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Comment by bckygldstn | Hacker News Reader

As a kid I saved up for a used laptop so I could play Halo LAN games with my mates. The computer didn't meet the required specs for the game, but it mostly worked if you turned the all the graphics settings down to low.

Except for invisibility: invisible players are normally rendered as, well, invisible, except for a slight rippling of the air that's only perceptible if you're a few metres away. But on my underpowered machine, invisible players were rendered as an opaque explosion of colourful glitchy noise!

We agreed to just not use the invisibility powerups after I got in some epic cross-map shots of supposedly invisible players.

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Yeah, I think the original Halo PC invisibility ("active camo") effect only worked on AMD GPUs, or something like that. If you had an iGPU or Nvidia (IIRC), other players who picked up the invisibility were fully visible. I also have memories of running Halo PC on a very low-capability PC -- I remember adding "-useff"[1] to the launcher to set graphics to the lowest levels.

[1]: http://hce.halomaps.org/index.cfm?nid=309

In StarCraft 2 there’s the opposite problem: invisible units make a slight ripple that you can pick out. On low graphics the ripple of invisible units is basically unnoticeable. But if you turn the effects setting all the way up while keeping everything else low, you’ll see a high-res shimmer in the shape of the invisible unit against the low-res background.

Its the reverse. Far easier to see invis units on lower graphics and textures settings than it is on high/ultra textures. If you jump onto twitch and have a look, many of the high level players will have the game on the lowest settings graphics settings for this reason although plenty also just run it looking nice for the audiences sake.

Yes the pros have everything on lowest...except one or two settings are higher to make the invisible units pop out better. Which is what the parent said.

During my first year at uni, we used to play a lot of counterstrike, back when it was still only a mod. Me and my roommates discovered that if you lower the resolution to 320x200, the heads are really big. Desert eagle headshots all day long...

Later i started playing Bad Company 2 with a friend. With details on minimum i could easily make out the mines. We played quite a bit of tanks, him driving and me on machine gun/repairs/mine spotting duty.

Fun times

Wow, I had the exact same experience! I used to play Halo Trail with family, friends, and random people online. The graphics got messed up on the old family desktop and invisible players became easier to see. Good times.

If anyone else has had a similar experience or wants to relive the old days or Halo 1 PC you can still do so with Halo Custom Edition. OpenCarnage.net has the information you need, be sure to check out the Chimera mod.

In cod4, you could sufficiently mess with how the game rendered (through console commands at least).

This effectively removed folliage rendering. So gillie suit snipers suddenly stood out like a sore thumb. :)

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