I’ve seen similar reports a few times before, but I thought I’d post this and include a video of the problem as well.
Platform:
Microsoft Windows 7 Professional Service Pack 1 (64-bit)
Description:
When hiding behind walls (even in an enclosed building) enemies can sometimes spot you through the walls and go into combat mode.
In the video below I’m hiding in a garage at Stenhaga Farm.
Steps To Reproduce:
Go hide behind a wall or in an enclosed building with robots nearby. Likely they’ll detect your presence and might go into combat mode (even though you stand still).
Might only work if their heads actually glitch through the wall.
Images / Videos:
Host or Client:
Singleplayer (but the problem likely occurs in multiplayer as well).
Players in your game:
(Singleplayer)
Specifications:
RAM: 16 GB, 2133 MHz
CPU: Intel Core i5-6500 Skylake (Quad Core, 3.2 GHz)
GPU: ASUS Radeon RX 580 Dual OC (8 GB)
Graphics Driver: Radeon Adrenalin 19.4.1
Monitors: 1 (1680 x 1050 @ 60 Hz)
HDD: Western Digital Blue WD10EZEX-60M2NA0 (1 TB, 7200 RPM)
Yeah, experiencing this very often with a friend of mine in bunkers. We are playing on Windows 10. Perhaps enemies feel the micro vibrations of you through earth
But it’s very distracting, because you don’t know, whether it’s an enemy inside the bunker or not.
Detection while inside a bunker is a known bug, but some of the robots can see through walls (without sticking their heads through ) - it’s a normal game feature.
B.T.W., at the moment hiding inside car garage is a very bad idea
@0L0 Well these don’t seem to be that kind of robots. Note that in the video not all of them stick their heads through, though (and not all that do so see me). For instance the sixth one (detection no. 6, at 01:36) doesn’t appear be hugging the wall like the rest of them.
Yeah, I know.
I was just trying to sneak around without being detected and get to know the area before going into combat.
Some of them can see through walls. they have three 4 visual modes. Normal, IR, NV, and Xray/Op. They can see you in the room. What they cant see is if you are alive. So its best not to move so they cant see you moving.
The main purpose of this video is flawed imo, as - as has been stated - many enemies have scanners and scopes just like we do and are meant to be able to see through walls.
The fact that players still feel surprised by this points at a missing graphical/animation design feature, failing to make it clear to the player that robots are actively seeing you.
What I have bigger concerns with however, is the clipping and the light bleeding through walls.
@Zambrick@bcatrek I am fully aware that this is a feature (and if I recall correctly I even knew so before I started playing it), but for reasons described below this (from my perspective) does not appear to be caused by that specific feature.
If you happen to know which ones do have this feature (if not all), please let me know.
By the way, do you really face such enemies so early into the game? (this is only the third mission/safe house)
The reason I wrote this report is that they don’t appear to be actively seeing me (apart from when one attempted to shoot me). Infact the behaviour shown in the video seems rather random and not that of a feature.
For starters, the fact that they detect me and then just run around only to lose track of me again shortly after does not seem like something a functioning x-ray capable enemy AI would do. I’ve seen the almost exact same behaviour in many other games (sadly it was a while ago and there has been so many over the years that I cannot give a concrete example) where the enemy detects you even though it’s impossible, only to lose track of you after a short period of time.
Another thing that makes this seem so random can be seen thanks to that their models (heads) actually glitch through the walls: They often don’t look right at me (sometimes not even near me) until at the exact moment that they detect me (since at that point they are supposed to turn their heads) - detection no. 7 in the video (02:03) is a great example of this.
And at the times where they actually do look right at me or when I should be in their sight, it still takes them a short while to actually detect me. So if it’s not a bug/glitch, then they seem to be missing everything related to them scanning/switching modes.
At detection no. 8 (02:17) an enemy even appears to be turning away before detecting me.
To me it looks much too similar to similar glitches in other games.
As seen in the video I stand still most of the time (I only move sometimes when I’m already detected).
Yes the enemies are this hard. You will however get new equipment, traps, and guns to mitigate this. They have set it up to specifically hard especially at the beginning to get you thinking about tactics early. I remember thinking man what I wouldnt do for some kind of sound lure to distract the bots almost an hour before I found my first one.
As for which bots can see through walls, it can be any of them. They can have any combination of the 4 mods I described in my previous post.
As for the 2:17 mark in the video. I suspect it was because you were already seen before you ran into the building and closed the door. The bots do not give up ever. If they see you and can track you into a building you closed the door on, they wont leave. They never stopped detecting you. As long as the light they produce is yellow, it means they suspect you are around and the red flashes mean they can see the target.
The buggy part is that they phase through the walls. Its a known bug and hopefully one they can fix soon. They are not phasing through the walls and then seeing you. They can already see you or detect you before they start phasing their heads through.
Line of sight, detection and sound play a big role in how you survive. Hunters can seem to hear you farther away than they can see you for example. Runners are the cannon fodder of the bots.
The one thing you cannot do in this game is be afraid of running away. Throw down some flares and fireworks and haul ass. Find a better building to hide in or totally break line of sight and sound detection. If you have them distracted by a flare and fireworks and you slip out unseen into another building, they wont know where you are.
Yes and I agree with you there. That’s why I wrote it might be a missing design or animation that is causing this confusion.
The problem is that in the game it appears as if the AI is programmed poorly, while in fact it’s fulfilling its intended purpose but not showing that to the player. The turning of their “heads” is a good example of this - that the character animations are not perfectly linked up to the AI’s behaviour.
The AI should still be improved though, for example by more actively seeking clear line-of-sights instead of firing straight at non-destructible walls, but the “detection” part is not the problem here imo.
