32 replies to this topic

[Kaeb Odellas]

So I was watching some videos of Elite: Dangerous and noticed that a ship's HUD gives each weapon its own hardpoint, which I thought was pretty cool.



I think this would be a fantastic way to increase TTK and reduce the impact of laservomit and pinpoint burst alphas. Each crosshair will have some degree of sway that intensifies with fast movement, jump-jetting, and heat levels. It isn't quite cone of fire, as the pilot can see exactly where his shots will land, but will be unable to land all of them in the same location without slowing down or cooling off. It would take just under a second for all weapons to converge on a point. Weapons would converge on the point the pilot is looking at, or they'd converge according to the target's distance, to allow for leading of a target without screwing with convergence.


Certain weapons could have better or faster convergence than others. For instance, lasers should naturally have quick convergence since they're compact, lightweight, and can be easily gimbaled, while an AC20 on a (probably) fixed shoulder mount might not have any convergence at all and simply fire straight on, with the crosshair adjusting on the HUD to account for distance changes. Missiles shouldn't have any convergence issues at all, as they would simply adjust their coursesmid-flight. Weapons mounted on an arm with a lower actuator would have faster convergence than weapons on a torso or stub arm.

It can even be used as a balancing mechanic, where certain mechs can be more stable firing platforms or be particularly well suited to firing certain weapons on the move. Weapons and quirks would of course have to be adjusted to account for this change.


Apologies if this was brought up before, but I haven't been around much the past few months.

EDIT: Just to be clear, I'm not asking for the auto-aim stuff you see in the video. Just the individual crosshairs and lack of instant pinpoint convergence.

Edited by Kaeb Odellas, 05 August 2015 - 09:26 PM.

[Hotthedd]

Brace yourself for the sh1tstorm from the "but I haz mad point-n-click skillz" crowd that believes simultaneous firing of several weapons at one time SHOULD all land precisely on the same reticle point.

[Jaeger Gonzo]

dont nerf my point&click adventure

[SmoothCriminal]

Err yes I think this has been brought up before (though in a less substantive way). Agree with your suggestion save that different weapons shouldn't re-adjust at different speeds (sounds too complex to cope with on the fly). My preference would be arms (fast convergence) and torso (slower convergence). The realignment could be evidenced by reticule bloom of each cross hair as the weapons move in their gimballed sockets.

Good luck getting this noticed in the feature suggestions area of the forum!!

[LordNothing]

easy feat of trigonometry.

impossible feat of game balance.

you actually need to make considerable effort to make the system stupid so its not op. its not hard to make any weapon intersect a target at any time, if the true capabilities of target acquisition and tracking were implemented in games, they would be very very boring. global thermonuclear war boring. you click a button and the thing you want dead instantly dies (that is unless they clicked their button first).

[Hotthedd]

LordNothing, on 05 August 2015 - 03:20 AM, said:

easy feat of trigonometry.

impossible feat of game balance.

you actually need to make considerable effort to make the system stupid so its not op. its not hard to make any weapon intersect a target at any time, if the true capabilities of target acquisition and tracking were implemented in games, they would be very very boring. global thermonuclear war boring. you click a button and the thing you want dead instantly dies (that is unless they clicked their button first).

Not in the BattleTech universe. For the past half of an eon, continuous warfare has destroyed almost all of the R&D capabilities in the Inner Sphere. All of the people who could develop these technologies (or re-develop them) have either been killed or fled the I.S. 300 years ago. Likewise, the production facilities for designing new mechs and weapons were long ago vaporized into radioactive dust. For the past 300 years, with very few exceptions, the I.S. has been copying existing technology, and trying to reverse engineer designs found in data caches from abandoned Castles Brian.

The year 3050 is the Bronze Age when compared to the Star League era.

