Bunyip Posted March 26, 2006 Share Posted March 26, 2006 Hi, spent a few hours on drop team over the past week, so here's a few thoughts. 1. Steering is clunky. The "steering wheel turn rate", ie lock to lock time can be frustraingly slow for low speed maneuvers. I'm in the UK so lucky to play on <100 ping, which probably makes this worse. Converting an analogue control to digital is always going to be a massive compromise. I'd suggest a second set of hard turn keys. eg s/d for left/right and a/f for hard left/right. Should be fun watching all the rolly polly shrikes after 100kph hard turns 2. Turret quibbles. Enemy turrets are blanket visible on the minimap and this makes it a trivial task for some on-board arty to clean em up. Secondly turret deaths count as player deaths. Score doesn't count for much in a team game but it makes for some ugly stats. 3. Some endgame chat might be nice, always good to acknowledge a worthy opponent. 4. Visible model damage. Tyres are definately one that stands out as an example of a nice to have. 5. Non-vertical Drops. Can I start a dropship pilot school? What's with all these rookies bringing 'em in vertical? Siting ducks every time. Surely an angled, curved, or terrain hugging approach would increase survivability... 6. Audio. As it stands the immersion factor is severly lacking! How about a surface/speed sound. ie tracks on snow, tyres on road, etc. Add to that a relavent engine and transmision sound. ie hover turbines take a second to wind up to full speed, and few more to wind down to idle when the "brakes" are locked. Of course the turbines would have to wind up before the tank popped back up off the ground. MBT's could have automatic sounding setups. The small wheeled vehicles would be candidates for manual transmissions. Anything would be better than the on/off engine sounds at the moment. Turret traversal, ammo reloads, gatling wind downs would add another layer. Every heavy vehicle I've had anything to do with makes a hell of a racket, and I feel this vehicle game is sorely lacking that. 7. Ammo change. I haven't noticed any delay on changing ammo type after reload. 8. Weapon/vehicle combos. Why are there no plasma armed vehicles? Where's the 76mm turrets? Why do ions only come in one size? Can MBT's not have tube launched ATGMs yet? I hope there's more to come on the retail release. Other than that it's a great game and wish you all every success! PS, Get in touch with Jon Tuffely at Ground Zero Games and license a Dirtside mod. He's got a great little tabletop that should match this engine nicely. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
inktomi19d Posted March 26, 2006 Share Posted March 26, 2006 Originally posted by Bunyip: Hi, spent a few hours on drop team over the past week, so here's a few thoughts. 1. Steering is clunky.No argument there. I wouldn't mind so much is the steering were "smart" and tried the tightest turn safe at whatever speed it's traveling. When a truck is moving at dead slow speed you want nearly every turn to be the tightest possible. Sometime when I'm not being shot at I'll need to get on a paved road and try some U-turns. My feeling is that the wheeled vehicles don't turn tightly enough, but maybe when I can see it in context of something familiar it will look right. A lot about this game doesn't feel right because the scale and speeds in other games are so wrong. The most common wheeled vehicle in the game is the Paladin, and it's freaking huge. Look at it next to an MBT sometime. Because of the wide stance, it looks like the equivalent of a humvee or something, but it's sized like a typical APC. 2. Turret quibbles. Enemy turrets are blanket visible on the minimap and this makes it a trivial task for some on-board arty to clean em up. Secondly turret deaths count as player deaths. Score doesn't count for much in a team game but it makes for some ugly stats.Jammers make the turrets invisible on the mini-map. It's pretty easy to find the ground turrets as soon as they fire anyway though. Sometimes it's useful to intentionally use turrets to clutter the enemies sensors too. I never really count on the automated defenses though, that's not what the game is about. 3. Some endgame chat might be nice, always good to acknowledge a worthy opponent.Agreed. Maybe it would be possible to chat while things are loading? 4. Visible model damage.Agreed, but I'm not that worried about it. At the distances in this game most damage would not be visible. I'm not sure how hard it would be to see damage to a run-flat or solid tire at 4 km. 5. Non-vertical Drops. Can I start a dropship pilot school? What's with all these rookies bringing 'em in vertical? Siting ducks every time. Surely an angled, curved, or terrain hugging approach would increase survivability...The vertical drops are great when you can create a clear LZ, either with a Hermes or jammers. You can drop jammers inside the protection of other jammers, creating an ECM highway straight into enemy air defenses. The first time I tried that the defenders caught on about the second time I dropped into their base, right next to the AA tower. Vertical drops kinda suck normally, but if you play the electronic warfare game they're amazing. Bots don't normally detect a dropship that's landing near a jammer unless it's within about 1km of them. If there are intervening obstacles you can successfully land within about 500m of them. You can get even closer to players if you pay attention to their turret orientation and your dropship's shadow doesn't cross them. I've landed Thor's 50m behind players that were sniping from hilltops. Half the time they'll drop right in to the same spot again, assuming that the 120 round they caught must have been a lucky shot from 6k out. Vertical drops are really great if you cover them properly. 6. Audio.Agreed, but it can wait IMO. 7. Ammo change. I haven't noticed any delay on changing ammo type after reload.I didn't notice that. You should need to reload between ammo types. I just kind of assumed that was the case, but didn't really pay attention. 8. Weapon/vehicle combos. As I understand it those sorts of things should be easily moddable. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ClaytoniousRex Posted March 30, 2006 Share Posted March 30, 2006 Converting an analogue control to digital is always going to be a massive compromise. I'd suggest a second set of hard turn keys. eg s/d for left/right and a/f for hard left/right.Has anybody tried steering with a joystick yet? I've been meaning to go to the controls tab and set myself up for steering with a joystick in the left hand while still aiming with the mouse in the right hand (using joystick buttons for most other functions) but have never had the time to play with it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
weasello Posted March 30, 2006 Share Posted March 30, 2006 I actually have a wheel setup that I was using - makes driving the Shrike pretty fun. I really enjoyed it, but: (1) The wheel is too much of a handful to properly use the mouse (2) The joystick is too sensitive for my tastes, plus my left hand wasn't designed for it I've found that setting keyboard steering sensitivity to 75% really helped. Once you "learn" how to drive it's really not all that bad. Then again, I've always had this stubbornness for mastering the keyboard controls (I fly helicopter in BF2 with keyboard, and very well at that). I'd wager that a dual-analogue stick like the consoles have would be the optimal control scheme for driving/shooting... But the rest of the interface really demands a mouse Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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