Ping After Death - Could be Removed

See also this PR: https://github.com/FAForever/fa/pull/3418

You can not ping when:

• You are an observer (army = -1).
• You are in a replay.
• Your focus army is not allied to your original army.

In all other situations you can ping as usual. And the best part: you will always ping in your own name unless malicious intent is in play (e.g., someone changing code).

I am not sure if I can add in filtering options (I want to see no ping of X, but other players can) as they are actual entities and therefore affect the hash made to check for desyncs. @arma473 can I see that mod of yours?

What is possible is:

• Add an option in the game options for pings to (not) make a sound when it spawns from certain people, or in general.

Just blocking pings themselves already makes teamgames way more enjoyable. I don’t really think chat is a problem, if a dude is annoying you can already mute them and chat is where most pertinent info should go when playing anyway.

Since there's already an option to mute someone in chat, how hard would it be to check against that list when a ping comes in, and use that to decide whether to show the ping?

@arma473 said in Ping After Death - Could be Removed:

Since there's already an option to mute someone in chat, how hard would it be to check against that list when a ping comes in, and use that to decide whether to show the ping?

Allow me to quote myself:

I am not sure if I can add in filtering options (I want to see no ping of X, but other players can) as they are actual entities and therefore affect the hash made to check for desyncs. @arma473 can I see that mod of yours?

Please share the code of the mod you described.

edit: I received it through PM!

After looking at the code it doesn't prevent the mesh from spawning. But, what we can do is this:

There are two 'ping' animations: one is a UI-based ping (that Arma's mod prevents, along with the sound) and the other is a sim-based ping (that still plays).

The sim-based ping

The ui-based ping

The ui-based ping is better in every aspect: it is smooth and scales accordingly when you zoom in or out. If we'd remove the sim-based ping and make the ui-based ping available when the camera is zoomed in then we can add filtering options to pinging reliably as we no longer need the sim.

I'm personally not a huge fan of filtering options like these as then you are never guaranteed whether your ally received your notification. But if a lot of community members want this then I suppose I can work it out.

Marker-based pings (with text) would be excluded from this - you'll always see those and I am not altering their behavior.

If you eliminate pings when you're zoomed out, and only in rare circumstances when someone is zoomed in will they see the pings, that probably solves 99% of the problem

How often are people even zoomed in, and when they are, how often would someone be pinging that exact spot?

That solves the problem for you - but I'm not introducing such a feature into the base game.

The new ping logic has been merged - I encourage everyone who responded in this topic to check it out on the develop branch. As described earlier you can not ping when:

• You are an observer (army = -1).
• You are in a replay (army = -1).
• Your focus army is not allied to your original army index (the one you started the game with).

In my opinion this topic can be closed by a moderator. I am discussing whether filtering pings based on who pinged is a desirable feature with Morax next Sunday. Either Morax will ask the community directly or open up a new topic about this potential feature.

@arma473 said in Ping After Death - Could be Removed:

If you eliminate pings when you're zoomed out, and only in rare circumstances when someone is zoomed in will they see the pings, that probably solves 99% of the problem

How often are people even zoomed in, and when they are, how often would someone be pinging that exact spot?

Quite a bit actually (in reference to the zoomed in). A lot of the lower level players don’t really zoom out as much as it’s difficult to control.

We're going to aim for an implementation where you can mute other players ping messages for the next patch of November, see also this issue on the FA repository.