1911 replies to this topic

[Void Angel]

I really hate film grain in every game I've played. The first thing I did playing Mass Effect was to hunt down that setting and turn it off.

[Omid Kiarostami]

DarkonFullPower, on 19 October 2014 - 11:40 PM, said:

Are empty ammo slots counted in the crit roll, or are they ignored?

They are counted in the crit roll. An empty ammo slot will act as a crit buffer until it is destroyed.

[shellashock]

Karl Berg, on 23 November 2014 - 03:06 PM, said:

Hey shellashock; I'm not sure. I'll forward your question on to Russ.

Thanks a lot Karl! Hopefully we can get an answer soon and the poor Oxide can stop wondering what its new shiny will be!

[zudukai]

Omid Kiarostami, on 25 November 2014 - 10:49 AM, said:

They are counted in the crit roll. An empty ammo slot will act as a crit buffer until it is destroyed.

how are laser crits handled?

Edited by zudukai, 25 November 2014 - 06:44 PM.

[Cimarb]

zudukai, on 25 November 2014 - 06:44 PM, said:

how are laser crits handled?

Each "tick" has a chance to crit for the amount of damage it does - meaning lots of chances to do a small amount. Yet another reason FLD is overpowered.

[TheCaptainJZ]

Karl, back in the day when repair and rearm were introduced, a mech's weapons would do reduced damaged as it's health was lowered from damage. Is this still true or does a weapon with 1 health left still deal it's full damage? Or did it never work this way and I am remembering wrong?

[zudukai]

Cimarb, on 25 November 2014 - 06:55 PM, said:

Each "tick" has a chance to crit for the amount of damage it does - meaning lots of chances to do a small amount. Yet another reason FLD is overpowered.

can we get an official count on laser "ticks"? i still would like it farther defined from PGI.

[Cimarb]

zudukai, on 25 November 2014 - 08:26 PM, said:

can we get an official count on laser "ticks"? i still would like it farther defined from PGI.

I would love lots of info like that, but I believe it was confirmed as ten ticks, broken evenly along the beam duration. That means a large laser, with 1.0 second beam duration, does one tick every 0.1 seconds, for 10% of its damage. (I know that comes out to 11 ticks if you count the first tick as the "go", but it is something like that...)

[Li Song]

Hi again Karl!

I followed your link to the explanation of HSR which you gave earlier. And noticed this (emphasis mine):

Karl Berg, on 15 April 2014 - 11:11 PM, said:

...snip...

HSR is multiphase. It rewinds all rewindable entities, except the shooter, by the shooters ping; and then takes a very high / mid / narrow phase like approach to see what was shot. The mid phase is a continuous (swept) check against the set of rewindable entities, and gives us an accurate time of intersect if anything was actually hit. We can then adjust time to the new TOI and run the narrow check, including static geo and terrain. The client never tells us what they hit except for telemetry purposes. The authoritative determination of 'hit' is only ever done on the server; so it's not possible to say 'I hit that guy behind the wall' with a hacked client.

...snip...

Immediately my algorithm sense went off the charts. Something didn't sit right with not rewinding the shooter so I sat down and drew this up:



As far as my understanding goes, the server sends (some subset of) the authorative world state to the client periodically (say 30Hz). The client performs a prediction (extrapolation) from the last packet to give a smooth visual experience. And smoothly melds the positions when the next world state is received to avoid "popping" where the mechs snap to the correct position. HSR keeps a history of positions for each rewindable entity.

Consider the above diagram, two players run on a parallel course, their positions being perpendicular to each other and the course. Player A aims and shoots at Player B just before she is to run in behind cover. First of all, if only the target position is rewound, then in this case Player A's shot would miss, because the players would no longer be perpendicular for the sake of the hit registration. Second, if both players are rewound only by 1 ping, then the shot would hit the obstacle as the time it took for the servers true state to be transmitted to the client wasn't accounted for. This would support the observation that slow mechs can hit fast lights even with high ping but light dogfights suffer hit-reg issues as both the shooter and the shootee is moving fast. Especially supports the feeling I've had that PPC shots from a spider some times go through the target even though it was a clean hit on my screen.

So, to me it seems like the correct thing to do is to rewind all objects, including the player by one round trip time (RTT), i.e. 2*ping. This is because the player is reacting to content that is delayed by 1 ping and it takes 1 ping for the reaction to reach the server.

Edited by Li Song, 26 November 2014 - 01:50 AM.

[Mawai]

TheCaptainJZ, on 25 November 2014 - 08:11 PM, said:

Karl, back in the day when repair and rearm were introduced, a mech's weapons would do reduced damaged as it's health was lowered from damage. Is this still true or does a weapon with 1 health left still deal it's full damage? Or did it never work this way and I am remembering wrong?

Just a comment ... but I don't recall it ever working this way. I don't think damage to the module has ever affected damage output.

As far as I know, damage is done to crit spaces of the weapon when a crit space is destroyed the weapon is out of commission. This is one of the issues with the AC20 ... it has so many crit spaces that once armor is stripped, internal damage will usually quite quickly destroy the weapon.

[Void Angel]

I don't remember that at all. Weapons were fully functional, or destroyed, with no intermediate states - for as long as I've been playing, at any rate. I'm certain it's not that way now - my Atlas's guns all work at full efficiency until they are destroyed, and I know there are times that my last SRM or whatever has partial damage from lasers and the like.

[Void Angel]

Hey, that HSR analysis suggests a related question to me:

Karl, I recall an explanation a while back as to why delayed convergence was taken out of the game - my understanding was that convergence created an unequal playing field because people with high latency weren't able to take shots as efficiently as those with lower ping. However, all this predated HSR, so my question is whether we can use HSR to support delayed convergence - and whether it's something you'd want to pursue if it were feasible.

