That's Lit
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If you got 3 mins, please at least browse through the page, it'll answer a lot of questions and maybe
save you some time and trouble.
The mod is about reducing non-skill-issue death. It does makes the game easier, but can be balanced
with SAIN and loadout mods giving bots NVG & Flashlights. Check "Notes" and "Recommended Mods".
(This=No Bush? NO. This+No Bush? OK. This + SAIN? GOOD. Do not turn off any No Bush for this...Use
both. Because people ask.)
The mod is known to be heavy. The reason is the extra camera from the Brightness module which is
responsible for making bots affected by darkness/brightness. With Brightness disabled, other features could still
enhance bots reaction for you.
Let's define unfair: When your bullet hits or whizzes past a bot, it knows your exact
position. They can see you perfectly fine in the dark as long as you are within its vision range. They don't care
how dense are the foliage and grasses around you.
Yet we
struggle to locate bots with our human eyes.
This is why That's Lit exists: in SPT, we no longer play against human players, bots need to make human-like
mistakes just like how real players do.
That's Lit let AIs overlook you when you are blended in the shadow, or spots you faster when you are lit up by
lighting. Imaging ratting in Night Factory?
It also allows you to traverse the fields through grasses and bushes without always getting engaged from afar.
Imagine to prone in the Woods?
Additionally, randomness is applied to AIs vision check, so they are no longer machines which 100% spots you in their
configured distance or 0% out of range.
The goal is to give bots vision restrictions and imperfect reaction similar to human, so you can sneak around in
night time without always getting spotted by bots from a distance, dash into trees and plants to interrupt bots'
aim, or maybe get surprised by the fact that, bot no longer shoot at the very first moment you pop out of cover.
By default
2 meters are displayed at the top left corner for you to learn the mechanic, and they can be disabled.
The first is brightness meter showing how dark (left) and how bright (right) you are, the second meter (factor) tells
you how much AIs are actually affected by your brightness. Factor value is just squared Score. In other words, the
second meter is the final effectiveness of the first meter.
The meters only give you a rough idea about the impact of your brightness, ingame the bots are affected individually
according to their positions, directions or other conditions.
To directly feel the effect of That's Lit, just go to Night Factory and look at the meters as you move, or sit in the
darkness and wait for innocent AIs coming to you.
The mod is developed with SAIN and Realism, it works fine without them, but the default experience could feel easier
if your setup is different.
It's very important to have a loadout mod that properly gives bots NVG or Flashlights in night
raids to keep the game balanced.
The
positive and negative impact from the mod is fully configurable, so when you feel the game becomes too
easy maybe adjust those to your liking, but I suggest try harder SAIN presets or hardcore mods like Realism, before
tuning the mod, because the mod is more like a post-processor which is based on vanilla and other mods.
Some
setting adjustment is required for SAIN, Check "Recommended Mods" below.
Keep reading to get the most out of the mod.
Explanation
In short: The mod delays bots reaction, in a way that how a human would see you but fail to recognize you.
Most parts of the mod are about modifying one value called SeenCoef, which determines how long the an AI
needs to have you in their vision to recognize you, in other word, time to visual confirmation.
The SeenCoef is modified by some calculation with all these factored in:
- The mod factors in all sorts of data to adjust AIs, minor mechanics are not listed. Direction, distance, height,
indoor/outdoor, weather, season, devices/goggles/scopes, movement... A lot of stuff could have a impact on the
gameplay.
- Time and cloudiness determine the ambience lighting in raid. Lighting matters a lot! Try to sneak in shadows and
avoid lights.
- This also means weathers now affects gameplay! Sunny days are much brighter
than cloudy days and makes you more visible, thus you'd prefer cloudy days for low profile raids.
- In the brightest hours of clear nights you could be as visible as day time raids of normal weather.
- When outside, you will want to stick to shadows, especially in the
brightest hours (clear days&nights). It helps.
- Top half of some Ground Zero skyscrapers do not have proper colliders thus Ambience Shadow check
is not working stably for these. This only mess with you if you are not covered by nothing else
or the bottom of the skyscrapers. (Maybe Streets have the same issue too, not tested)
- Some balance changes are applied in winter raids, and overall makes you slightly easier to be spotted.
Try to avoid empty snowy ground.
