[1.1.3 Release...]

An airbrake would lock on pressure loss, no?

I would guess any debate on the subject depends largely on what kind of brakes the things even use.

[New Turrets]

The box under the turret is the weak part. The top part is armored similar to the paladin turret, so hull down for the turret is finally a tactical plus. The turret carries 100/50 rounds of AP/HE. 76mm HE pretty much sucks so you probably won't see the turret fire that at anything other than infantry, shrikes, or I guess other turrets.

Originally posted by ClaytoniousRex:

This might be why you saw them finally start shooting when there was an Apollo to shoot at?

Nah, they were side shots to weak units like apollos and paladins, under 1000m. The turret was just lazily pointing the other way.

[tank destroyer]

Originally posted by konstantine:

It leads me to wonder, though: does the ion ablate differently angled armor at the same rate?

It does, I think. Therefore, the ion will probably be a bit of a weakness for this unit.

[ August 20, 2006, 08:39 AM: Message edited by: yurch ]

[Creating Models..]

I think you're right with the .obj anim thing.

Having a time converting the damn things properly, though. Everything's turned 90 degrees, and the chassis is shrunk down to some impossible size...

[some 1.1.3 bugs.]

Ctrl-leftclick works on the tacmap.

[tank destroyer]

The Mjolnir is actually fairly small, not sure if it's the most believable chassis for that sort of thing.

I do think an asymmetric equipment game is interesting, and that was my original intent behind some of these designs.

I'm not sure about that asymmetric. Might piss some players off... we do only have one server of 'em.

[New Turrets]

Originally posted by ClaytoniousRex:

Yurch, the turrets should definitely be firing at jammed units already in 1.1.3, though if they're not facing the jammed unit then a little time might pass before they "notice" it and engage it. This should only be on the order of 10 to 15 seconds in bad cases, and more typically much less than this. Doesn't seem to be working?

Hadn't noticed, although I suppose I saw one take a single shot at an infantry unit.

It's taking them quite a while to notice unjammed units, I know that much. They don't have much else to do! I had one deployed in a nice blind spot that let several units by it without firing a shot, until it finally picked up on an Apollo...

They also have this odd behavior that causes them to pop and shift around visually, both in thier turret orientation and thier anchoring. I'm guessing it is lag related.

[Creating Models..]

Pretty much how I thought it worked, okay.

As the Guy Not Doing The Modeling it doesn't quite bother me either way. These models are probably going to go through many more iterations, so I doubt you want to be converting for us all day. I'll try converting myself in the meantime.

It seems the general consensus though is that blender isn't that great. (I've never heard of .cob before playing DT...) I think the second option sounds best if only for more support for alternate formats.

[New Turrets]

It would be extremely easy to just stick other guns on the same chassis/turret with the XML, as the new turrets now appear to work just like the other vehicle mounts. Not sure how intelligently the more complex weapon systems will be fired, though.

Human controllable or not, I do wish they would fire on thier own on jammed targets, if not with some penalties.

[some 1.1.3 bugs.]

despawned?

I see shadows on the spacebarmap all the time underneath dead vehicles, is this what you mean?

[some 1.1.3 bugs.]

If you start the game with a mod loaded by default, it will allow you to join an unmodded server. If you go back and change it to base, then it won't let you connect.

Turret activity shows up in your crosshair. (the reloading circle)

[Creating Models..]

Okay, I need some help or information about how the "animations" work. Not animations as in the infantry, but for different physobjects.

For instance, we have these tags here in the Thor's file:

</font><blockquote>code:</font><hr /><pre style="font-size:x-small; font-family: monospace;"> <Animation>

<AnimationID>0</AnimationID>

<BaseModelName>MBTChassis</BaseModelName>

<TotalTime>0.6</TotalTime>

<Sound>

<Filename>Tank_Int_Idle_Steady.wav</Filename>

<Time>0.0</Time>

<Priority>50</Priority>

<Looping>true</Looping>

</Sound>

</Animation></pre>

[Dropships]

The poor apollo gets dumped as much as 4x it's height off the ground if the terrain isn't perfect enough. Gets ugly on some maps, like the ice map with the big hills.

Given dropship insane manuverings (drunken deploying dropships dancing dreamily) the only two acceptable ground weapons against it are 120mm AP, maybe 76mm, and ATGM. They're too armored and/or fast for anything else. That includes, oddly enough, the ion, which is hard to lead for lag. Luckily, with the drunken deployments, players aren't attempting to drop close... yet.

40 dropships is simply too many, and I don't think running out of them will ever be a problem in normal games. That also means losing 40 pieces of equipment to ground fire, which is basically unheard of. I just had a successful attack that only lost a single dropship.

[Occupying buildings]

Is the entering exiting handled like the extracting/vehicle entry? With those all you need to do is get one guy in, and whammo, the whole squad is there.

Could be problematic for buildings.

[Quick Question on Campaign]

If you really want to prepare yourself, the standalone games are closer to what you'd see online.

Especially if there aren't any players online.

I don't think they even let you use an ion or jammer in the 'regular' singleplayer...

[Occupying buildings]

Is it possible to target individual members (say, squddies annoying ion) or hurt them with anything besides HE? Ion, HEAT, AP, ect.

I ask in particular because this seems a bit like an instant-win button in an infantry-infantry battle. The guy who gets his infantry man to the building first pretty much controls the area - infantry don't have any way to knock down a sizable structure and probably would take tremendous losses trying to.