[LordNothing]

im aware of the lore, i was more approaching it from a game design angle.

il give you a prime example: turrets. they can land their shots ct every time perfectly. if you wanted to make them more stupid, for example as if they had a human operator, you would need to throw in some intentional noise into the targeting solution to make it less perfect. my point was that while such perfect firing control is possible, it is not desirable in this (or any) game. it would result in a no skill insta-kill solution.

i want torso weapons to be on a fixed vector, arm weapons should only converge with the appropriate actuators installed. there should be no automatic lead compensation or time based convergence (weapons of different speeds fired at different times so they hit the target at the same time, modern artillery can do that), they dont belong in a mechwarrior game.

Edited by LordNothing, 05 August 2015 - 04:05 PM.

[Kaeb Odellas]

LordNothing, on 05 August 2015 - 03:20 AM, said:

easy feat of trigonometry.

impossible feat of game balance.

you actually need to make considerable effort to make the system stupid so its not op. its not hard to make any weapon intersect a target at any time, if the true capabilities of target acquisition and tracking were implemented in games, they would be very very boring. global thermonuclear war boring. you click a button and the thing you want dead instantly dies (that is unless they clicked their button first).

LordNothing, on 05 August 2015 - 04:01 PM, said:

im aware of the lore, i was more approaching it from a game design angle.

il give you a prime example: turrets. they can land their shots ct every time perfectly. if you wanted to make them more stupid, for example as if they had a human operator, you would need to throw in some intentional noise into the targeting solution to make it less perfect. my point was that while such perfect firing control is possible, it is not desirable in this (or any) game. it would result in a no skill insta-kill solution.

i want torso weapons to be on a fixed vector, arm weapons should only converge with the appropriate actuators installed. there should be no automatic lead compensation or time based convergence (weapons of different speeds fired at different times so they hit the target at the same time, modern artillery can do that), they dont belong in a mechwarrior game.

I think you misunderstood what I was asking for here. I'm not looking for any kind of auto-aim mechanic. I just want there to be some delay between you pointing at something with your center aimpoint and all of your weapons converging on that point. Having a separate crosshair or aimpoint on the HUD for each weapon would be a useful way to indicate that your weapons aren't yet ready to hit where you want them to hit that handily sidesteps the "muh skillz!" complaints that standard FPS reticle bloom would elicit.

Fixed torso hardpoints would be neat too, though not all torso hardpoints should be fixed. Weapons that can be easily gimballed would obviously not be fixed.

Convergence limits for certain weapons and hardpoints would also be interesting to see. For instance, a Jagermech's arm hardpoints probably shouldn't be able to converge perfectly at very close range. This would prevent AC40 Jagermechs from landing both shots in one alpha, and allow the devs to remove the AC20's ridiculous ghost heat penalties. This shouldn't interfere with the mech's role as a long range fire support platform.

Edited by Kaeb Odellas, 05 August 2015 - 09:32 PM.

[LordNothing]

thats one of the things you can actually do to make things more sim like. in the real world things dont just go where they are told. sensors are noisy and you cant rely on them. you need to get data from multiple sources and determine which one is lying to you the least. measuring and compensating for error with math i barely understand. in a virtual world you can with great precision align your guns with any point in 3d space and hit it. the math for that is pretty straight forward and it doesnt really have to deal with any noise aside from a bit of floating point fuzz (which is really too infinitesimal to matter at the range of scales the game operates on).

as someone who does a bit of control theory as a hobby, playing around with pid controllers and kalman filtering, i can say it is totally possible to simulate erroneous sensors and imprecise motor controllers and run those same control algorithms to make actuators chase those setpoints in a more or less realistic fashion. if this was implemented in mechwarrior there would be a bit of jitter in the convergence. the more time a crosshair is on a target a tighter targeting solution can be found (with some degree of fluctuation). players would need to get used to a degree of latency in there inputs and uncertainty in their fire control solutions.

that would probibly be taking things a little far though for the type of game and target audience, you can do a lot with simple constraints. anything out of gimbal range is simply impossible to hit. then the amount of time needed to calibrate the controllers for every mech would be absurd. its better to just use a deterministic system and call it a day. it is just a game after all.

