yurch

20mm Apollo makes a very nice AA platform in the vacuum maps. One of the few uses I have for it.

Unfortunately, being a game, some of the weaknesses can be patched right up without a thought. Take the thor, add more top armor for ATGM, make it faster, lower the shrike center of gravity, less recoil on the hurricane, ect. We aren't really limited to constraints or phyisics. It is our responsibility to not just make things 'better' for the sake of doing so, and to place the constraints ourselves. I do have some chassis musings I'd like to try out, but I want them to fit in with the rest of our motley crew of units.

Does this mean other rounds will have this burnfactor as well, just starting at zero? And, do you mean that with a 10% base, this is the minimum factor for the 120mm?

76mm does very good damage to whatever subsystem it hits. Better than 120mm AP, if you consider the rate of fire. The problem is hitting. The Thor and Apollo have quite a bit of empty space. I'm having trouble importing the Apollo model, so I have nothing better than the coordinates to judge off of. It's got the same subsystem sizings as the Thor, but a weaker engine. The battery is very low - so low, that I'm guessing the target area is shaped more like a half-sphere than a full one. This might be the hardest battery to hit in the game. Aim below center-mass on this one, folks.

HE rounds are undirected blasts and have a very low penetration. They do not have enough penetration to defeat the armorings of nearly every chassis and mounted turret. Exceptions are: Deployable Turrets, deployable equipment. Tires. Shrike chassis. Infantry. ATGM mounted turrets. Ion-weakened armour. The 120mm has a shrapnel effect and will shake the screen. The other, smaller HE rounds don't have these abilities. HE does more damage then average versus structures, but be warned, many structures are still very tough. The internal damage is quite good against vehicles if you can manage penetration. Combat wise, HE rounds are generally too inaccurate and too underpowered to justify thier deployment. Accuracy will be an issue against fast or small targets like infantry, deployables, and the Shrike. The 120mm is of particular interest, though, as it can be used as an initial shock weapon against Paladins and Shrikes to destroy tires and possibly their ATGM launchers.

Oh, how I've derailed this one. At any rate, the Apollo might need looking at. There's even a space between the turret and lower hull that the driver name tracething goes clear through. I'm also wondering if the battery is too low to be intuitive.

The mercury has terrible front armor. The cutter is odd, the engine is in the high back and the battery is in the low middle. You can kill the engine by arcing over the shovel, and the battery by going underneath. It didn't get the additional ammo given to the other 20mm carriers, and can run out very fast in an infantry battle. I don't think it's quite fair to demand huge changes to the chassis designs. If I recall these models are from another source - really, the best we should be going for is an accurate internal arrangement, first. If we're messing with models, we may as well make new units instead. We're also using many of these vehicles for roles they obviously aren't intended for, like the paladins in close combat...

Actually, if you want to get technical, it probably wouldn't be - otherwise all that kinetic energy on the firing end would be doing worse. The 76mm is a very good indicator of what subsystem you're hitting. It's fragmentation is pathetic; you need to hit the subsystem directly in order to kill in any reasonable number of shots. This round can be blocked by other subsystems, however. You can kill the Thor battery in 3 shots with the 76mm. The apollo battery is located extremely low in the chassis. If it took you 15 shots, you probably weren't really hitting it.

"Kill" is a goofy term. There's plenty of targets the Abrams has shot where the entire crew gets out alive enough to surrender. If the turret is stuck, or the engine is out... that might be it for the crew. There isn't always a spectacular brewup involved, it's just that something breaks. It seems most problems people have with shooting a target is that it shoots back. Everyone aims for the chassis nowadays because of the battery, but there's nothing in the chassis that can stop the weapon from working at 100% functionality. This is why I suggest a gunner subsystem in the chassis. Going to further extremes, units like the apollo or paladin are obviously storing the majority of thier ammo in the chassis. An ammo subsystem, much like the gunner subsystem, should probably be located in the chassis as well. Thor's large turret advantage is that the ammo is located away from the crew...

With the burnfactor, the chance of surviving 9 120mm AP rounds is something like 38 percent. This is if you avoid doing subsystem damage at all. Are you sure you're penetrating? Are you hitting tires instead? Where are you hitting? This is the left side of the chassis internal diagram for the hermes, other paladins are similar: The only thing that will 'kill' a vehicle is destruction of its engine or battery. 25% chance on the engine destruction, 100% chance of the battery. Light green is the engine, light blue is the battery. It's very rare that either subsystem will survive two AP rounds that pass near the center of the target areas, and it's very possible to hit both at once. If you're impacting near the yellow circle, you won't do much damage with any weapon. The engine is a very big target, and very easy to disable. I recommend attacking this for your first shot. It will make subsequent shots (if even necessary) easier.

