General stuff.

[yurch]

Most of these are related to my latest obsession of getting bots to pull thier weight. There are other topics, however.

1: while firing a support asset, like emp or firemission, you'll get faint circles if you point at an object on the spacebar-tacmap. This includes enemy targets you shouldn't be able to see. This is offline, not confirmed for online.

2: The ATGM launcher has some sort of problem with achieving green lock. It's possible, either through inaccurate mouse motions or the (more common) screen shaking caused by incoming explosive rounds, that the 'possibility' of green lock is totally lost until you point away and back again. It's stuck in yellow mode until you do so. Often the tone stops, but not always. Online and offline, also in demo. Easily reproducable with a shrike under fire.

3: I'm losing more friendly units in the singleplayer campaign to flipping than anything else. My units can't even seem to follow the same path as the first enemy paladin group in 'slugfest' without causing me extraordinary headaches.

4: Bots given a capture order often are stuck and will not follow simple move orders after the capture is complete. Extracting them is often impossible due to the tower, you have to move them yourself.

5: It is not possible to give bots a precise move or drop order by clicking the 'normal' world, only the tacmap.

6: Something about the command track is letting it survive immense amounts of 76mm fire on occasion. I suspect it's due to the dense (overlapping?) subsystems and the inability of that round to 'overpenetrate'.

7: Bots on advance will stop permanently at the first sight of anything. This makes it a poor command to use with distant troops cresting hills or even just enemy dropship usage (I think). Could this command be changed to allow the bot to resume movement afterwards? Further, it might be good to have the bots continue to move if the target is out of effective range, this would be very useful for 20mm units... or anything without an ion.

8: Ion units are shooting themselves (paladin and apollo, have not seen thor do this). Bots have a tendancy to kill themselves with ions combined with hull-down orders.

9: Is there a way to stack orders? Stacked advance orders, if they worked how illustrated above, would be extremely useful for giving bots acceptable behavior in planned conditions.

10: Are there any purpose to the capturable non-turreted towers (other than owning it for points in territory)? Could a long(er) range sensor be attached to one of the tower types?

11: Ion and ATGM towers have individual automated turrets with collision boxes defined but to date I haven't seen any of them destroyed. Is this intentional?

[Grappler]

All good ideas. We are gathering up all the AI suggestions to make sure that any UI change will accomodate them all.

[poesel]

I'm sure yurch easily has the highest cpm (characters per message) rating on this forum

(just kidding - I usually nod when I read your posts)

- if your engine is destroyed, you can't lock the brakes

- it would be nice if the names in he messages would be in team color (I can't always remember whos on my team or not)

- a bot from my team with the flag and a damaged engine seemed to try to give me the flag (he kept ramming me), but he didn't drop it. Was that intentional?

- ceteram censo: I'm also against that underwater firing nonsense. I actually quite like the movement and the sounds and its ok if you can get shot at (with limited efficeny), but shooting is plain silly

[yurch]

I must add, although I've mentioned it elsewhere, since it's actually more a non-demo-issue:

The rocks that are scattered through many of the retail maps have a very high invisible collision object of some sort. It does not seem to affect projectiles but it stops ion beams and rangefinders. This is bizzare and unintuitive, as players can visibly see thier target but the beams aren't hitting and the rangefinder is adjusting elevation very short.

You can reproduce or see this happening by pointing at a target at the other side of a rock or other such feature. If you can't see the target's name, the rock is obstructing the rangefinder.

[cool breeze]

I like the under water firing and think it is reasonable given the extreme velocity of these extremely dense shells. I imagine it would vaporize the water in front of the shell, thus flying through a steam bubble. I think the water visibility distance keeps underwater firing ranges reasonable. good points guys, thanks.

[Taras]

Blah, firing a cannon underwater is so wrong on so many levels. The ballistics would be completely borked. The barrel would look like a used party favor. Just shreds my suspension of disbelief.

It would make a little more sense if you could fire a micro-torpedo through the barrel the way a T-80 tank can fire ATGMs.

Not that I'd ask the devs to make such a thing, but if I were king, I'd disable all cannons and mortars any time they were below the waterline and have a delay after resurfacing before they could fire again.

[Wishkah]

Actually, I find the underwater visibility to be amusingly Disneyish - a magical undersea kingdom of bright colours and shiny light and visibility into the far distance.