[Kaeb Odellas]

LordNothing, on 06 August 2015 - 04:33 AM, said:

that would probibly be taking things a little far though for the type of game and target audience, you can do a lot with simple constraints. anything out of gimbal range is simply impossible to hit. then the amount of time needed to calibrate the controllers for every mech would be absurd. its better to just use a deterministic system and call it a day. it is just a game after all.

Would it though? I think there would definitely be an audience for simulation-level mech combat. Flight sims and hardcore racing sims exist after all. Why not a hardcore mech sim?

[GreyNovember]

I've only played MW3 and beyond. I don't recall ANYTHING like this in said games.

MWO doesn't feel like it's supposed to be hardcore, ultra simulation depth of this depth.

[Voivode]

I think this would be amazing. It would definitely help some of the more hardpoint limited mechs and mechs that have all their weapons on one side, which in the current state of things is detrimental. I kind of agree that maybe the arms converge significantly faster than torso weapons (with the correct actuators) so that mechs with those low mounted arm hardpoints get something of an advantage in convergence to compensate for their disadvantage in weapon height.

More than anything, though, this would make MWO feel like Battletech. That's a good thing!

EDIT: Kaeb Odellas, try pitching your idea in this thread that the community manager opened for feature suggestions. It

Edited by Voivode, 06 August 2015 - 07:40 AM.

[Spleenslitta]

I'd like to see convergence of torso mounted weaponry removed althogheter but this is a good alternative.
If only arm mounted weapons could converge i'd like it if heavier weapons converged slower.

[Kaeb Odellas]

Spleenslitta, on 06 August 2015 - 09:03 AM, said:

I'd like to see convergence of torso mounted weaponry removed althogheter but this is a good alternative.
If only arm mounted weapons could converge i'd like it if heavier weapons converged slower.

Certain torso hardpoints look like they should have even greater mobility. The Hunchback's head laser in particular looks like a turret.

[Skarlock]

Kaeb Odellas, on 06 August 2015 - 05:37 AM, said:

Would it though? I think there would definitely be an audience for simulation-level mech combat. Flight sims and hardcore racing sims exist after all. Why not a hardcore mech sim?

Because not many hardcore games in general have a big audience. If there was an audience for it, people would play it. Look at the game as it is in its current state. Look how much people complain about every single thing under the sun, no matter how unreasonable their demands are. You are now telling this same audience that plays this game "We're going to make it harder for you and easier for the guys that can put a lot of time into the game and achieve high levels of skill, because you will suck at shooting them, but they will still be as precise, if just a bit slower than they were before shooting you."

That will be the end result. The more skill intensive a game is, the more dominating skilled players become over the less skilled. Sure, TTK will go up, but the players that struggle in this game will have even less of an impact and their win rates against players of higher skill will go down significantly. I think people will just give up, and everyone will try to run LRMs and SSRMs, and that will ultimately fail to good positioning and mass ECM. So then they nerf ECM into the ground, the unskilled still lose on positioning. They nerf the map cover, and all that ends up happening is superior concentrated damage beats spread damage over multiple components.

If the goal is simply to increase TTK, you could trivially just double the effectiveness of all armor, or halve weapon damage, and double ammo counts per ton. I think implementing an idea like bizarre weapon convergence as artificial difficulty in this game would be pretty hilarious to watch new players struggle through though. But I'm a sadist, and I enjoy watching people suffer. Maybe this is why sadists shouldn't be in charge of game design...

[WhineyThePoo]

If you want the devs to listen to your ideas, twitter russ about it. Isn't that how it work nowadays?

Also, I support this.

[Kaeb Odellas]

Skarlock, on 07 August 2015 - 02:56 AM, said:

Because not many hardcore games in general have a big audience. If there was an audience for it, people would play it. Look at the game as it is in its current state. Look how much people complain about every single thing under the sun, no matter how unreasonable their demands are. You are now telling this same audience that plays this game "We're going to make it harder for you and easier for the guys that can put a lot of time into the game and achieve high levels of skill, because you will suck at shooting them, but they will still be as precise, if just a bit slower than they were before shooting you."

