91 replies to this topic

[Spheroid]

They need to get of their asses because MMLs are coming sooner rather than later.

Edited by Spheroid, 20 April 2015 - 09:00 PM.

[Mystere]

LordNothing, on 20 April 2015 - 08:30 PM, said:

... a little script that any 9 year old with a linux terminal could write ...

Produce a fully-documented video or you do not know what you are talking about.

[LordNothing]

Bishop Steiner, on 20 April 2015 - 08:56 PM, said:

I do disagree. It's a little heavy, but it's got low heat, solid 10 pt punch, decent velocity and a good RoF. Quirks have made some ac20s just as fast, but that doesn't take away from the ac20 to ac10 comparison, weapon to weapon. iT ALREADY OUTPERFORMS THE ppc AND er ppc IN PAIRS, (stupid caplock) pretty quickly comparing stats and HPD vs DPS. The weight and ammo is quickly balanced by the issues of DHS.

Mind you, I would not complain about an extra 2-300m/s on them, but they are one of the most underrated guns, still, in the game-

im a big ac10 fan myself. probibly happened after i put 3 of them on my ctf-im. even in pairs they are a great, same damage as an ac20, much higher fire rate, and longer range. i think a big problem with it is all the mechs that cluster all their ballistic hardpoints into one section, making multiple 10s rare.

Edited by LordNothing, 20 April 2015 - 09:01 PM.

[FupDup]

Bishop Steiner, on 20 April 2015 - 08:58 PM, said:

if 10 pt PPFLD is not a good baseline, I guess that bespeaks to even deeper issues in the game.

It's almost as if PPCs got meganerfed with the hammer of Paul almighty.

[Bishop Steiner]

FupDup, on 20 April 2015 - 09:01 PM, said:

It's almost as if PPCs got meganerfed with the hammer of Paul almighty.

eh, I still find them usable, though not as the long range weapon they were meant to be (unless shooting assaults) without massive quirks. But still prefer them to most lasers. Probably just my fighting style, I really dislike face time.

Regardless, I make rather effective use of the AC10 in my La Malinche, CN9-A and ENF-4R.

[LordNothing]

Mystere, on 20 April 2015 - 09:00 PM, said:

Produce a fully-documented video or you do not know what you are talking about.

well there are my freespace mods i did several years ago, implemented features in lua toted as impossible by the community for years before i showed them. things like atmospheric flight and virtual cockpits with rtt textures pgi still hasn't gotten that to work.

i got better things to do than write bash scripts in the terminal.

Edited by LordNothing, 20 April 2015 - 09:17 PM.

[FupDup]

Bishop Steiner, on 20 April 2015 - 09:06 PM, said:

... Probably just my fighting style, I really dislike face time.
...

That's probably the root cause. Personally I think PPFLD is overrated, and it's the boogeyman that got ACs and PPCs nerfed to begin with.


I find PPCs to feel like this when I use them:


Not very satisfying. :\

[Repasy Cooper]

I refuse to believe implementation of alternate ammunitions is impossible. I've only self-studied computer programming, but even without institutional education I know there is ALWAYS an alternate way to program something. What seems more likely is that they may have programmed in a certain direction w/o foresight into alternate ammunition, and now that decision has increased the amount of work they'd have to do in order to implement a feature that normally would take a few days. It's probably a simple case of what do they have time for. Do they spend x amount of time refining code to allow for this feature, or do they spend x amount of time releasing more content?

From a purely business standpoint, if it takes the same amount of time to add an alternate ammunitions feature as it does to develop several more lines of mechs that can be sold to increase revenue, wouldn't you take the latter? They wouldn't stand to gain ANY revenue from alternate ammunitions. So, it may be the case that they have hit a snag due to a previous coding choice, and in the interest of continuing to make money off of developing a free-to-play game they have regarded this feature as a lower priority. That's totally reasonable. Heck, maybe they don't even want to implement alternate ammunitions, out of fear of obsoleting other weaponry.

To believe that the feature is dead and nothing short of a whole restructuring of the entire game would allow for this feature, let alone a new game engine........ I mean really guys? They would not be stupid enough to program "one ammo type per weapon only" into the vertebrae of the game. This isn't the age of monolithic WALLOFTEXT programming. Google modular programming. It isn't even up for debate! Everybody programs modularly one way or another. EVERYONE. It's only an issue of time x money, I guarantee that much.

Edited by Repasy, 20 April 2015 - 09:54 PM.

[the hedgehog]

Repasy, on 20 April 2015 - 09:50 PM, said:

Heck, maybe they don't even want to implement alternate ammunitions, out of fear of obsoleting other weaponry.

That sentence just makes every ballistic weapon outside of gauss obsolete for clans.

