I have seen a few threads about sneaking and this is mine. One thing I have seen in most of these threads, stealth is kind of binary. You have the proper equipment or you don't no real input to it. Mine works a little differently. You would press the ctrl key and fade out into the background. You would turn slightly transparent based on how good your gear is and rather then walking in front of objects you would be rendered behind them. The fact that you stand behind objects is the real important part here because the larger the object the more it covers you the less change you have of being detected. This means you want to pay attention to path finding in order to sneak properly. Enemies would have a line of vision extending about half a screen. Not a cone because with the size of buildings, a cone would cover everything too well. You want to give the player room to hide in the space above a NPC. When your in a NPCs view they can spot you. NPCs would have a spot check based around level and how many eyes they have. The closer you are the easier time they have and the more obscured you are the harder time they have. If your fully obscured, then you can get right next to them and they will almost never spot you. I say almost because shooting a gun, or making noise will raise the spot check of every NPC that is within earshot. Well that's my idea. Just wanted to add my idea to the sea of other people's ideas.
I like the idea of stealth placing you into the background, so that you can actually hide behind things. That's a neat little touch. I'd also like to propose something, since I recall someone mentioning that MP stealth might be a problem. After discovering and consuming pretty much anything Starbound related I could get my hands on yesterday, I had a vivid dream. I saw a party of 3 players wandering around an abandoned building. Most of the walls and ceiling had caved in, leaving some bits dangerously hanging on. As the group explored the building looking for loot, one of them suddenly gibbed, followed by the sound of a jetpack activating and a shimmer in the air. Both players start studying the ground around them, and eventually a telltale puff of pixels from the floor reveals the landing location of their would-be assassin. They both open fire to the sound of jetpack activation again, and a bolt of energy streaks past them, destroying a block beside them. They take cover underneath an overhang and watch for the landing, but after only a few moments, a burst of machinegun fire appears at point blank range, killing the second PC. The extended fire weakens the stealth of the assassin, revealing him as a black Apex in tier 6 Apex Armour. The sole survivor wasn't packing heat for something like this, so he desperately tries to jump away, activating his own stealth unit. His pixels slowly fade to the background colour, but his camo has to readjust when he stands before the setting sun, the orange and purple forcing another colour change, and his assasin, back on the trail, follows him. Fully adjusted, he turns and taps out one question before his death "How did you land? We were watching everywhere after you fired!", the speech bubble giving his position away. For a moment nothing happens, sniper fire rings out through the countryside and a spot of sky fades, just for a moment, to black. The last PC congratulates himself again on an excellent purchase; that voice thrower might have just saved his life. He raises his gun and fires manically at the swiftly blending spot, scoring a dozen hits. Each one weakens his stalker's stealth, and still equipped with sniper rifle, can't reload fast enough to respond. Basically, I had this idea that stealthed characters would blend into their background colour while stealth was active, revealing themselves only when they have to fire, take damage or when a rapid colour change becomes necessary. After jumping or jetpacking, a few "jumping" pixels of surface material would also be able to give them away, although this would necessitate a small addition to the already perfectly functioning movement/tile interaction (and I'm not sure it's necessary). A complete fade, true invisibility, is the only way to have stealth work in MP, as any other system would just see stealthed characters shot with impunity. The other thing was that I recall a mention that what characters say is revealed to everybody in hearing distance, and for some reason I have speech bubbles in my mind (maybe I was dreaming that too), so I thought that as an additional stealth "tool" you could equip a voice thrower, that would place your speech bubble at a random point on the screen, preventing you from being given away even when speaking, making it perfectly possible to coordinate a team of stealthed characters. I really want stealth to work, since it's my primary playstyle in any game that has stealth mechanics. I like to play snipers and saboteurs, and I've had lots of experiences on both ends of the virtual barrel that were amazing games of cat and mouse with really intense, awesome moments with a sniper on a nearby roof, or an exceptionally cunning and skillful target.
I like your idea but that would make more sense for someone wearing say a cloak suit nomotog's idea is a great one if you don't plan to wear a special suit or something and it could prove useful for getting away from some snipers and stuff like that
