501 replies to this topic

[Koniving]

Shar Wolf, on 07 March 2014 - 06:15 PM, said:

You didn't know that?!
......not sure what to say about that.

Not a Spider fan.

Xanilos, on 07 March 2014 - 07:02 PM, said:

Why would they need an ejection when they can't be killed?

Used to be the other way around. See the end here. This was common.

[Ph30nix]

okay i just saw this post because it was linked from someone elses post and i have to say OMFG you have done some amazing work.

also a question the model for the king crab where did you get that> did you make it from scratch? If so how long did it take you to do?

because PGI likes to tell us its takes month and months and tons of money to design and put out a mech......

[DirePhoenix]

Ph30nix, on 07 March 2014 - 10:53 PM, said:

okay i just saw this post because it was linked from someone elses post and i have to say OMFG you have done some amazing work.

also a question the model for the king crab where did you get that> did you make it from scratch? If so how long did it take you to do?

because PGI likes to tell us its takes month and months and tons of money to design and put out a mech......

The King Crab wasn't designed from entirely scratch. It was assembled from parts of existing MWO models that were rearranged and/or rescaled to fit the design. Example: the cockpit/torso is from a Cicada, but stretched out to resemble a King Crab, the missile section comes from a BattleMaster, the arms are from the Centurion, and the legs are from a Stalker.

Edited by DirePhoenix, 08 March 2014 - 12:50 AM.

[Cactus In The Rear]

Koniving, on 07 March 2014 - 09:22 PM, said:

Not a Spider fan.



Used to be the other way around. See the end here. This was common.

Sadly that mostly reminded me of how much better the graphics and sound used to be.

[Ph30nix]

DirePhoenix, on 08 March 2014 - 12:47 AM, said:

The King Crab wasn't designed from entirely scratch. It was assembled from parts of existing MWO models that were rearranged and/or rescaled to fit the design. Example: the cockpit/torso is from a Cicada, but stretched out to resemble a King Crab, the missile section comes from a BattleMaster, the arms are from the Centurion, and the legs are from a Stalker.

it looked amazing to me and frankly they could start from a base like that then just tweak the skins. its like they want to do everything as bassackwards as possible

Xanilos, on 08 March 2014 - 06:10 AM, said:

Sadly that mostly reminded me of how much better the graphics and sound used to be.

i loved that he was listening to mech warrior 2 music

[Koniving]

Xanilos, on 08 March 2014 - 06:10 AM, said:

Sadly that mostly reminded me of how much better the graphics and sound used to be.

Sad thing is even back then, those graphics were terrible compared to closed beta. On youtube look up "directx 11 Kon"

[Cactus In The Rear]

Any idea why they keep making the game look worse and worse and making it take more and more power to run?

[Koniving]

Xanilos, on 08 March 2014 - 08:34 AM, said:

Any idea why they keep making the game look worse and worse and making it take more and more power to run?

"Most of the free to play player base is using low-end computer specs."

If the engine were Unreal 3, this wouldn't be a problem the engine works very well with low end computers and still manages a pretty mid-high end of visual fidelity. PGI also had a lot of experience with it.

They went with CryEngine 3 because of the high end graphics potential that surpasses Unreal Engine 3.
The trade off is this: It doesn't run well on most low end or even medium-end computers.

Evidently PGI didn't know this. Nor did they expect everyone to have low end computers.

Add to this that PGI used 1:1 scale mechs. So in an engine designed to give you visuals for a player on the ground, seeing out to 200 meters of high end detail, 500 meters average, and never more than 1,000 meters... they're pushing it to give 2,000 meters plus all the time. The textures used to be 4096x4096 for everything which made it all look great. Down below you can see the lag that "medium" settings gave me, but damn can you see that visual difference? That's medium! Now it's like 1024x1024, and on things this big they look like crap. So to make up for it they are using bump maping and other 'texturizers' to make things look grittier, which as it turns out CryEngine 3 doesn't handle those all that well. I even heard a claim that CryEngine 3 can't do real fog too well either, so they intensify the film grain on Caustic Valley instead.

Some closed beta from back in July 2012.

Edited by Koniving, 08 March 2014 - 09:12 AM.