[Heffay]

Void Angel, on 26 November 2014 - 01:20 PM, said:

Hey, that HSR analysis suggests a related question to me:

Karl, I recall an explanation a while back as to why delayed convergence was taken out of the game - my understanding was that convergence created an unequal playing field because people with high latency weren't able to take shots as efficiently as those with lower ping. However, all this predated HSR, so my question is whether we can use HSR to support delayed convergence - and whether it's something you'd want to pursue if it were feasible.

And a quick follow-up question, if I may: Is it possible to have weapons in different areas have different convergence? Arm mounted weapons currently work as is (instant convergence), but torso/head weapons have a [fixed/user defined] convergence that they set prior to dropping?

[Void Angel]

(I may have been wrong about the timeline - someone else remembers that PGI found integrating the two systems to be a non-trivial task, but I can't confirm the source.)

[Nothing Whatsoever]

I am simply happy to see this keep going!

[TheCaptainJZ]

Mawai, on 26 November 2014 - 05:32 AM, said:

Just a comment ... but I don't recall it ever working this way. I don't think damage to the module has ever affected damage output.

As far as I know, damage is done to crit spaces of the weapon when a crit space is destroyed the weapon is out of commission. This is one of the issues with the AC20 ... it has so many crit spaces that once armor is stripped, internal damage will usually quite quickly destroy the weapon.

I vaguely remember hearing this back in closed beta when R&R was implemented. Perhaps it was merely an idea that was thrown around but never done. I feel like the info came from Garth perhaps in an Ask the Devs, but it was a long time ago. It's true that I've never heard it referenced ever since.

[Mawai]

Hi Karl,
There are still quite a few anecdotal concerns about hit registration.

Some time ago, Russ posted that the server tick had become messed up which was causing hit registration issues but that problem should have been fixed.

I was wondering if you have server hardware monitoring to go along with the match data tracking. In particular, depending on your hardware, some machines can adjust clock speed with load or use features to boost clock rate on specific cpus (so called turbo boost features). There are also server characteristics like the server game tick rate. Do you track these in real time? Could there be a bug that would re-write the tick rate during a match which would lead to worse hit registration under unpredictable circumstances? How about the number of matches on each server? Does that affect game performance or hit registration?

I think we have all seen poor hit registration from time to time ... and I think it might be useful for "you" (meaning PGI) to record some key server state variables throughout matches to see if there are systemic issues that might cause it.

[DarkonFullPower]

Omid Kiarostami, on 25 November 2014 - 10:49 AM, said:

They are counted in the crit roll. An empty ammo slot will act as a crit buffer until it is destroyed.

YES! WOOOOO! Ty for the confirm.

Edited by DarkonFullPower, 29 November 2014 - 11:45 PM.

[Jman5]

Hey Karl, back in April you made a comment about the reasons for setting up the restrictive private lobby system. I think most of us are sympathetic to the real life costs it takes to run the servers, but at the same time there is a lot of concern that the current scheme is too restrictive. From a customer value point of view, he's paying $7 per month so that he can maybe possibly run a custom private lobby game if he can find someone else who is also paying $7 per month. In my mind that devalues the worth of premium time if you can't even ensure the feature you're paying for.

You guys might not realize this, but it also creates all sorts of headaches in the league scene when you have to:
A) Find two guys on opposing teams with premium time. (can be really tough in 1v1 and 4v4 leagues)
B ) ensure they are group leads (screw up here and you often have to reform the entire group/lobby)
C) Force them to stick around the entire series (might be several hours)

Finally, it would give experienced players a safe place to let their new friend explore the game against more than dummy mechs. This would improve the "new player experience".

I don't think it's unfair to say that reducing the restriction from 2 players to 1 player with premium time would be a huge boon for the playerbase.

I know you're not exactly in charge of this area, but your players would appreciate it if the team at PGI would reconsider this current onerous system for something that makes a little more sense. In my opinion this is one of those legacy decisions that really could use changing.

Edited by Jman5, 02 December 2014 - 08:42 AM.

[Heffay]

Jman5, on 02 December 2014 - 08:41 AM, said:

Hey Karl, back in April you made a comment about the reasons for setting up the restrictive private lobby system. I think most of us are sympathetic to the real life costs it takes to run the servers, but at the same time there is a lot of concern that the current scheme is too restrictive. From a customer value point of view, he's paying $7 per month so that he can maybe possibly run a custom private lobby game if he can find someone else who is also paying $7 per month. In my mind that devalues the worth of premium time if you can't even ensure the feature you're paying for.

You guys might not realize this, but it also creates all sorts of headaches in the league scene when you have to:
A) Find two guys on opposing teams with premium time. (can be really tough in 1v1 and 4v4 leagues)
B ) ensure they are group leads (screw up here and you often have to reform the entire group/lobby)
C) Force them to stick around the entire series (might be several hours)

Finally, it would give experienced players a safe place to let their new friend explore the game against more than dummy mechs. This would improve the "new player experience".

I don't think it's unfair to say that reducing the restriction from 2 players to 1 player with premium time would be a huge boon for the playerbase.

I know you're not exactly in charge of this area, but your players would appreciate it if the team at PGI would reconsider this current onerous system for something that makes a little more sense. In my opinion this is one of those legacy decisions that really could use changing.

I would also like to see per-match premium time tokens. PGI could help support the competitive leagues by issuing a bunch of tokens to the league organizers, who can hand them out to the captains to support the private lobbies. I know they discussed having a token system a while back, but it sure would be nice to have these options!