58 replies to this topic

[DevilJade]

Dishevel, on 02 April 2013 - 06:24 PM, said:

The motors are hot. the parts that look the same as the snow are the same temp as the snow.
Mechs have fusing reactors. They make a lot of heat.
In fact they have these things all over their chassis to dump that heat to the outside world.
These are called heat sinks. The heat sinks on a mech would glow whiter than the body panels separated from the engine by air.
So ... Still ... I am right.

And did you read "LOW HEAT LEVELS"? Get a SS of a mech at 80%+ heat and show me how it's the same color as the terrain please.

[dal10]

Quxudica, on 02 April 2013 - 06:28 PM, said:

Because it made it incredibly easy to see mechs all the way across the map - making the other vision modes more or less irrelevant and the most competitive people spent the vast majority of their time in thermal vision.

this is why my stalker has a flamer, i shoot it in peoples faces and blind them.

[tecnorobo]

Hey, at least your mechs and snow don't look like rainbows in heat mode.

[Shinikaru]

DevilJade, on 02 April 2013 - 06:19 PM, said:

Or maybe ambient temperature effects the outside of vehicles? Lets look at a few examples.








A mech at low heat levels is not going to shine like a beacon in the night against any terrain.

Man I love science. You got it right, Perhaps a slight "white" increase in wherever a mechs ENGINE is located, and if they were feeling spanky a dynamic to have areas on the mech that discharge weapons both increase/decrease in whiteness with fire (heat for grey scale).
But basically, being a new englander myself I'd have to be some drunk to stick my tongue on the door of my car even if i'd just driven it for an hour in the middle of january. Sure the hood is hot, but the body is not.
They actually got it pretty close to reality, they only ignore the engine compartment.

[DevilJade]

Here I saved you the trouble. Short clip of Alpine Peaks at start of match, hunchback is shooting off a few lasers and watch how he glows.

[MentalPatient]

Shinikaru, on 02 April 2013 - 06:42 PM, said:

Man I love science. You got it right, Perhaps a slight "white" increase in wherever a mechs ENGINE is located, and if they were feeling spanky a dynamic to have areas on the mech that discharge weapons both increase/decrease in whiteness with fire (heat for grey scale).
But basically, being a new englander myself I'd have to be some drunk to stick my tongue on the door of my car even if i'd just driven it for an hour in the middle of january. Sure the hood is hot, but the body is not.
They actually got it pretty close to reality, they only ignore the engine compartment.

A car body will likely be different to a mech chassis, car bodies don't have actuators moving tons of metal around. Think o father heat those kind of actuators would produce. Hydraulic pumps produce fairly large amounts of heat under pressure, and that would pail in comparison to the pressure these actuators would need to produce. There would be a lot of waste heat being dissipated. The only way around this would be if mechs found a way to turn excess heat into usable energy, or if the efficiencies of all the parts were so well tuned they produced little to no heat. Is suppose it is possible in theory.

[Noobzorz]

Cold Macaroni, on 02 April 2013 - 06:30 PM, said:

The devs have made it fairly clear that the MWO vision modes are not attempting to mimic reality, rather to provide different tools that can be useful at different times. This requires designing in balance that may or may not exist in reality.

Correct. So make thermal vision not unusable trash on alpine!

It's all well and good to bring up the fact that this is a game, but when reality and gameplay balance are in agreement, it's time to make a change.

[Cold Macaroni]

Noobzorz, on 02 April 2013 - 06:56 PM, said:

Correct. So make thermal vision not unusable trash on alpine!

It's all well and good to bring up the fact that this is a game, but when reality and gameplay balance are in agreement, it's time to make a change.

Fair enough. What would you like to see adjusted?

[Trauglodyte]

DevilJade, on 02 April 2013 - 06:19 PM, said:

Or maybe ambient temperature effects the outside of vehicles? Lets look at a few examples.








A mech at low heat levels is not going to shine like a beacon in the night against any terrain.

So the fact has escaped you that every mech has a sun on the inside powering ALL of it? And that metal is a conductor of heat?

[ThinkTank]

My fusing reactor burned out a long time ago.

[Suprentus]

Trauglodyte, on 02 April 2013 - 07:17 PM, said:

So the fact has escaped you that every mech has a sun on the inside powering ALL of it? And that metal is a conductor of heat?

And obviously those cars aren't made of metal.

What do you think Mechs are armored with, by the way? Platemail?