[Heffay]

Koniving, on 08 March 2014 - 09:10 AM, said:

Add to this that PGI used 1:1 scale mechs. So in an engine designed to give you visuals for a player on the ground, seeing out to 200 meters of high end detail, 500 meters average, and never more than 1,000 meters... they're pushing it to give 2,000 meters plus all the time. The textures used to be 4096x4096 for everything which made it all look great. Down below you can see the lag that "medium" settings gave me, but damn can you see that visual difference? That's medium! Now it's like 1024x1024, and on things this big they look like crap. So to make up for it they are using bump maping and other 'texturizers' to make things look grittier, which as it turns out CryEngine 3 doesn't handle those all that well. I even heard a claim that CryEngine 3 can't do real fog too well either, so they intensify the film grain on Caustic Valley instead.

The texture maps for MWO are and have always been 1024x1024. They were never 4096. They also have always used bump maps. Star Citizen uses a max of 2048x2048 for their texture maps, as well as bump maps.

Edited by Heffay, 08 March 2014 - 10:11 AM.

[Koniving]

Heffay, on 08 March 2014 - 10:10 AM, said:

The texture maps for MWO are and have always been 1024x1024. They were never 4096. They also have always used bump maps. Star Citizen uses a max of 2048x2048 for their texture maps, as well as bump maps.

I have a closed beta install of the game. Looking through them, some were 2048x2048, okay there's evidently only 3 that were 4096x4096 (one appears to be a ground texture encompassing the details of a large area of the old Forest Colony maybe? Lots of ground detail anyway.)

By comparison, all of the ones we have now are 512x512 or 1024x1024. That's still a significant drop.

Actually since I went through and started looking at them, the November 4th 2013 build evidently had cockpit glass already in it titled "cockpit_HorizontalGlass_adf.dds"

Dimensions 1024x512.

There's more of them too. And mech damage. But back then mechs didn't show actual damage.

For some odd reason all of the desert textures are black and white. But yeah November 4th 2013 it's all 1024 or 512.

Cockpit details went from 1024 to 2048 to 512 between just before the end of October 2012, to patch 12179 to November 4th 2013 on the Atlas.

But enough about textures. I wants more Haruko art.

[Heffay]

Koniving, on 08 March 2014 - 11:02 AM, said:

I have a closed beta install of the game. Looking through them, some were 2048x2048, okay there's evidently only 3 that were 4096x4096 (one appears to be a ground texture encompassing the details of a large area of the old Forest Colony maybe? Lots of ground detail anyway.)

By comparison, all of the ones we have now are 512x512 or 1024x1024. That's still a significant drop.

Actually since I went through and started looking at them, the November 4th 2013 build evidently had cockpit glass already in it titled "cockpit_HorizontalGlass_adf.dds"

Dimensions 1024x512.

There's more of them too. And mech damage. But back then mechs didn't show actual damage.

For some odd reason all of the desert textures are black and white. But yeah November 4th 2013 it's all 1024 or 512.

Cockpit details went from 1024 to 2048 to 512 between just before the end of October 2012, to patch 12179 to November 4th 2013 on the Atlas.

But enough about textures. I wants more Haruko art.

I'd love to see some of the 2048x2048 mech UV files. Or a 2048x2048 cockpit detail one as well.

[KalebFenoir]

haruko, on 21 October 2013 - 10:13 PM, said:

I've considered all those options, trust me, I love the Commando, but it just isn't in scale, when FD drew it up for PGI he imagined it probably being larger than it is in-game.

Allow me to demonstrate:

Here is your pilot in the in-game COmmando cockpit:



Now lets just put it in the Commando head shall we?


Oh {Scrap}! It doesn't fit! This isn't surprising, none of the mech cockpits do (except for the Raven sort of), since the in-game mech cockpits are horribly blown up, with a fish eye effect, if they weren't you wouldn't be able to see anything out of your mechs viewport since most of them are actually pretty small when you look at them in actual scale, I like to handwave this away as; you're just seeing an enhanced composite image of your cockpit viewport through your neurohelm, hence the fish eye view and why they appear larger than they actually are on the model itself.

Ok so, the pilot is in the exact pose he is in-game, so lets just remove the in-game cockpit and he should fit in the head right?


Nope, as you can see, his arm sticks out of the side of it's head, now, sure I could just move his arm but we're trying to stick with what is in-game now remember? Lets see how his legs fit...

Well, he fits....well...not really, he's high enough that he'd be warm and toasty above the ammo loader, engine and it's heatsinks, BUT, he's in the way of the mechs arm actuator joint and the myomer muscles that would come out of it! The red circle is how the entire joint is on the model itself, and no, there isn't enough space for it to pass underneath him, he's practically sitting right next to it, on top of the fact that I had to remove the Commando's neck for him to even fit in the first place.


