While digging through the code untouched by man for several years, one sometimes stumbles upon interesting things. One such things is that people stink. Wherever a character steps, he marks this region with his smell (no, really). This is then used by bloodcats and crepitus to track their prey. Not that they do that a lot...
I've decided to use this for something else. I hereby redefine these marks as 'tracks'. Mercs with the Ranger trait or a specific background can now read these tracks (think of those old Wild West adventures where the Indians could read the tracks the bad guys made). If your currently selected merc has that ability, you will see these tracks:
As seen in the video, you can activate and deactivate this via calling the Overlay menu with [Ctrl] + [c].
Tracks decay over time from green to yellow, then to orange, and then they disappear.
Blood is also shown and with a higher priority. So you can actually track an enemy by the blood he spills while running away from you. It is, however, erased very fast for internal coding reasons.
There is no differentiation between your team and the enemy team, or between human and creature (there is codewise, but lets make this as easy as possible).
Tracks on roofs, in water, on paved roads and building floors are not shown. They exist, but I just decide not too. Most boots don't leave marks in concrete.
AI rangers will pay no heed to this.
Ranger settings in Skills_Settings.ini:
; Rangers can look out for tracks of people. This can be activated in the [Ctrl] + [C] menu.
; This is the maximum range at which one can spot tracks.
TRACKER_MAX_RANGE = 30
; per level of the trait, we can spot tracks at up to TRACKER_ABILITY % of TRACKER_MAX_RANGE. Values from 0 to 50, default 30.
TRACKER_ABILITY = 30
New background tag in Backgrounds.xml:
<tracker_ability>0</tracker_ability> <!-- +- % range on tracking ability, see [Ranger] in Skills_Settings.ini, 0 to 40 -->
This background was added to a few merc's backgrounds. This does stack with the Ranger trait.
Does not break savegame compatibility.
No, this will not go into any 2014 stable release patches.
This has been added to the trunk in r7646 and GameDir r2178.