- Getting lit up by any lights including flashlights, gun flashes or thunder, will hinder your stealth, especially
when the lighting is unstable.
- Active flashlight or laser is very likely to expose you (including IR if the AI is using NVGs)
- A lot of the features are much less effective with flashlights on,
some even get impacted by lasers. Try to toggle them wisely!
- AIs using NVGs are quite unaffected by darkness, especially at close distance. If the player is in really dark
areas, their NVGs will be somewhat less effective.
- AIs using Thermal goggles are pretty much unaffected, and can actually spot the player faster.
- Taking stims like SJ9 actually nullify this and grants you stealth against them.
- AIs using Night Vision scopes and Thermal scopes can ignore your stealth, given you are in front of them,
especially when the bot is not moving.
- Forest blending: Staying close to foliage grants a small chance for AI vision check to fail from
afar.
- Requires the nearest foliage to be between the AI and you (effectiveness scale down with the relative
angle up to 90 degree).
- It's configurable up to 5 candidates instead of just the nearest foliage, which can helps you
against multiple bots from different directions
- By afar I mean this has no effect for AIs within 10m, and the effectiveness
gradually scales up by distance up to 110m. (It's a low curve, much weaker at close range, only 25%
effective at 50m but reach 100% at 110m)
- AIs have a chance to overlook players up high, especially when the player is in low poses.
- There's a small chance for bots outside to fail spotting players inside. Does not work when the bot is looking
straight toward the player, or at closer
distances.
- "Inside" is defined by BSG. Proper buildings with walls and ceilings usually count... of course, there
are weird exceptions.
- There's a possibility AIs will continuously overlook when you hide nicely inside foliage, even at close distance, just like how we can rat in
bushes on live.
- You may still become exposed anytime, especially when they get close or turn to you. Don't feel too safe
in there.
- Different foliage have different characteristics, different poses may be required for a foliage to take
effect, and the effectiveness may vary against AIs at different heights.
- This even applies to short trees or tall bushes, while they are usually useless against AIs at close or
maybe mid range, It's not a bad idea to stick to foliage as much as possible,
It does has an effect against AIs far away.
- Preview
- Grasses are now proper visual covers, surrounding grasses contributes
to AIs overlooking you.
- You can actually get close to enemies without being noticed in day time by crawling through dense
grasses.
- The only thing to note is only grasses in the direction to the AI within ~3.5m participate in the
calculation. Otherwise, common sense applies.
- Warning: there are some rare exceptions (ex: the plant in the
center), these are probably decorations manually placed by BSG. They are not rendered by the terrain
detail system so are not detectable.
- Distance matters. Most of the features are more effective to AIs far
away from you. Once you are spotted, you lost the distance bonus and will need to get out of the sight for a
short while to regain the bonus.
- For AIs at 110m+ away you need to stay out of sight for about 1.5 seconds; the required time is much
longer for closer AIs. If the AI is actively targeting you, it'd take longer.
- Physical obstacles are always better than grasses and foliage. If you are caught off guard and really
have no choice but some nice dense grasses around you, you can try to prone and hope it works.
- Player and bot movement are applied as final modifiers.
- Sprinting bots are less likely to spot players not in front.
- The player will be spotted faster by movement speed, unless it's really dark.
- Bots staying still will spot the player faster.
- Like SAIN's Personality system, That's Lit has a caution mechanic that diversify bots' immunity
against some mechanics.
- 1 or 2 bots out of 10 have better resistance, they are defined to be cautions and are less likely to
overlook the player in stealth.
- 3 to 5 bots out of 10 have weaker resistance, they are defined to be careless and are more likely to
overlook the player in stealth.
- To simulate bots remembering your presence, many mechanics are greatly nerfed if the bot has seen you recently,
or has seen you at the same spot. Keep moving!
- By
default, all the features don't affect bosses (optional). Bush Ratting does not work for bosses even
if the option is turned on, for balance reason.
TL;DR: Out of
fights, utilize the environment and choose path wisely. When engaged, be strategic and flexible, try to stay out
of sight as much as possible... When you pop up, you kill.
The mod also include some small patches to make bots more reasonable:
- Bots' aim will be delayed if they encounter you when sprinting, because in vanilla they sometimes head,eye us at
the first moment they end inertia slide, while we players can't even ADS when sprinting.