Well, we can just move him a little to the side right and it'll be fine right?

Nope.


Completely blocked by the eye sensor, which as you can see from the in-game cockpit, it extends past the cockpit, so you can't fit there, not to mention he wouldn't even be facing the viewport.

Lets just rescale the Commando then!


Unfortunately that doesn't work either, as the Commando's neck still completely blocks his feet.

Commando is just broke, only way to get the pilot to fit in there would be to resize it to a size that would be too big for a light, or to have the pilot sit higher up in the head, but then he wouldn't be able to see out the Commando like he does in-game!

Of course, this could all be fixed, by taking the lore friendly option of just saying that the pilot doesn't even use the viewport as he has a compressed 360 degree view through his neurohelm, unobstructed by anything and not requiring him to look through the tiny viewport. But of course, the game isn't like that, as I'm sure you know.

tl;dr pilot doesn't fit in the Commando.

Weird thought, but, when I read the books, I never thought of the mechs as having actual windows to peer through. Instead, given the HUDs and HDDs and zoom mechanisms they were supposed to have, I merely assumed that on most mechs that 'eyes' were artistic.

Sure, there's mechs that clearly have defined cockpit windows (Catapult, Locust, Shadowhawk, Awesome, Thunderbolt) So maybe those pilots CAN see straight through... but most mechs heads seem to just have either a tiny port or must rely on additional camera inputs to provide the pilot with an actual view (canon says 360 or 270 squeezed into 90 or something like that, which would make combat insanely hard when you think about it, which explains why weapons seem inaccurate in the novels for some reason).

Heck, the Hunchback's head is usually drawn with these weird shutters covering what would be the 'windows'. Somehow I doubt the Hunchie stops moving, drops the shutters to protect the windows, fires its AC20 or whatever, then raises them again to see if they hit.

Now that I think about it more, the book style compressed-view means that all input to the pilot IS from a series of cameras on the head and possibly torso, to compile a complete image for the pilot in such a warped view.

The only way the Commando head works for me is if the mech was larger in stature than it is in game, and the pilot isn't required to see directly through the 'eye'. That massive sensor mechanism on the other side of the face has got to serve SOME purpose; let it be a visual array! Then the pilot is just cramped down into this small-sized head (and yet, not a Compact Cockpit, as that's even smaller!), with almost no room to move around.

Kinda wish the Locust cockpit was arranged more like riding a motorcycle though. Always feel like it should be leaned forward with the pilot's legs behind him rather than sitting normally.

[Heffay]

Lore is inconsistent. And since it's not real, you can make up whatever you want to explain it and you won't be wrong.

[Alaskan Nobody]

Heffay, on 08 March 2014 - 05:28 PM, said:

you can make up whatever you want to explain it and you won't be wrong.

Not quite, but close

[CyclonerM]

Heffay, on 08 March 2014 - 05:28 PM, said:

Lore is inconsistent. And since it's not real, you can make up whatever you want to explain it and you won't be wrong.

Not quite, and not close.

From my understanding the 'Mech DO have a trasparent armored panel (visual is fundamental when heat vision, night vision, magscan or cameras cannot be used for whatever reason), in fact i have read instances of MechWarriors being blinded for a second when a laser hit directly the viewport (but it protects the pilot, otherwise he would be blinded forever. They probably rely on cameras to get a 360° view streched into 120° (IIRC) in their neurohelmet.

[Frozen Spirit Jac]

Well done. Taking the effort of explaining the real logistics of the flaws of the game. Still dreading to think what disasters of the clan mechs. But at the same time thinking what the hell its only a game. Even if I was piloting a flea, and somehow the scale was larger than an atlas. Would I care... maybe. Not really. Just want campaigns to start.

[BitGlitch]

Any chance someone could give me a download of the rigged Pilot with a helmet? The one I got from my game files would not import into Blender as an .fbx, and that helmet looks awesome as well!

[Koniving]

This came up during gameplay. Thought it was interesting. It shows the fact that the Spider cockpit isn't even in the cockpit but shoved in the chest.

>.>; Sort of defeats 1:1 scales if you ask me.

[Sparks Murphey]

haruko, on 05 March 2014 - 08:49 AM, said:

And what looks like shock absorbers?

Looking forward to melee being introduced to MWO, when I can bite the head off a Spider with my Banshee!

[ThatBum42]

CapperDeluxe, on 13 December 2013 - 07:42 AM, said:

I'm late to this (very cool) thread, but this image on the first page made me bust out laughing for some reason