My point of view is that the intented result of ghost heat is much needed, but like many others I think it was implemented in a unconsistent and unintuitive way. Imo the ghost heat mechanism fails because of two reasons:
- weapon groups are inconsistent
- it does not address alpha from low-heat weapons
1. Inconsistent weapon groups.
Instead of these groups, I suggest grouping ALL weapons by heat. What ghost heat wants to achieve is basically a stacking penalty, but the arbitary groupings make it too easy to circumvent, while at the same time ruining some builds in the process. If we instead group all weapons that are fired within the same 0.5s, add up their heat and scale that value to an exponential function. That is, when you alpha, the generated heat will not be linear, but exponential, exactly as for ghost heat, but with the big change that any heat generating weapon will contribute. Something like the figure below:
Scaling here is arbituary. Point is that every weapon combination creating heat will contribute to this value, no longer any free or forbidden combinations. This will for example address PPC+large laser+medium laser+srm+lrm combinations, but will not take projectiles fully into account since they create little heat per damage, especially AC5 and gauss.
2. Alpha from low-heat weapons
In order to address these, I'd suggest adding a small recoil bump. An old idea, but it would help with the low heat high damage weapons. This would use the same principle that all weapons fired simultaneously add up their recoil (use impulse?) contributions and give the aim a bump in corresponding size. Fire another group before it has returned to equilibrium will bump it further before starting to relax again. The whole recoil-relax process need to be short, like 0.1 to 0.2 seconds. Just a small bump is needed. This will address all combinations of ballistics fired together with lasers, the recoil will spread the lasers around if you fire them first or simultaneously, or you will have to wait for recoil to relax before firing the laser if you fire the ACs first. Here you can tweak so that arms recoil independently from torso aim, and arms could recoil more than torso.
The only thing that may not be directly affected here is the gauss+ppc combo, and that one is difficult to address since the gauss absence of heat is mainly balanced against its weight. They both should have some recoil though so firing gauss+ppc when they are not in the same group will make the recoil of one affect the hit of the other. If you group them, the charge mechanics of the gauss will prevent alpha completely. The key is to prevent the window where both can be manually fired simultaneously to avoid the recoil kick. One could try to make the kick near instant, or prevent other weapons to fire just after the gauss charge release (0.1 secs or so), or combine this entire suggestion with delayed convergence. At least as I see it, delayed convergence can't replace ghost heat or any other stacking penalty alone, but having convergence doesn't exclude other solutions.
All in all, I don't think the heat mash-up will take much coding at all. It's more like tweaking the current ghost heat groups and some constants. The recoil needs some work but probably not much. There is impulse shake in the game, just apply some to your own mech when firing projectiles.
Now, back to work, flame away!
EDIT: Adding a 3rd point here from below further below, and highlighting some misunderstandings.
3. Convergence
True range convergence was tried before, like Hoax described below, and it makes it difficult to impossible to converge reliably on mech legs or on moving mechs (with netcode and hsr) - giving us a strong reason to always aim for the centre of mass = boring and less skill involved.
Instead, the second best choice would be to force unlocked arms, and I suggest also separating the aim reticules for the left and the right arm. That would always give you 3 aiming circles instead of the 2 you have now with unlocked arms. In practice, this would mimic the wanted effect from delayed convergence - i.e. that you have to be a bit patient and wait for perfect alignment before firing away if you want to hit where you are aiming. This also opens up for many interesting tweaks, for example:
- Individual recoil for arms and torso
- Individual speed for arms depending on how much stuff you loaded them with
- Different movement restrictions for forehand and backhand motions, allowing you to pivot out to the right with your right arm for example where your left arm doing a backhand motion will not be able to follow because of a clash with the torso. Different speeds in forehand and backhand motions are also required to separate the convergence of the arms from each other in the first place.
Final note: Ghost heat nor Convergence nor Cone of fire nor Recoil will alone be able to achieve the wanted effect - but a combination of 1) uniform heat stacking penalty, 2) Recoil and 3) Forced unlocked arms/separated left and right arms convergence could do the job.
The shape suggested here does require minimal coding so I think this suggestion is actually realistic.
Edited by Duke Nedo, 04 October 2014 - 01:29 AM.