318 replies to this topic

[Tlords]

OMG - overall I love this idea. I'm not sure how I feel about destroying both legs and not killing the mech... other than this its a great idea.

For example there is a reason I never run more than 55-60 armor on my atlas's legs... because no one ever shoots them.... splitting the pelvic into right and left leg - means my legs may get shot more - meaning I need more armor there....

Overall this is a great idea! I'd love to see PGI implement the hitbox designs this way....

- Casey

[SuperJoe]

so how about that ATD answer. lol

[Chronojam]

Carrioncrows, on 18 September 2013 - 11:01 PM, said:

As you can see that Torso is MASSIVE, more to the point even if trying to roll torso solves nothing as the Center torso still sticks out up above the torsos.



Even on both sides does the Center torso still stick out as absurdly big.



The rear torso has got to be one of the absolute worst hit boxes ever. That rear torso is Massive.



As you can see the Orion itself has a lot of problems with it. The Orion battlemech was renown for being tough, a good brawler and an excellent jack of all trades able to operate at any range.

But despite having 14 tons worth of armor the Orion dies after 75 points of damage because the CT is so large that enemy players can't help but hit it. Even good players that try and roll torso are still getting rocked directly in the CT.

There is some straight up realities when it comes to the Orion. The Orion doesn't make a good hill humper. The Jagermech, K2, Blackjack and others are always better. Like the Atlas the Orion has to expose a significant amount of it's torso to be able to clear the guns. And with the Orions massive "Forecastle" or hull that sticks up above making it a magnet for enemy fire.

But there are times when an Orion pilot is forced in that situation and simply has to make the best of it. I get it.

But that doesn't mean that we can't design intelligent hitboxes allowing the player to work within those limitations.

Lets look at how the Orion should be.



As you can see here the pelvis / pelvic area is split between the legs, as it should be. The side torso's are slightly bigger from the front and visually from the the front there isn't a whole lot of change. Anyone firing at the orion center mass will hit the CT.

Here is where the big change happens.



As we turn to the side we see that the actual side of what used to be the CT is now the Right torso. As it should be. If you compare to the picture above of the same view you can see what a massive change this make. Even from a 3/4 side view the CT is no longer the biggest hitbox but instead the Right torso is, as it should be.

Also you can see how the arm hitboxes stretch up the side of the left torso, this also makes sense as the shoulder actuators are housed there allowing a more intelligent and progressive hitbox view. As i said above, more peeling an Onion and rewards a pilot for torso twisting.



Now from the other side. This begins to just make all sorts of sense. The upper part of missile box now becomes part of the shoulder of the arm hitbox. The left torso now takes up what used to be part of the Center torso and allows a pilot to roll torso to spread damage.



Lastly what we see here is the rear torso.

Now there is no helping it, that rear side of the mech is one big billboard of space, but what we can do is be a little smarter about it by at least making the Rear Center Torso equal to the side torso's or smaller. Losing a side torso doesn't kill you (Unless you have a XL which is a risk you took when you bought it) but loosing the Rear Center torso will.

Peeling an Onion.

What the idea behind intelligent hitboxes means is essentially the "VIEW" you are looking at a mech should present the largets hitbox to be hit.

If I am looking at you directly from the left, the Left arm should be the biggest hitbox.

If I am looking at you from Front left, the Left torso should be the biggest hitbox.

If I am looking at you from straight on, the Center torso should be equal or smaller than the side torso's.

See where I am getting at?

Now if we take this design philosophy and lets apply it to a few other mechs.

The Dragon



As you can see here i made the ARM big taking up a big chunch of what used to be the side torso but also I extended that side torso down cover the left side of the mech.

It's OK to make Arms too big. Everyone expects arms to get blown off, it's apart of the Mechwarrior.

Why? Because once that arm does get blown off continued hits there will be transferred to the side torso. The target isn't taking less damage, he is still taking that damage but ultimately his mech is just becoming easier to crack but hard to kill.

Lets look at another example.



Cicada

See here on the cicada what I did, I made the Arm hit box a part of the side of the mech. It makes sense because that's where the Shoulder is, but also it makes sense because it gives cicada pilots a reason to pack armor in their arms.

Before arms were essentially useless as they never took a hit and did little to help the survivablity of the mech.

Next I extended the torso's down to be apart of the CT but like the orion in such a way as to be intelligent so it's only the biggest hitbox exposed when you are looking at it from that view.

The pelvis / pelvic area is also split between the legs as it should be.