- In situations a bot is told to "see" you but it's actually not facing your way, by a chance That's Lit will
cancel the visibility. Instead, the bot will be told it's spotted from the player's direction, so it may finds
covers first instead of instant returning fire,
- If that doesn't happen, there's still a fallback chance for it to happen if it's a surprise attack (the
bot haven't seen you for quite a while and you are far away)
- Basically, this helps bots to behave like human being clueless when surprise attacked.
- Compensation to bots vision distance to at least a reasonable amount:
- When the ambience is very bright
- When the ambience is dark but the player is lit up
- When the player is in the dark but the bot is using NVG
- When the bot is using Thermal goggles
- These compensations are especially important with SAIN, because it scales down bots' vision distance
simply by time and weather. Vision distance decides whether vision check happens, this means, no matter
how much the player is lit up, bots remains unable to see the player if the distance exceeds the SAIN
modified value. The patch balances out SAIN's vision distance scaling.
- When the Brightness module is disabled, an optional fluctuation to visual confirmation is applied (optional,
enabled by default). For the most part there will not be noticeable difference, only that you may get lucky or
unlucky.
- Bot aim point is forced to randomly jump when blind firing. This is because I got shot in the head from the
sawmill (Woods)... and I was at RUAF Gate.
That's Lit
is unlikely to conflict with other mods. The mod only modifies specific values out of the whole AI
system, it does not add or change AI behavior pattern. An analogy would be... Given a formula A+B,
That's Lit changes the value of B instead of makes it A+B+C or B+C.
Notes
- AIs don't always rely on their vision to detect you, especially with SAIN installed, they may act in response to
noises you make.
- An unintended interesting side-effect of the mod: Because vision checks are performed per body part, with the
randomness from That's Lit, somehow head,eyes is reduced as a result (my personal observation).
- It's well known that That's Lit takes away some fps especially on weaker CPUs. I've seen all sorts of feedbacks,
your mileage may vary. Check "Performance" below for more info.
- If you set your games to have a lot of bots, performance issue is
unavoidable. Check "Recommended Mods" for mods to control bot spawning.
- Night Factory is a very special experience (With brightness module on). It's a dark hunting ground... only
shadow walkers survive.
- You don't need NVGs to run Night Factory.
Installation
Decompress the zip file into SPT folder. Bandizip or 7zip is recommended.
Configuration
...is provided through regular F12 menu. If That's Lit is not listed there then it's not in correct folder.
Maps
All maps are supported, but Brightness module is disabled on Day Factory and The Lab because it's bright and visible
everywhere in these maps and it'd be a waste of fps.
Compatibility
Custom lights, lasers, Night Vision/Thermal Scopes,
Goggles
...can be
supported through thatslitcompat.json files. It's simple and intuitive to add compatibility, check
out the default and blank thatslitcompat.json files.
If the gear is not defined in any thatslitcompat.json, you don't get debuff when you leave custom
lights/lasers on, and bots don't get buffed by custom scopes and goggles.
So yes, you won't lose anything with unsupported custom items, it just opens up opportunities to cheese which I am
personally not a fan of.
Mods substantially changing game world and
visual
Needless to say, mods or reshade setups that make the scenes look much brighter, remove darkness or drastically
change the presented visual, will make the experience inconsistent.
For example, if you play with a mod that make the game looks (visually) bright everywhere, you may feel bots are
unreasonably weak when your character is in a "dark" area. Basically anything that only change the visual instead of
the actual game world will have similar issues.
On the other hand, for example, the GrassCutter mod just turn off the whole terrain detail system thus all the grass
data are not provided anymore, so it's fine.
Recommended Mods
- SAIN
- Try harder presets (I'd say just crank up at
least 1 tier of SAIN preset). Bots reaction time can be much worse when under the effect of That's
Lit.
- I Like Pain is a nice choice. And I actually recommend Death Wish if you want a true
versus human experience. Every encounter is a showdown... And you gain upper hand
by perform correct movement and concealment.
- Basically, SAIN difficulty decides bots' best performance they clearly see you. That's
Lit decides how bad they become when you utilize the mechanics.
- Recommended preset: PMC
Terminators
- Latest tweaking recommendation (Tested with 3.9 I Like Pain without Realism):
- Optional: Adjust night vision modifier in General
- Look - Time Settings when you feel bots are blind in nights. Try increase
0.1~0.2 at a time.
