiny they like to pop a barrier into it "right now" and maybe haven't set their colors up yet so I have been encountering more issues lately and my play time has been cut DRASTICALLY as a result. The opening hum of it that fades out is also at a particular level that it can be problematic if there aren't other sounds obscuring it at the time, though it is problematic on the level of mild nausea until it fades.

6. There are two in electric control that I have issues with, the ground placement and a toggle - I have no idea what each one is called but the toggle one is worse for me than the ground placement one, though the combination of both is pretty close to instant "gotta go lie down now" response. They rotate through pulses of light way way too fast, and every last one I've seen has been a very bright color, or black. I have no idea why but a lot of these flashy powers are just as bad for me on a bright color as they are when colored black - "lighter" dark colors generally aren't as bad, but so many people seem to think that black is as "not bright" as you can get and therefore it should be "safe" but it isn't (for me anyway).

7. I don't watch the screen whenever I know in advance that a bunch of people are summoning lore pets. There is a flash effect with lightning bits that goes off as they are summoned that isn't bad when it is just one or two sets of pets, but watching 6-16 people pulling out lore pets at once for buffing up before trying for the Master of Lambda badge (as an example of when this kind of thing happens) tends to be enough flashing to be problematic for me. Generally inducing headache pain almost instantly when on a large enough scale.

8. My latest "Huh, really? This bothers me?" moment of shock came when I levelled up a fire brute - Blazing Aura apparently makes me nauseous and after about 45 minutes will result in a migraine. It could be something where I was particularly close to migraine thresholds for several days but after days of toggling it off anytime I wasn't in combat, I played one day with no audio due to my headset dying on me and not wanting to wake my husband so keeping my speakers off...two hours of playing with no audio and no nausea. I'm still working on testing my theories on this, but so far at least I think this is one I would have blamed on the outward pulses but am now leaning more towards an audio cause for the problems. I mention this one in part because I'm curious if I'm the only one this sort of this has happened to (and/or maybe others have issues with it graphically and not aurally).

Cende responded herself, or I'd have mentioned many of her issues as one of my friends with complaints about these recent powers. She and I have different thresholds and generally different ending result for exposure to these, but our list of powers that give us problems is generally closely related. I have other friends (8-10) that have commented on Barrier in particular, and occasionally the electic powers I mentioned, but most of them haven't voiced any of the other powers I mentioned as being problematic. And know at least as many who have no issues whatsoever with any powers in the game.

It is frustrating to hear "then don't play" when voicing concerns, and for most of us, hearing it in this thread wouldn't be the first (or even the 100th) time we've heard it, but we still love this game and at least I feel that with my years of playing without significant problems to suddenly have a laundry list of powers with graphics and sounds that cause distress it isn't a real solution to simply quit the game. It is more indicative of a trend that is starting with new power creation being too flashy/strobey/high pitched and would be a trend best nipped in the bud early. For me at least, having the ability to put in a color override file for problematic powers similar to how we can override problematic sounds would be at least a step in the right direction - I don't want to have to lower graphics/settings/efx for powers that don't bother me, but having an option to suppress powers one by one (via override file) could be just as useful as a colors override but serving different needs - and likely both are next to impossible to pull off, but we can dream.

I updated my post in at least one place where I thought Ageless was Clarion - I coulda sworn I was all by myself when I hit Ageless the other day and got the effect that is apparently Clarion, apparently I got a drive-by Clarion as I tested Ageless's colors/graphic to see if it needed tweaks to be "Nomme safe" after getting it.

I also wanted to update a bit more on Clarion though - the people I generally team with (and thus have "safe" colors for me for the powers I have really big issues with) opted last night to break from incarnate trials and run an RSF and a BSF. The things that I wasn't sure about I now have confirmation on - Clarion isn't a problem at maximum camera distance but is a HUGE nausea inducer at closer range (such as occlusion forced camera distance in the council caves), Barrier is worse at close range even with my altered color palette but is still better than the default color (a couple of times people used a default colored one - ouch). Part of my trouble could be that Clarion inducing nausea and migraine stacked with my issues with the camera distance in caves putting me too "close" for me to not get motion sickness/nausea is just a double whammy that makes it almost impossible to play.

I'm not sure I'm being clear, so to list it out:
1. RSF, mostly at max camera distance except when it came in due to walls pushing it in towards my character, default and alternative colored Clarion, altered and default Barrier - Clarion wasn't bad unless the camera wasn't at max range then it got worse the closer the camera was to my character, Barrier was more noticable but not really a problem with a "Nomme safe" color scheme, Barrier with default color was extremely "in your face" and almost immediate nausea and low level headache resulted (though both faded a bit when I took a 5 minute "time out" during the 3rd mission - I travelled on to Nerva to be in place to enter the mission early and set off the cutscene while everyone else travelled - and to get a grip on the nausea).

2. BSF - outdoor maps no additional nausea/headache levels from clarion and barrier that I could discern. Indoor maps in council caves I already have issues with, so I cannot be 100% certain but it really felt like my nausea and headache were more severe than my usual levels from the caves alone - particularly since I split off on my own a couple of times to stealth through a bit and the nausea lessened a bit even though I continued to use my barrier (with the safe color for me) while alone in that section of cave - I just closed my eyes when I hit it and used the audio cues that it was "over" before looking at the screen again to avoid the initial flash of the larger bubble.

At the end of both I could not have continued playing - before the incarnate powers were introduced I could have easily run 3 back to back RSFs with no nausea/headache and one BSF would have been safe and I could have continued playing afterwards as long as I avoided caves again for a bit and stuck with things I could pull my camera way back on. I know my issues with camera distance make it a lot harder to detect what they exact nature of my problems with powers are, I always have to question if my camera distance was the cause of the resulting nausea/headache or if it really is thus and such power - but I genuinely think Barrier isn't that bad (for me) beyond the first flash of the larger encompassing bubble - even the default colored smaller bubbles don't bother me to a huge extent - they aren't entirely safe, but they are a lot smaller of a concern for me than the big bubble and the flash that accompanies it when my camera is all the way back, at closer range they become a bigger and bigger problem if they aren't my "safe" color. Clarion isn't bad unless my camera isn't at max distance, then it also gets progressively worse the closer I get to my character with the camera.

Most of the other powers I brought up before are not reliant on camera distance - they are bad at any distance for me. The sonic grenades for example worsened my problems early in the BSF even though generally the longbow base maps themselves aren't a problem for me - the grenades (5-6 at a time sometimes) were bad though.

This is actually rather disappointing, these are real concerns, and we have yet to have a redname respond to this issue.

I have, however, posted a link to this thread in Tunnel Rat's new All Things Art - FX Edition thread, hoping to bring it to her attention. I've also asked Zwillinger to take a gander and to pass it along to the appropriate folks in the hopes of attracting attention from the right folks.

Michelle
aka
Samuraiko/Dark_Respite