I think the hitboxes on the cicada are very important as we have the locust comming out next month and it's design follows after the cicada in so many ways.

Last mech i'm showing



The Jenner.

Like the cicada's arms people finally have a reason to put armor on the jenners torso so the CT doesn't take the brunt of the damage.

Straight on of course the Jenner ct is at it's biggest, but this at least allows Jenner pilots to torso twist to start soaking damage in other locations.

So by this point probably a lot of people may not like this idea because they feel it will ruin a lot of their builds that rely upon XL engines.

Yes and No, The XL engine has always been a risk. A valid one because you save lots and lots tonnage by using it, but also and more to the point the Standard Engine will be a Valid choice as well.

The Combination of intelligent hitboxes and a Standard engine even a jenner could absorb an impressive amount of damage before finally going down. (Not HSR ghost damage either)

Feel free to post up your thoughts, but at the very least I hope it gets PGI thinking about hitboxes and the future.
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EDIT: Putting all mech designs for hitboxes located here:

miSs, on 18 October 2013 - 10:33 AM, said:

Answer from Paul: The decision to destroy a Mech upon both of its legs being blown off is based off of two factors. The first is that being in a Mech that is severely hindered is not much fun. You basically become a tank turret and are rendered almost useless. The second is the griefing potential behind taking out a Mechs legs and just leaving them to hobble around in the environment. Imagine being stuck on Alpine and an enemy takes out both your legs and drops your speed to a fraction of what it’s normally at and that enemy runs off just leaving you there. It’s very frustrating.

[Dexion]

Yup...It looks like he read Rule #1 of the OP, Decided he didn't like that idea, and based off of that, stopped reading.

This was the ONE question on ATD I was hopping would get a detailed response... Its one of the BEST suggestions to come out of the community sense Early Closed Beta.

[Flying Judgement]

well dont get me wrong some of the ideas are great but they sure need to be tuned and PGI is experimenting with this for quiet some time. i would love to see the awesome old and present hitboxes for instance

in your proposal the dragon idea is quiet bad there wont be any more XL engine in it for sure and some of the other mechs would be incapable to use XL engines i rather have my CT cored than my XL pop.
With torso twisting i try to use my back rather than my ct works well.
sure some of the mechs need some adjustment but not this much in my opinion.

i have the feeling thats why they didnt read the whole topic it may seemed exaggerated. or the same what they may did try with one or two mechs already, and didnt work.

the "sensitive Ballas" are a bigger problem, but not game breaking at least i die from it max 20 times from a few thousand match. but i dont own a Stalker...

[SmithMPBT]

Shouldn't 2 blown legs put you on your back or belly mate?

[Mahws]

Shouldn't one?

The way the game works is that legs can't be destroyed, only damaged. It's not realistic, but waddling around on two damaged legs makes just as much sense as waddling around on one getting stunned every time someone hits you with a small laser.

[GRiPSViGiL]

I am at the point where I wouldn't mind if they mad the pelvis not be able to take damage. I think Paul was meaning to say that the pelvis counting as legs would mean a lot more legged mechs on the battlefield. So when I look at it that way I don't thikn the pelvis should be CT or legs. It should not take damage or it should only transfer half the damage to CT.

Something like that.

[ICEFANG13]

I love this idea. I made a post about how a more restrictive heat scale would slow down the game, this would also "slow" it down a bit. What a well written and thoughtful post.

[Rat of the Legion Vega]

Quote

Answer from Paul: The decision to destroy a Mech upon both of its legs being blown off is based off of two factors. The first is that being in a Mech that is severely hindered is not much fun. You basically become a tank turret and are rendered almost useless. The second is the griefing potential behind taking out a Mechs legs and just leaving them to hobble around in the environment. Imagine being stuck on Alpine and an enemy takes out both your legs and drops your speed to a fraction of what it’s normally at and that enemy runs off just leaving you there. It’s very frustrating.

Uh... thanks Paul. It's good to know you think that being quickly CT cored again and again and again no matter which direction you're facing, leaving you to spectate a match or ragequit, is soooo much more fun than losing a leg and still being able to live and fight.

[Chronojam]

Bear in mind that when I asked about increasing time to kill on mechs via health increases, they said it would be easy to do, there is a global multiplier they can use, and also they're terrified of making mechs live longer despite the fact that all the fiction (and the MWO website background image) depict Mechwarriors valiantly fighting on in epic century-old war machines that have quadruple-redundant systems against the odds.

Zombying around in a mech is the whole point of why they're preferable to vehicles in the fiction and in the original gameplay.