[Sephlock]

Its radioactive snow.

[Noobzorz]

Cold Macaroni, on 02 April 2013 - 07:02 PM, said:

Fair enough. What would you like to see adjusted?

I played another round on alpine and made sure to use my thermal nonstop. I've done a bit of a flip flop on this one. I still don't think it's useful (since mechs are so visible), but I suspect the reason I thought it was unusable was because of some postpatch wonkiness.

I'm not sure how you'd make it relevant now (maybe Alpine is just a map where you stick to normal vision?), but I sure do hate this new patch.

[BlackBeltJones]

Sephlock, on 02 April 2013 - 07:35 PM, said:

Its radioactive snow.

Simple and cost effective. Make up some radioactive snow lore and you got a stew baby.

[Tempered]

A mech that has been out in the snow for awhile tends to gather snow and ice on it. The snow and ice insulate the mech and reduce any heat signature that it emits. You see, mech

armor is made to dissipate as much heat as possible so as to be harder to burn through with lasers. It is actually quite cold to the touch, even on a hot day.

I've posted a screen shot of a mech that has been out in the snow for a few hours. It's hard to tell, but if you look closely you can actually see snow accumulating on parts of it.

This is why it is hard to see a mech through thermal vision at a distance.

[PropagandaWar]

Damocles, on 02 April 2013 - 06:17 PM, said:

its ok, i like it.
From one former OC person to another

Yesss! Love this group and from OC originally too

[Johnny Reb]

Last time I checked, Fantasy and Reality were also two separate things!

[JeepStuff]

Dishevel, on 02 April 2013 - 06:24 PM, said:

These are called heat sinks. The heat sinks on a mech would glow whiter than the body panels separated from the engine by air.
So ... Still ... I am right.

EDIT: Preemptive apology. I read your post so fast that I thought you were saying the heat sinks would glow whiter than any other part of the car, which is not AT ALL what you were saying. Sorry. I'm going to leave my post intact (which says you are wrong when in fact I'm the jackass here) because there's some other stuff I still want to say, but I wanted to add this at the top to acknowledge that "read much?" applies to me here. Apologies.

Original post starts here................

Yeah.......I don't think that's the way it works, amigo. Admittedly it's been about 20 years since I took heat transfer and thermodynamics, but I'm pretty sure the way it works is like this: If you connect two things together at different temperatures, they try to come to the same temperature. The hotter thing imparts heat on the cooler thing until they reach the same temperature. So if the heat sinks were hotter than the mech, the heat sinks would actually HEAT UP the mech, not cool it. The heat sinks only work because the hot parts try to impart their heat into the heat sink and try to heat the heat sink up, but the heat sinks dissipate the heat fast enough that they always stay cooler than the hot parts. So the hot parts keep trying to heat them up, and the heat sinks keep taking that heat and giving it away, and the whole system cools down.

The point is, heat sinks are not the hottest part of the system or they wouldn't work. They're not the coldest part either (if they were, it means you attached them to all the wrong places). They are just cooler than the hot thing they are attached to.

Anyway, I said "the point is" but I didn't mean it. Here's the real point. This is a video game. Balance is important. In my opinion, any conversation that goes something like "mechs would do this in real life" is just like having a conversation about whether the Enterprise could kick a Star Destroyer's ***. It's just silly.

But hey, if you're in to that, knock yourself out. For me, I'm just playing a game, I want balance in that game, and the devs can make up any fiction they want to explain away the balance. Or they can not bother with the fiction and just give me the balance. That works for me too.

Edited by EJT, 02 April 2013 - 09:46 PM.

[Dishevel]

DevilJade, on 02 April 2013 - 06:31 PM, said:

And did you read "LOW HEAT LEVELS"? Get a SS of a mech at 80%+ heat and show me how it's the same color as the terrain please.

Low heat levels for a mech are not equivalent to snow. Not even close.
Look at that last pic. The one that is done correctly. Look at how the human being at 98.6 deg F his face is bright white.
Even the heat leaking through his clothing stands out. A mech that is operating even at "low heat levels" is much warmer than a person.
Period.
If they do not want a thermal view then do not have one.
To have a thermal view that can not tell the difference between an operating mech and snow is not just "unreal",. It is monumentally stupid.

[AlexEss]

it is almost like they are not entirely done with the vision modes... If only they woudl have explained tha...

Oh wait.. they did.

The maps are seeing tweaks to better balance for the new heat vision.