I think a lot of this can/will be excused by having the AI not clip through walls. I still think that the AI should see a barrier 0.5m outside of every hitbox, within which it can not set foot (i.e. closer to the wall). Just my two cents.
I’m not so worried about the lack of animations as I would prefer the actual current and very real problems being fixed before even thinking about additional animations.
I would prefer if they roamed around the building a bit more as it’s really annoying when a Hunter (especially) appears to be peeing over the back of a barn for 15 minutes solid
Enemies seeing through walls is a really complicated subject. Some of them (maybe all??) should have the same vision enhancement processors that you can pick up after shooting them, and have audio detection sensors as well. Between IR and object penetrating, they should have at least some level of detection through walls of houses and thin buildings, particularly if you’re moving and making noise.
However:
Machines with only IR vision shouldn’t be able to see you through walls at all. Try looking at any wall with a FLIR camera and you can’t see what’s on the other side of the wall unless there’s a really significant heat source that’s raising the temperature of the wall. They should be able to see you at distance in the dark though. Just not through walls
Machines with object penetrating vision should be able to see through walls, but realistically, they wouldn’t be able to determine what they’re seeing unless you’re moving or they already know you’re in there. If you haven’t already been detected, you should be able to hide from a machine inside if you’re not moving and can’t be seen through windows and such. And of course, remain silent.
Low light vision is kind of redundant in this game. IR vision does the same job for you with much longer range and detects targets way better. As a player, if it’s all you’ve got, then great. But overall as an “upgrade” for yourself or machines, it’s pretty underwhelming. It should be of no use in detecting someone outside of open areas for machines.
So the current detection when you’re hiding in a house / building is a little heavy handed in the machines’ favour. It doesn’t help that they can often clip through walls to kill you.
The real issue I have is being detected from outside bunkers and then aggressed. A bunker should be multiple metres of concrete, steel and rock. There’s no way that they would be able to detect you inside. And then they start clipping through the bunkers walls to come at you inside. Just last night while running through Sorken bunker I had a group of 3 hunters outside the bunker detect me and clip through the wall to come at me.
I was briefly trapped inside a garage last night by 6 hunters. One of them got onto the roof and was doing his jump attack repeatedly and killing me through the roof.
After 2 revives, I just took my chance with running out in the open and getting the hell out of Dodge while I could.
@Zambrick I know. At the moment this is actually a good thing because thanks to that visual glitch we can actually see their behaviour before and at the moment of detection, which makes it clear that something is not as it should be - either the detection system or, as suggested by @bcatrek, complete lack of sound, animation or any other cue when scanning through the walls.
The last part specifically is what (to me) makes it seem to be more of a bug than something they would’ve actually missed, since how does one completely forget such a crucial feature when it is what appears to be an important, not to mention special, part of the game?
Though it wasn’t yellow when I entered the building as I was being very careful as entered it, and they were a couple of meters away.
@bcatrek I beg to differ. As I said I’ve seen far to much of similar cases in multiple games over the years, and my instinct when the robots started doing this was: BUG!
I had also forgotten about all the reports that I read during the first weeks about the bunker glitch, which I was reminded of thanks to Crunchmeister’s post:
This, I’d say, more or less confirms that at the very least the greater part of their detections through walls (in cases similar to mine) are caused by a bug.
- Also thanks for the interesting info, @Crunchmeister !
@Zambrick@bcatrek I can now confirm that the case in my video was a bug.
The robots do infact have both animation and sound when scanning through walls, so it’s not something the dev’s have missed. I discovered this whilst playing today:
To confirm this, I tried hiding in one of the buildings whose walls the robot above scanned, and it did partially notice me which made the detection indicator fill rather quickly with orange. However during no scan did the indicator actually get completely full. Instead, the robot started walking around the building looking for a way in. When it found none, it simply ignored me and the detection indicator eventually went away.
This was totally different from what’s seen in my video. In my video the bots didn’t even scan once (which is clear because we would’ve heard it, and likely even seen it thanks to their glitching) and their detection and overall behaviour was much more rapid.
In the end, robots have the potential of partially glitching through walls which affects their sight and detection behaviour (and they can apparently also shoot you during some of these times).
I would have liked to have seen what was happening before you went into that garage in the first video. I am betting they saw or heard you before you ducked in there. At the beginning of the original video, the bots were already queued to your presence. Otherwise none of them would have had the red glowing aura about them during the video. They would as you have said showed nothing but yellow light for scanning and would have eventually left. They either saw you or heard you before you went into the building or they heard you while you were in it. Patrols of runners just dont stop at random garages and start shooting.
@Zambrick Sadly I started recording only when I saw this behaviour so I have no proof to back this up; but as I mentioned earlier I was being rather careful while sneaking in there and I don’t recall anyone ever seeing me as they were on the other side of the garage.
They did hear me as they always do, though (when the detection indicator fills slightly as I walk). Standing still and out of sight in these cases usually results in them ignoring you.
What’s seen in the video was after already standing there for a little while and they had already detected me a couple of times at that point. At first after entering the garage they weren’t that suspicious (they mostly just roamed the place), but shortly after they started flocking around it, filling the detection indicator and doing their weird thing even though I mostly stood still.
Also now that I’ve been able to play a little more I’ve seen enemies give up much more quickly and in more obvious places (such as after seeing me in open areas).
That is true, but I was making much more noise around the robot in my recent post (the one that did scan the walls), and it got close to detecting me through the wall, but it never did.
The wall scan and otherwise. The yellow beam they emit doesnt mean they are exclusively scanning using the OPV only. They use that scanning beam when checking for IR sources as well.
Now I am not saying that there are not bugs in this game. Phasing through walls is one of them, but the detection mechanic is not where they should be spending their time. The Detection mechanic is the one thing that is keeping the game exciting versus turning the game into a walking simulator.