[Deathlike]

Chronojam, on 19 October 2013 - 05:11 PM, said:

Bear in mind that when I asked about increasing time to kill on mechs via health increases, they said it would be easy to do, there is a global multiplier they can use, and also they're terrified of making mechs live longer despite the fact that all the fiction (and the MWO website background image) depict Mechwarriors valiantly fighting on in epic century-old war machines that have quadruple-redundant systems against the odds.

It would be interesting to just have multipliers for each portion of the body, if not just outright distinct values for each part on some mechs for balance... but that would probably be more work than Paul would like to deal with I'd imagine.

[Chronojam]

Oh, for sure. Just imagine if you could bolt some extra armor onto the Hunchback's hunch, or reallocate some armor to the Dragon's goofy nose. You'd make them a lot more viable.

[Nicholas Carlyle]

Chronojam, on 19 October 2013 - 05:11 PM, said:

Bear in mind that when I asked about increasing time to kill on mechs via health increases, they said it would be easy to do, there is a global multiplier they can use, and also they're terrified of making mechs live longer despite the fact that all the fiction (and the MWO website background image) depict Mechwarriors valiantly fighting on in epic century-old war machines that have quadruple-redundant systems against the odds.

Zombying around in a mech is the whole point of why they're preferable to vehicles in the fiction and in the original gameplay.

This is the main thing killing this game for me.

It's why I've always been a proponent of SOME kind of fix to instant pinpoint accuracy.

It's also one of the reason that mechwarrior games have for the most part not had respawn.

You have one mech, it is a king of the battlefield, destroying it should take A LOT of effort.

There are a lot of ways to do this, and I'll list them.

1) Fix mech scaling

2) Fix hit boxes

3) remove instant pinpoint convergence

4) move people towards varied loadouts via mechanisms that make sense

Does anyone remember the old AV in WoW? Where the matches were wars of attrition instead of what we have now in online games, instant gratification via short encounters.

That is what we need now. Not these 5-10 minute skirmishes where peeking your head around the wrong corner is instant death.

[Noth]

Honestly, I have little issue with the hitboxes being so varied. It adds flavor and strengths and weakness to the design of the mech.

[Fooooo]

Love all the pics carrion, nice work!

I support the idea in a sense, however I am a little on the side of paul in that legging would become easier.

Now, you already pointed out a way to fix this issue, however it seems paul doesnt like that idea, or didnt even read it.


Just to paul, there are other ways.........(which im sure you know, but it would of been nice to see what you thought tho in the atd!)


Like Nicolas suggested in another post, make the pelvis a seperate section.

Destroying the pelvis = loss in torso twist rate / degrees + loss in turning rate. (no crits in there or anything, just a loss of agility for it being destroyed, basically your better off shooting another section unless you want to slow their twist + turn etc....however at least its not all a CT .)


Another would be to use carrions hitboxes, however, you also add Front and Rear armor to the legs! (maybe even side armor, just the section facing outwards not inwards.) Increasing legging time in general.



There are plenty of ways to get around legging becoming a problem, it should not imo be a deterent to implementing carrions ideas as they will help on the whole.......at least imo.

Edited by Fooooo, 19 October 2013 - 11:18 PM.

[The Boz]

All I want is for my Atlas to not have an effective armor of 60 because of the highly important and hilariously enormous side torsos, coupled with complete lack of CT weapons in all but one variant.

[General Taskeen]

Carrion, I think your question should be reworded to the Devs if you ask them again. They concentrated too much on the alternate idea you proposed for legging, rather than looking at the main hitbox redrawings. I think that idea should be presented as secondary below the main issue. Although, I still don't understand why they didn't address the actual question when they clearly had an image(s) to look at...

As a reminder for the devs and players, previous Mech games had similar ways of dealing with hitboxes as Carrion has drawn.

Edited by General Taskeen, 20 October 2013 - 03:27 PM.

[Deathlike]

The thing about asking the question is how you ask it. You have to be clear and concise as to what your intention is, and frankly I wonder if the message/question some people intend to mean are explained well.

Otherwise, we get very non-informative or oddly answered questions.

Edited by Deathlike, 20 October 2013 - 04:28 PM.

[Name113995]

Quote

Kill 1 Leg - Reduces you to 15% movement for 5 secs then you are permanently reduced to 50% top speed. Additional hits on the legs won't hamper your speed at all.

Kill 2 legs - Knocks you down, you get back up and you are permanently reduced to 15% top speed for the rest of the game.

Can some one explain me how can mech move with his 2 legs destroyed?