Ping After Death - Could be Removed

Jip · 13 Sept 2021, 17:05

I want to re-iterate again that the exploit isn't necessarily pinging itself, it is being able to ping in the name of someone else.

Keyser and I already discussed reverting it and we're trying to find an alternative approach to achieve the results (not being able to ping in the name of someone else).

FtXCommando · 13 Sept 2021, 19:11

I’d be satisfied with the option to just blanket remove all markers and pings from the game (on your own screen) or even better an option to selectively mute those from certain players same as you can mute their text chat. If we can agree that a dude can be SO annoying that muting his in game chat is warranted, how does that not extend to chat markers of copy pasted quran quotes or lenny faces?

(Also they are annoying and provide 0 benefit except to irritate the shit out of you by pinging stuff you noticed 4 minutes ago)

Morax · 13 Sept 2021, 19:46

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

I’d be satisfied with the option to just blanket remove all markers and pings from the game (on your own screen) or even better an option to selectively mute those from certain players same as you can mute their text chat. If we can agree that a dude can be SO annoying that muting his in game chat is warranted, how does that not extend to chat markers of copy pasted quran quotes or lenny faces?

(Also they are annoying and provide 0 benefit except to irritate the shit out of you by pinging stuff you noticed 4 minutes ago)

That is not always true. I have had people ping events I was unaware of and stopped a possible game-ending attack…

Yes, it can be abused and annoying, and if that happens then report the player? It may not be an exact rule break but I’m certain moderation would not be anything other than willing to ask someone to kindly be considerate of the two individuals involved cannot resolve matters on their own.

FtXCommando · 13 Sept 2021, 19:51

That’s great, I haven’t had a useful ping in 2000 games and I would light 5000 incense candles in the monastery of St. Lazarus for the dev that lets me mute them on my own screen. People that want them can go ahead and deal with the pain of having them on.

The “then report the player” logic falls off because the same applies to people spamming game chat with quran verses and lennies. If one was such a problem there is really no reason to say the other isn’t.

Guess I should clarify: pings are great when used by players that do something like mark an smd with time it was built if you’re going for some nuke game plan or say something in chat like “enemy chicken 40%” and if you dunno where it is they ping it for you. This is stuff that helps in bigger games like if you’re carrying a 1v4 sentons or playing a 20x20 2v2 game and need to coordinate.

However what it really gets used for is 18 pings on 3 strat bombers when your air is already moving to intercept or 28 pings on a 5k enemy ACU when no one has anything to help or do anything to snipe the ACU. Even better if it’s a big teamgame so everyone is aware the enemy ACU is 5k because there is literally nothing happening anywhere else on the map.

Like 98% of FAF can’t ping responsibly so I’m fine with just a blanket ban that I can change myself, but best solution is just allowing you to personally mute dudes on your end.

Resistance · 13 Sept 2021, 20:52

yeah,i totally agree,some ui that removes pings would be a must have,as most of the time is just annoying and not helping at all,especially on fullshare lobbies where you are in control of most stuff and someone spams pings and keeps you distracted

arma473 · 13 Sept 2021, 21:07

@FtXCommando @Rezy-Noob I made a mod that can remove chat and pings but not map markers. I got bored and abandoned the project. I think the difficulty I ran into is that map markers get saved in a data structure because the game has to keep track of them (whereas it can forget about pings as soon as it sends them) so hiding them would be more complicated and I never figured out how to safely disable them.

I didn't want to set up errors, e.g. I didn't know if it would cause a problem that one player is allowed to add extra map markers because he's hiding half the map markers so on his system it looks like there's room for more markers but on other players' systems they show there are too many markers.

For me personally, I use a mod that actually makes in-game chat more noticeable by making a little beep sound when someone types a chat message. (In the mod vault as "ChatBeepLite.") So I just didn't have the motivation to keep working on a silencer mod.

It shouldn't be too difficult to update the mod to include either a blacklist or a whitelist for removing pings/chat from some people but not others.

And I don't think it would be difficult to set it to allow pings from active players but disable pings from dead players (or to be even more fancy, let's say it allows pings from all live players unless they're on a blacklist and it disables pings from all dead players unless they are on a whitelist).

The mod that I abandoned made small changes to chat.lua and ping.lua. You can get rid of chat messages by overriding "ReceiveChatFromSender" with a new function that applies logic to decide whether to show the message or not. And you can get rid of pings by overriding "DisplayPing" with the same thing, apply a little logic to decide whether to show the ping or not.

Jip · 13 Sept 2021, 21:25

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.

FtXCommando · 13 Sept 2021, 22:16

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.

arma473 · 13 Sept 2021, 22:19

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?

Jip · 14 Sept 2021, 06:28

@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!

Jip · 14 Sept 2021, 06:51

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.

arma473 · 14 Sept 2021, 07:01

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?

Jip · 14 Sept 2021, 07:37

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

Jip · 17 Sept 2021, 09:31

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.

Morax · 18 Sept 2021, 12:59

@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.

Jip · 29 Sept 2021, 11:29

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.