Ground highlight for missions turned off and not sure how to turn them on.

wraithmeister

Some missions show on ground where your ship or ground character needs to be for mission goals, for example:
- Kobali ground mission "At the Gates" where you have mission goal "Choke point control". There used to be highlighted square showing range of where you can stand on round but it is now gone. Sure I can stand in middle of area, but you have to stand on edge of marked area to be in range of guys as they appear so would be useful to see the box.

- Battle of BInary Stars, when get mission goal to rescue escape pods, you have to fly ship inside 2 circles to rescue pods, but the circles no longer show up, so I have to guess at area and fly around until popup msg to get a pod shows up.

I have searched Options and hud controls looking for where to turn that function on, but cannot seem to find it.

baddmoonrizin

thread /moved

phoenixc

I don't think that is the function of a control being mis-set, it seems more likely that it is part of the hugely disruptive bug that is preventing some 3D overlays from showing like the fires at the rocket stations in the current event, the Simon Says symbols in Sphere of Influence, the electrified floor panels in Dust to Dust, the hot plasma venting up from the floor in What Lies Beneath, and other floor hazards and indicators and whatnot in other missions.

A likely candidate for that bug could be if the devs somehow changed how particles and/or sprites are handled in the graphic section of the engine, so it may be hitting particle or sprite limits or something like that in an odd, unexpected way, which is hard to diagnose.

Sometimes things like that are done to combat lag but can have wild, unpredictable side effects (Second Life had somewhat similar issues years ago for instance). Ironically, the particular issue the Lindons (which is what the devs were called there) were trying to fix in the code at that point wasn't in the code, it was a hardware issue in one of the data centers hosting a critical database that was causing the widespread but elusive intermittent problem, but in the process of working the problem they found a section of the graphics engine that apparently worked differently from how they thought it did and ended up having to "freeze" it because changes to it produces all sorts of unexpected bad behavior.

wraithmeister

OK, thanks for the input. Hopefully that is an issue that gets fixed soon.

If anyone else here does "Binary Stars" TFO or the last 2 Kobali ground missions (for iconian and delta elite mark daily), let me know if you dont see the issue and in that case whether any of your own graphics settings bypassed the issue.

Otherwise, I'll wait to hear more from STO team.