Ok I have heard a couple of theories:

1) It works by sound

2) Goes by weather or not the alien is cloacked

I really want to know how it works?

See I don't think it goes by sound becasues people say to me motion doesn't work when they walk, however I still see slow moving blips which indicated to me that they are walking, Also peole think that silence negates motion tracking? I don't think so.

Sensory make sense to me, when alien is cloaked doesn't show up, running aliesn show up becasue cloaking doesnt work while running.

So which is it?

It shows all MOVING aliens not hidden by a sensory chamber. Even turning can make them show up.

Motion Tracking

Does what it says on the tin, tracks motion. Dunno whether it would be possible to make a sound detector, tho you may as well use your ears.


-- Didnt know turning makes them show up though, thats interesting actually, and annoying

ANY cloaked aliens will remain hidden from MT.

Erm, cloaked aliens on LoS stay hidden but ones behind wall do show up. So even you walk in vent with cloaking skulk, if there gl near, say hello to grenade.

Yes if its SC, but just cloaked alien, using the cloaking trait.

Never knew turning gave you away, explains why I've fallen victim to many a grenade, *sigh*. Well, good to know,

So we are all agreed the counter to motion is to reamin cloaked?

Not exactly... the 2 ways to stay off MT are:
-Stand still and dont walk/run/turn
-Be within the cloaking range of a sensory chamber

Simply being cloaked does it.



And the whole "Don't move" argument isn't really a counter to much, you're not accomplishing much by sitting around.

Alot of people say that Sensory chambers block MT. The game says it does, I said it does, but it recently came down to a test. We were playing ns_tanith and decided to end-game hide in the vat of chemicals in Cargo (outside of Fusion Hive). Interesting thing about it is that you can't hear anything inside if you're outside, so we didn't need MCs for Silence. We opted for Sensory to hide us from MT, but we got sieged right away. I asked the marines how they knew we were in there and they said we showed up on Motion Tracking, and they didn't have an Obs anywhere near there.

Maybe it's a glitch because we were "technically" outside of the map, but this is one time when MT saw right through Sensory chambers. We were standing right next to them, too. :/


[Edit:] Oh, and you can still move without showing up on MT. Just hold Shift (or whatever your "Walk" key is) and you'll move slowly. You won't break Cloak while using this either and you won't make TOO much noise. Very effective. Just don't wander too close to an Observatory, because those will mark you if you're close and behind a wall.

I'd like to get a clear answer on this, as it's rather important. Does holding the walk key keep you off motion? Non-SC cloaking? Sitting there and TURNING? (that one is a new one for me) Someone has to know for sure.

If you don't have cloaking you will show up, even when walking, yes.

Simple think about the name. MOTION (aka movement) tracking (or a tracker)
so if you move you'll be shown, the counter is CLOAK when from SC or from UPGRADE.

I thought the question was HOW it worked, like an explanation just to give it some basis in reality (not that NS has anything to do with reality ).

It's funny though how a motion tracker wouldn't detect something cloaked. The NS manual doesn't go much into detail on how it works, so we only speculate. As I recall from the Aliens movie, the motion tracker works by measuring changes in air pressure, which happens when something moves (or generally with sound anyway).

Thing is, the cloak, according to the NS manual, is the effect of changes to pigmentation on the alien's skin, as if it were a computer screen. Why wouldn't the observatory detect motion (changes in air pressure) of something just because it's visually camouflaged?



Not that I care.

As to the gameplay-related question of WHEN it works, I think it doesn't detect cloaked and aliens that are not moving. I didn't know about this 'turning' thing, I'll have to make tests to be sure, unless someone here is kind enough to make these tests for us and post the results here

turning doesn't trigger mt.