Benefits (How this will benefit the server and game as a whole): it would improve immersion and resourcefulness among aliens, xenos and predators alike.
Details (Description of how you think this would work, the benefits, etc): so i noticed something weird which has been bothering me.
Dense Jungle Walls and other overgrowth and bushes and so on are in effect, "Walls" instead of just being plantlife, they are identical to the R-Walls onboard the nostromo save for the fact that there is no means of destroying them (save perhaps for the use of C4)
why is that?
i mean lets think about this for a minute, this is a JUNGLE and typically you dont find walls in the middle of nowhere in the center of a jungle or rainforest or regular forest or anything like that, the only truly impassable obstacles in nature are trees (impassable in the sense that you cannot go directly through them) but prettymuch anything else in nature you are capable of traveling through it (albeit this is often a bad idea if what you are traveling through is thorny or poisonous or it may simply be difficult).
i really get the feeling that the maker of the map wanted this to feel like a jungle and yet the fact that these brushy walls are durable enough to stop bullets, rockets and movement alike to me not only defeats alot of the immersion of being IN a jungle but costs us the opportunities that would be afforded to us if they worked as overbrush WOULD.
now let me explain what exactly im suggesting be done about it.
what i propose is that we change "Dense Jungle Walls" so that anyone can walk through them and stand on their given square, you would not be able to see anything IN the square itself because the overbrush is too thick, to anyone else its just a thick jungle wall but whoever is on that square can be looking outwards, using the brush as cover and lying in wait to ambush people, animals in nature use this all the time to their advantage so they can pounce on their prey, we can imagine aliens doing the same, hiding inside the brush waiting for lone patrolling marines to walk by, only for a sudden pounce out of nowhere.
before anyone cries that aliens dont need to be any stronger then they are now, MARINES would be free to do the same, just imagine it...aliens walking to the big dome eager for the victory they already know to be coming, when the next thing they know out of nowhere rockets and bullets slam into them, how long would it take for them to realise the marines were lying in wait for them and where they are i wonder? would they realise it in time to save themselves? the weeds dont grow on the grass and the brush afterall so they would be at a distinct disadvantage.
if you cannot see anyone in the brush how do you fight them? well it would work by allowing you to witness anyone in the brush if you happened to be RIGHT NEXT TO IT, i am going to use several images to illustrate my point.
in this example the alpha marine is hidden in the brush where the aliens cannot see him, they do not have direct line of sight of him because they cannot see anything in the brush without being next to it, the alpha marine ergo would be free to attack them with impunity.
in this example, one of the aliens is directly NEXT to the alpha marine and would both be capable of seeing him, as well as attacking him in turn, his fellows on the other hand are still not next to the brush and would not be able to see him, they may be aware a battle is ongoing between the alien and alpha marine but would not see the marine himself until they moved closer.
in this example, the marine cannot see the aliens because he can only see through ONE square worth of thickness of brush he happens to be next to and he cannot see anything past that point, the aliens would likewise be incapable of seeing HIM because he is obscured.
in this example it would be the same as before, the alien and marine cannot physically see each other and even if they can determine through other means (sounds as if someone is moving through the brush, alien roars, motion trackers, etc) that they are not alone in the overbrush they still cannot physically see one another because there is too much brush in between them, if the marine moved one square up and one square right the alien and marine would both be able to see one another.
still dont understand? ill see if i can make things easier for you.
here we have another example of a marine in the overbrush, he is all by himself because half the time alpha cant stick together, poor poor alphas.
the blue area represents everything he would be able to see, everything outside the blue area would NOT be visible to the alpha marine, while in the brush you can see through one squares worth of overbrush so he would be able to see anything and everything that happened to be directly next to him, two of those squares are NOT dense jungle but rather, they are merely grass, ergo the marine would be capable of seeing out to a certain distance from that point, he cannot see very far to the north because there is dense jungle to the northeast which blocks his field of vision from that point and he cannot see much of anything to the southwest because the dense jungle is even THICKER there, to physically see aliens, other marines, predators and so on they would need to move into the blue areas which represent his field of vision in his given square.
lets suppose you think this is all retarded and you dont want to fuck around with things that impact your field of vision, smoke grenades were bad enough and you dont want aliens or preds hiding in the bushes to ambush you, well just cut it down, in real life this is exactly what machete's are for, cutting through thick overbrush as you would see in jungles, whether its just tall grass or bamboo a machete will get the job done, HERE in CM however apop has made it clear he does not want to give us new weapons, ergo this feature could be added to our knives, dont like the overbrush? just hack it away so you can keep the lanes of fire clear, we already clear alien weeds and they're sure as hell to be way more durable then fucking grass, if your knife cant cut through grass it sounds to me like you either need a new one or its in DIRE need of sharpening.
an important caveat however, you would be capable of shooting INTO the brush even if you cannot physically see what you are happening to shoot at, think an enemy is hiding in there? just launch a rocket or throw a grenade and deal with it later, too lazy to bother with chopping it all down? its fucking GRASS! we should be able to BURN it down using either incendiary nades or flamers, i mean flamers can be more then just weapons, they can be useful TOOLS for modifying your environment if you need to, a feature that has existed in games before this one certainly, shit ton of trees blocking your tanks? just napalm the fuckers and drive through! sometimes opening a new flank can be more valuable then using it on the enemy.
i for one think this would improve immersion and gameplay immensely while taking advantage of the fact that we're in the JUNGLE, in addition this would also increase the value of things which add to immersion (perhaps snapping of twigs as you walk, alien roars nearby to heighten the tension, motion trackers would be immensely more useful in areas your eyes arent very helpful, etc), thats just my personal opinion though.
Implementation (Optional, if you have an idea how to implement it): this would be a code issue (changing the nature of how a given tile functions) and perhaps to some extent a mapping issue (if dense jungle is more then just a wall it would need to be given extra consideration in regards to mapping)