-
Tweak Not Looking At Bot Settings: SAIN
now nerfs bots when you are not facing them, this is a very comfortable feature but could
make the game too easy especially when stacked with That's Lit, disable or adjust these to your
liking:
- Tweak Vision Speed settings:
- For movement: You need to choose
one. Stacking both will results in overly buff/debuff against
sprinting players.
- That's Lit's implementation is balanced around That's Lit enabled gameplay. It
factors in vision angle, speed, poses and brightness.
- SAIN's implementation scales the vision time by your speed.
- That being said, in actual gameplay it's not necessarily better than SAIN's
implementation, it's your call.
- You can disable it or adjust it if you
turn on Advanved settings. By default bots takes 50%
time to see you when you sprint fast.
- For Elevation modifiers,
it's fine to leave both enabled, but you can tweak if it's too much
for you. There's some difference between how That's Lit and SAIN use
elevation to affect bot vision, and That's Lit does not makes higher bots see faster, so
it's not a full overlap. From my playtest, it surprisingly works alright with
both at default values.
- Tweak Peripheral Vision:
- In That's Lit, the angle difference between the direction from bot to
you and
the bot's vision direction is used only to scale the impact separately
in each
mechanics. In SAIN, it's used to simply scale the vision time regardless of
situations.
- It seems alright in my playtests, but if you feel like bots are not aware enough
in
their surrounding, you can disable it or play with the
advanvaed
settings.
- START_ANGLE: the default 30 means when it's effective when the bot is
looking
away, starting from 30 degree
- REDUCTION_COEF: the default 2 means at the bot type's max visible angle
(usually
75~90 degrees), the bot takes 2x time to spot you.
- For Pose modifiers, you can disable or tweak
if lowering pose is too effective.
- In That's Lit, your pose is used to scale the impact separately in
each
mechanics. In SAIN, it's used to simply scale the vision time
regardless of situations.
- Headshot Protection: Headshot Protection
is much less needed with That's Lit. Due to a side effect of the introduced
randomness, headshots happens much rarely with That's Lit.
- That's Lit contains an optional patch that when a bot is close to the player, it
gets a chance to ignore SAIN's No Bush ESP, so bots won't be blind at meters away
just because it or you are touching a bush. DO NOT COMPLAIN ABOUT BUSH TO Solarint WHEN YOU
HAVE THIS ENABLED.
- SWAG+DONUTS
- Configure DONUTS to load the starting-pmcs-only or similar
presets, so you get a live-like experience and better performance
- DONUTS now spawns only "normal" tier AI by default, so all same bots have
average abilities. Find "PMC Difficulty" and "Scav Difficulty" and tweak
them to your liking. I use asonline because I like
randomness and variation (which is why That's Lit exist), asonline
randomly configure bots ability from all options, this plus SAIN
personality system gives a mixed bag of AIs.
- The mod has a nature of keeping bots near you, as it despawns bots far away
to prevent CPU being wasted on bots you'll
never meet.
- It's not intended, but with newer SAIN, which make bots smarter and
hear all sorts of sounds you make, there are inevitable side
effects:
- You can't really clear out a zone, bots will keep coming,
this is extremely noticeable in ULTRA.
- It makes you feel like EVERY scav has a death wish and are
willing to get you instead of running for their lives. This
does not make sense to me.
- From my personal experience with full Realism, this easily gets out
of hands.
- After enabling Bot Hard Cap, the game is fixed for me. It should be
noted that
I'm running default Realism (all features on). The author
of DONUTS plays Realism with increased health, which is also a way
to
balance it out.
- If you are going to turn on Bot Hard Cap, remember
to also check out Hot Spot Spawn Boost & Hot Spot
Ignore Hard Cap.
- Needless to say with the option enabled raids are quieter
than with out, especially on bigger maps. Because bots are
naturally distributed across the whole map instead of kept
together. Depends on bots movement, both chill and hot raids are
still possible.
- Questing Bots
- It makes bots to actually go to places where real players would go for
questing, giving your questing trips a twist.
- It makes the whole raid much more busy and unpredictable. Clearing out an
area no longer means the area is safe now, you never know when a bot would
come or pass by.
- It's known to be a heavy mod just like That's Lit, try enable the AI limiter
option to reduce the performance overhead.