[Game design question re mortars]

Originally posted by ClaytoniousRex:

No, but it would for the fragments which originate from it, and it those fragments penetrating the armor that we're modelling (not the concussion of the HE).

Right - but our mortars have higher penetrations than the shrapnel. A square hit with the hurricane to the side of say an Apollo will penetrate (xxx was killed by plasma mortar) whereas a glancing hit to the side kills by shrapnel (xxx was killed by artillery).

Hurricane mortar has a whopping 275 penetration for this effect.

I guess that would mean the big fat slow shell is actually penetrating the armor before detonating, but that sounds pretty crazy to me.

Edit: I really need to hit thread refresh.

[Game design question re mortars]

Would be harder to get that top-shot with the low-angle, depending on how close you are.

Which brings me to a question: Would angle of impact really matter at all for an unshaped explosive? If I recall, the mortars in-game have a penetration that acts somewhat like a HEAT round...

[Tactics in current DT version]

If I may take a crack at it:

The 'automated guns' such as ground turrets, air defenses, fill in the gaps that a team cannot concievably fill with a mere 8-10 controllable entities. The bots serve this purpose too, to an extent, since they can relied opon for little more than shooting (and not tracking targets, pursuing or intelligently falling back).

The Hermes bipasses all of these things with its jammer. The bots have been very bad lately about noticing anything without a pipper, often allowing infantry or hermes, or other cicumstantially jammed units to move clear up to them for easy dispatch. Players scan around and respond to sounds... the bots don't. A bot also never conciously attempts to distance itself from a close threat like infantry or 20mm.

Without bots and without automated units, you're stuck with the 3-4 players on the team as the only thing that can properly stop a well-deployed Hermes, a craft which already has a defense against some specialty weapons like ATGM and Mortars, and can often protect from AA enough to allow more incoming drops.

Given, I don't know what new kinds of defenses you guys have in store for the next patch. I'm really not liking the on/off nature of jamming on thier behavior, though. Intuitively, one would think that:

1: a jammer that loud and powerful has got to be leaving some sort of telltale sign for units in the region it is active. Not necessarily WHERE, but some sort of indication.

2: There must be some form of detection powerful enough to pick up the jamming anyway. It may be a painfully obvious form of detection that draws fire, but it's better than nothing.

3: Defenses that can be completely bipassed so easily are pretty useless. If the jammer had an effect of weakening them in terms of accuracy or response time it'd be a bit more believable. (maybe simulating a manual-control by uncontrolled friendly forces)

Edit: posted too slow, looks like I got instareplied a couple times...

[Ammo, Armour & Ablation]

Originally posted by poesel71:

Yes its not realistic that a shot to the left weakens the right but this is how ion works currently or am I mistaken? Armour rating is per side too even if in 'reality' the values would differ for different pieces on one side.

I think that's how it works. I currently rationalize this by noting that ion is one of those space things. I'm open to change there.

It actually would be a hell of a lot more interesting if the ablation (even if initially set with the uniform values) was tracked by individual triangle or face. If anything, this'd be great for the ion, allowing us to up the overall ablation rate for the thing, but requiring that the player bore through a very limited spot on the armor.

You'd probably need some kind of burn or scarring texture on the surface of the vehicle.

[Ammo, Armour & Ablation]

Originally posted by poesel71:

This would also help the game balance IMHO since you wouldn't need to be that exact in armour calculation (think ATGM vs Thor turret - if you'd up the top armour just one point there would be no more turret kills (IIRC)).

Nah, you could double that piddly top armor and the ATGM would still get through.

I think the ablation works by facing right now. That means a shot to the front right of the chassis would also weaken the front left, and anything else that falls under the 'front' category. For that reason alone I'm not much a fan of this to be happening with conventional weaponry. If it were to be changed to be more locale based, I guess it would depend on the numbers. It doesn't seem too terribly realistic for a guy to waste his time emptying ammo on a target he can't penetrate.

[tank destroyer]

Yeah, they're pretty impressive.

Adz: if you want you can send me the textures/models you have now (yurch (at) theonlinegaming (dot) com) and I'll see if I can get them in-game. No need to have everything right the first time, we'll probably run into all kinds of fun scaling issues anyway.

[Dark come home!]

Originally posted by Dark_au:

You've got Yurch who is treated like a hero because he opens up the game files looking for cheap weaknesses to employ and then puts pictures up of them. To me this is reprehensible but no I'm the one with negative energy.

You mean kinda like the ones all over the dropteam homepage? Oh, I am undone!

Because simultaneously helping frustrated players out and pointing out weaknesses in our simulation just makes me the Prince of Darkness, doesn't it? I must be hoarding secret information.

Everything I find while examining the XML, is made public. I examine the XML because scenarios, ultimately, are not the only way to add content to this game.

Leave me out of your childish cheapshots. I'm not your problem.

[Preplanned battles with planned commanders]

Total Annihilation's now-very-expired boneyards gaming service did something this. It was one of the finest experiences I've ever had online.

Problem is, there were hundreds of players. I don't think we've quite got enough for that sort of thing - you're going to end up with the 'skewed' battle very often.

[Preplanned battles with planned commanders]

Am I missing something? Every time I check in, the only thing with players is the demo server...