Visibility of 30m underwater is something scuba divers write home about, using lots of exclamation marks - 20m is considered clear and stick a tank down there, churning up sediment with tracks and superheating water at its muzzle and you'd be lucky to see your hand in front of your face. It's rare that diving to a depth of 20m you can see the surface when you look up, whereas tearing around the Archipelago the only reason you can't see the bottom from the ground is because of the reflection of the sky.

It's dark down there too, increasing fairly quickly with depth. Those disposable underwater cameras are recommended for only down to 5 or 10 metres, not so much because of pressure considerations but just because there's not enough light for an image to capture clearly. I'd estimate that in the Archipelago a vehicle can get down to at least 30m and divers going to that depth bring a light because anything you want a good look at is going to need it.

Then there's the way colours leach with depth. It progresses along the spectrum, apparently due to Science. A spiffy fire-engine red piece of gear goes dull rusty brown pretty soon. You can notice that blues and greens are a lot more prevalent amongst diving gear than are reds and oranges, and even so such gear looks a definitely different shade underwater than it does on the surface. Those tropical fish look great in tanks, but although the undersea world can be nothing short of spectacular, it's a somewhat subtly-coloured and mysterious alien type of spectacular, rather than the bright rainbow neon living-downtown-Tokyo look of the likes of Finding Nemo.

I'm not sure what my point is. I'd imagine that adding in code to determine a vehicle's depth and shifting the visible colours along a bit as appropriate - or even just having a blanket change for being underwater - would be more work than it's worth. It's definitely WAY too bright though, with visibility far too high, and the amount of crap stirred up by doing anything should be multiplied by like a factor of ten, and take ten times as long to clear. Of course, that'd make underwater a great place to hide because it'd be nigh-on impossible to find anybody down there. But I guess that's why Bond villains like underwater as a place to hide things.

This isn't a complaint, really, more some ideas to think about or not if it's not important. Of course I can't stress enough:

DropTeam = yay.

[cool breeze]

I thought most colors were lost, but I could be wrong. Y'all seem way to focused on modern technology for my taste. The comparative to omodern long range of view can be easily explained by serious computer horse power image inhansing over a very broad spectrum (unlike our narrow nature spectrum range) and complemented with active and/or passive sonar. These vehicles have anti matter engines which are supposed to make tons of radiation, so they should be much easier to detect than modern tanks. These guns fire at about twice the velocity of our tanks, and much denser shells. The tanks are made of entirely nanoconstructed materials so are probably almost incomparatively stronger than our materials, so there should be no chance of barrels exploding because of the "denseness" of water. Y'all have seen harpoon guns work underwater, ap shells have similar dimensions to a harpoon.

[yurch]

The pressure difference caused by submersion of water is quite severe. They measure water pressure in entire atmospheres for a reason.

More "general stuffs"

1) Hovercraft stop thier rotation near instantly, unless you hold the opposing direction. Then it slows down more gradually, which is strange because this time you're 'fighting against it'. I'm not sure, but it seems they have trouble turning if all jets are not 'on' the ground - should chassis rotation really need the ground effect to operate?

2) Automated weapons such as turrets, hermes guns, and AA tower weapons all aim instantly at the target despite thier previous facing. Attacking or firing from multiple angles is useless as there is no traversal time to exploit. These weapons are almost too much of a hard counter at times.

3) You cannot tell how much to lead for (as far as lag goes) on the ion weapons. With the other shots the game prediction works well enough, but the instant-hit nature of the ion weapon destroys this. Especially while moving yourself. High speed flag chases become a rather obnoxious lead-guessing game, especially with the ion's usual total lack of effect on the target.

4) On the subject of high speed chases, is there going to be at least a modder option of enabling shooter velocity to be transfered to the projectile? Moving gunnery, while firing at stationary targets is very easy, and gunnery between two side-by-side moving targets is somewhat unintuitive.

5) Why do ATGM tubes point forward but fire thier missiles straight up?

[cool breeze]

Good points yurch! do you take notes whiile you play? I wasnt trying to downplay waters heavyness, only up play the extreme far future.

[yurch]

The "rocks" in my second post, are also static. You can cutter away the area underneath them, and I imagine crater it too. The rocks will stay.

[Monkwarrior]

Small things I found.

* when blocking the brakes it should appear in the right corner of the screen that the brakes are blocked. For some vehicles this message doesn't appear (blocking itself works). It's rather confusing when trying to move doesn't work and there is no visual confirmation about the blocking.

* Personal macro's are not saved when leaving dropteam

Greetingz, Monk.