- Looting Bots
- Realistic bot looting behavior; let your prey brings loot to you.
- I recommend turning on Sight Checks except for containers, so they don't
magically get attracted to loots & corpses.
- Realism
- Your mileage may vary but I play with all Realism features enabled and enjoy
the extra challenges with balanced bots reaction from That's Lit
- Besides, It contains a Loadout system that gives bots proper loadout based
on map/time. (Do not use with other Loadout mods)
- Warning: Realism is a challenging
experience! Do not just install Realism without reading through the
description first. Many people instantly regret and
had to go through restoring from profile backups.
- Softcore
- The economy overhaul transform the game from simple "No I can always buy
this with cash" to "Hmm this could be useful".
- This combined with Realism's hardcore flea market feature
creates a flavorful experience and works very well with That's Lit.
- NVGs are rare asset but low level bots don't have access to NVGs
too, so overall a very balanced experience.
- Make sure to follow Realism's compatibility instruction.
- Any Loadout Mod that gives bots NVG & Flashlights in night raids.
- Do not use any along side Realism's loadout changes.
- Raid Overhaul
- The random blackout event spices things up with That's Lit.
- It's a feature rich mods but very configurable.
- The "Raid Start Events" option randomly open/close doors and lights on raid
start, which is very interesting for night raids.
- (Not a mod) Lossless
Scaling: a software providing Frame Generation technology.
- An alternative way to deal with low fps from CPU bottleneck. Requires idle GPU power.
- On the other hand, Upscaling helps with GPU bottleneck, which is
rarely the case for SPT.
- The Frame Generation feature tries to generate fake predicted frames between
real frames on the fly with your GPU.
- This means: up to 3x fps, with input latency and ghosting of hard-to-predict
stuff on screen like UIs. Take it or leave it.
Performance
- TL;DR: Only Brightness module cost
considerable FPS.
- Brightness module use an additional camera to observe the player, this cause
some unavoidable fps loss, the number depends on the CPU, some lose 5, some lose
20... Some even said it improves the performance retardadothinking
- If you don't care about night raids,
you can disable Brightness module, all other features still
work.
- On my end (Ryzen 5800x), turning it off yields about 1.9ms frame time in
Woods, which can be translated to roughly 70->60 fps.
- Starting every raid, the mod reads and caches terrain details (most are
grasses), this process is sliced into pieces and only takes up a tiny bit of
time per frame. Once the caching is done, it won't cost any frame time.
- The mod periodically checks grasses/foliage around the player, but these works
are nothing to any modern CPU.
- Quite a lot of math is performed to combine all the available data and calculate
values to apply per bot, these works are only performed for bots who is in
range, and math is nothing to modern CPUs.
- Let's
just say most of performance cost
comes from that camera. If you are interested you can turn on Debug
Info and Benchmark optinos to take a look, the time spent on That's Lit's code
path is negliable. Unfortunately the camera is a game engine thing and not
measurable by That's Lit.
Fun facts
- What we see in game is not what is actually observed by cameras. The presented
visual is heavily processed, raw cameras would observe a much darker and paler
scene.
- The first person character got no thorax (for real, you are just a running pair
of arms and legs), so a light that should have be projected on the thorax can
not be observed.
- The above 2 combined, is the reason why the light detection can't be die
accurate. But thanks to the countless hours put in, current system works good
enough.
- I knew nothing about how modding works for this game, like even how mod files
should be organized and how BepInx works, so I just downloaded Solarint's SAIN
then removed most his stuff and started to work on it. In the begining I also
read SAIN's code to locate AI stuff in EFT codebase, so a lot thanks to
Solarint.
Story
The very begining of That's Lit
Buy Me Bubble Tea
The mod is not technically advanced at all... it's pure labor. For example, one of
the biggest update was a 90+ dedicated hours work. Basically I need to endlessly
repeat the process of tweaking the code and playtesting to make AI vision human but
balanced.
If you enjoy the mod and want to support, consider a small donation.
I develop mods only because I want something improved in games I play, so it's not
like it would encourage/discourage the development 
But it'd indeed help and allow
me to continue assisting with some family health issues at home. It's not a matter
of life and death though, so only if you are feeling generous, here's the donation
link: paypal.me/badevstudio or patreon.com/BAStudio72