That will be the end result. The more skill intensive a game is, the more dominating skilled players become over the less skilled. Sure, TTK will go up, but the players that struggle in this game will have even less of an impact and their win rates against players of higher skill will go down significantly. I think people will just give up, and everyone will try to run LRMs and SSRMs, and that will ultimately fail to good positioning and mass ECM. So then they nerf ECM into the ground, the unskilled still lose on positioning. They nerf the map cover, and all that ends up happening is superior concentrated damage beats spread damage over multiple components.

If the goal is simply to increase TTK, you could trivially just double the effectiveness of all armor, or halve weapon damage, and double ammo counts per ton. I think implementing an idea like bizarre weapon convergence as artificial difficulty in this game would be pretty hilarious to watch new players struggle through though. But I'm a sadist, and I enjoy watching people suffer. Maybe this is why sadists shouldn't be in charge of game design...

I don't buy that one bit. DotA and League are both immensely complex games, and yet are two of the most popular games in the world. Both require massive time investments to achieve mere competence and even more to actually get good. Star Citizen to date has pulled in over 85 million dollars on the promise of complex space flight mechanics in a vast player-populated universe (whether they can deliver is another story).

Delayed convergence, multiple crosshairs wouldn't even be that complicated to figure out, really. It's basically your standard FPS reticle bloom, except you see exactly where your shots will go. Moving fast means your weapons are less accurate, and it takes a little while for your weapons to. That's most how most FPS games released in the past decade work.

It certainly wouldn't be hard if there was any kind of half decent tutorial system in the game, without the ridiculous noob-trap training wheel elements like defaulting arm lock, 3PV, and throttle decay to on.

[Savage Wolf]

SmoothCriminal, on 02 August 2015 - 09:45 PM, said:

Err yes I think this has been brought up before (though in a less substantive way). Agree with your suggestion save that different weapons shouldn't re-adjust at different speeds (sounds too complex to cope with on the fly). My preference would be arms (fast convergence) and torso (slower convergence). The realignment could be evidenced by reticule bloom of each cross hair as the weapons move in their gimballed sockets.

Good luck getting this noticed in the feature suggestions area of the forum!!

But that is EXACTLY how it works already. That's why you have two crosshairs!

[Hotthedd]

You have 2 crosshairs, but they each instantly converge respectively. The suggestion was that each have a bloom delay.

[Savage Wolf]

Kaeb Odellas, on 07 August 2015 - 03:23 AM, said:

I don't buy that one bit. DotA and League are both immensely complex games, and yet are two of the most popular games in the world. Both require massive time investments to achieve mere competence and even more to actually get good. Star Citizen to date has pulled in over 85 million dollars on the promise of complex space flight mechanics in a vast player-populated universe (whether they can deliver is another story).

Delayed convergence, multiple crosshairs wouldn't even be that complicated to figure out, really. It's basically your standard FPS reticle bloom, except you see exactly where your shots will go. Moving fast means your weapons are less accurate, and it takes a little while for your weapons to. That's most how most FPS games released in the past decade work.

It certainly wouldn't be hard if there was any kind of half decent tutorial system in the game, without the ridiculous noob-trap training wheel elements like defaulting arm lock, 3PV, and throttle decay to on.

MOBAs aren't complex, but they have lots of depth. It's easy to play the game but there is huge potential for mastering which, granted, becomes increasingly complex. But anyone can pick up the game and play the game with some success and knows what's going on.

Making it harder to hit your intended target just increases the barrier to entry without adding any depth. We already have plenty of projectiles that aren't instant that adds complexity, but also depth to the game. We don't need needless complexity to scare players away and leave it for the few who some reason likes to do the same thing, just harder.

And I don't get the immersive factor either. Who the hell builds giant war machines that can't shoot straight? Of course they have poured countless technicians at trying to build a mech that is easier to train pilots for and is just overall more precise. And it's perfectly possible to create torso weapons that can converge and aim

Hotthedd, on 08 August 2015 - 07:55 AM, said:

You have 2 crosshairs, but they each instantly converge respectively. The suggestion was that each have a bloom delay.

All of my mechs take time to torso twist and converge. Not much, but it's not instant. What you want is already in the game.