I wouldn't say so at all. 120mm AP is one of the easiest rounds to score penetration with, and in many situations is the only weapon that can do so. It's sporting a 10% burnfactor, and is one of the few weapons with the overpenetration property, allowing it to do damage to more subsystems at a time. HEAT rounds also have overpenetration, and are fantastic for putting on the pain. In situations of those often too-necessary close-range attrition battles that involve enemy Thors, I choose the Apollo KC-H. It's faster on the ground, so you get get more units in there in a shorter amount of time. Thor front armor doesn't save it from the 120mm AP round. The paladin isn't tougher than the Apollo. They have similar armorings and subsystems, but the Apollo has by far one of the better turret protections, smaller subsystems, and no tires to lose. The Apollo has a turret mounted very far back, and this can be used to your advantage. Put a piece of cover between you and the target, pivot at a slight angle, and reverse until you can just see the target. The enemy won't be able to see anything else but your turret and an awkward glancing shot at your side armor. Multiple teammates firing in this manner from different angles is absolutely lethal. As good as any weapon is, if your survival depends on killing the opposition first, then you're using the wrong tactics. This is a total mistake. It's too easy to get comfortable in a multiplayer game where the maps are the same every time - don't let it happen. The 6 second reload time is something you should be accounting for. There is no reason you should be sitting in an Apollo exposed to fire waiting for that cannon to reload.

They aren't space vikings without horns. It's definitely the lack of horns that's the problem here. (horns) I think this could be made part of the proposal. Perhaps even give one side's infantry 14mm single-fire rifles instead of the rapid 10mm.

Wow. Not what I was expecting. Hope this doesn't limit development to the original too much though...

Huh. I guess that could be used to make the Tron thing or something if you knew enough about the vars involved. Any hooks along these lines that could be added for total and excessive abuse of particles?

There's a number of these things in the /data directory. Is there anything to be done with them?

What about the object burn that was fixed as well? It was burning Thor chassis from the front...

Hey now, the viper's a real bitch to hit, especially if it's hovering above your firing arc. Last thing I need is hotshot viper pilots trying to pick me up.

Yes. It stopped the round "early" enough to leave you half alive without any tires and probably with one less teammate. It's not just artillery, either. Without point defense, the ATGM would utterly dominate. I know the wargamers instinct is kicking in, but some of our play mechanics have to be a bit different from full on simulation in order to make things work. If a minor compromise must be made, point defenses could be changed from removing projectiles to affecting them. Instead of full vaporization, the point defense could take chunks out of the projectiles, prematurely detonating explosive munitions and hurting the penetration ratings of the now-malformed AP projectiles by some percentage. The end result probably wouldn't be much different, though, except for the very lightly armoured entities. [ August 08, 2006, 03:23 PM: Message edited by: yurch ]

A common variation on CTF in FPS games is to switch the spawn location for each team but leave the flags in the same area. In dropteam's case, you could allow a team deployment time for a defense around the enemy flag. Not sure if it'd be too much different from a standard game, the bots tend to congregate in this manner already.

The .cob files are TrueSpace models, which you can use with Caligari's Truespace or Blender. Blender is free. I don't think I particularly like either of 'em from what I've seen, but then again I can't model worth a damn. No idea how the animation files are used, or how skinning and the like works. More information would certainly be appreciated.

Well, there are some interesting questions that this raises, such as: Why we aren't picking up units that are 'killed' otherwise? why aren't we picking up enemy units for quick and embarrasing capture? The kill thing is largely a practical concern, not really one of fluff. The scoring is supposed to change soon anyway, 'killing' an inanimate object is a weird concept. It'd be kinda silly having the flag carrier dead on the ground with no crew, but it's still holding onto that flag...

Confirmed on magic flying paladin. It seems the client is rendering deep blast holes that the server doesn't have. These seem mainly to occur on the borders of areas that are unblastable, like the central base in raid and many of the roads on other maps.

What? First of all, this vehicle does not carry a point defense. The rotary gun is fired by the player in bursts like the 20mm. The missile only engages Dropships, Vipers, and Galaxies.

I have a reload time and possibly a 'pool' count(what does this do, have a pool of missiles to fire? Are they reloaded independantly?), and that's about it. I'm not too sure of the exact behavior of the AutomatedGun type objects.

Doh, and I had just posted the other thread. Even then, it's probably a bit easier to breach them then that - The AP round is going through it to hit the subsystems behind.