Edited by the hedgehog, 20 April 2015 - 10:28 PM.

[627]

cSand, on 20 April 2015 - 08:22 PM, said:

nothing is impossible, but it is this simple:

time/money investment > return

This is the sole reason for it.

It is far from impossible, and if you think about it for some minutes, I bet everyone with a bit of programming experience can come up with 2 or 3 bandaids how to implement this quick and dirty (with ghost guns or pseudo ammo or what not).

The point is, if the code base is straight and well documented and not a big mess, things like this are easy to implement. But if your base is all foxed up and overly complex and you don't even understand your own code anymore, easy things get hard.

You can still implement your feature, but the manhours needed will go up to a point where you can't afford it.

In the end, we all don't know how good or not PGI's expertise is regarding the cryengine, but if I take the dev statements about it and how they are more or less alone without any help from crytek, I wildly guess they just can't do it with the current resources/manpower.

[aniviron]

Well, Russ has been wanting something that would make clan ballistics less bad- this is what he's looking for. But he's not going to do it, because it's too much work.

[One Medic Army]

627, on 20 April 2015 - 10:42 PM, said:

This is the sole reason for it.

It is far from impossible, and if you think about it for some minutes, I bet everyone with a bit of programming experience can come up with 2 or 3 bandaids how to implement this quick and dirty (with ghost guns or pseudo ammo or what not).

The point is, if the code base is straight and well documented and not a big mess, things like this are easy to implement. But if your base is all foxed up and overly complex and you don't even understand your own code anymore, easy things get hard.

You can still implement your feature, but the manhours needed will go up to a point where you can't afford it.

In the end, we all don't know how good or not PGI's expertise is regarding the cryengine, but if I take the dev statements about it and how they are more or less alone without any help from crytek, I wildly guess they just can't do it with the current resources/manpower.

So he pretty much uses "impossible" the same way I do for my boss.

Translation: It is possible, but would entail more money/resources than you are willing to allocate. If I told you this, you would badger me until I found some way to do a craptastic job on the cheap, and it will either fail spectacularly or work so intermittently and poorly it would have been better off to not waste the time.

Yes, I learned this by experience, after cleaning up after several such craptacular jobs I got pushed into because there wasn't a budget for sufficient quality, and it got done anyway. Always ended up costing more in the long term.

[627]

One Medic Army, on 20 April 2015 - 11:00 PM, said:

So he pretty much uses "impossible" the same way I do for my boss.

Translation: It is possible, but would entail more money/resources than you are willing to allocate. If I told you this, you would badger me until I found some way to do a craptastic job on the cheap, and it will either fail spectacularly or work so intermittently and poorly it would have been better off to not waste the time.

Yes, I learned this by experience, after cleaning up after several such craptacular jobs I got pushed into because there wasn't a budget for sufficient quality, and it got done anyway. Always ended up costing more in the long term.

Programming in a nutshell:

Edited by 627, 20 April 2015 - 11:04 PM.

[One Medic Army]

627, on 20 April 2015 - 11:04 PM, said:

Programming in a nutshell:

Actually I'm a Mechanical Engineer (technically the entire ME department, because startup...), works about the same way. Except with physical objects sometimes cheap just isn't an option at all, because the specs are too tight.

[Darlith]

I don't think they are saying it is impossible overall so much as not something they could fix quickly. My guess is the code put in early on for weapons and ammo doesn't lend itself to alternate ammo, so to add it would require reworking all the code for weapons and that just isn't a quick project.

I'd love to see the adjustable choke idea, similar to what scattermaxs did in the original planetside (so as not to tread too much on ac/10) which was you could tighten the spread down to where it was decent at longer ranges, but you took a large hit to the refire rate.

[Kmieciu]

Players want switchable ammo for LBX because scatter shot simply sucks. LBX is only workable with extreme quirking (CN9-D is workable yet not exactly meta).

LBX is terribly inefficient. I had I game where I wasted 500 damage to bring down one Timber Wolf with it.

It needs less spread and more damage per pellet.

Right now, If I had the option to use slug rounds, I would never switch to scatter shot.

[Kuritaclan]

LB-X has connections to hit detection/hitreg - annimation of the shot - ammo system and hud || Maybee als dig deep in some other roots of the game we don't know for sure. It may break something messing around and this is why they do not promise to do it soonish™.

Anyway, without quirks are playstyle depended. I use LB-X10 on my MDD and have a 2xLBX20 Dire serve me average duty. If they now could change the ammo i don't know if they would perform the same way or even better.

[kapusta11]

I will never understand what's the problem with multiple firing modes/ammo types might be. You write the code for secondary weapon profile, set a button that switch modes, like chainfire does now, and off you go, game now thinks you have a different gun stats wise.

Edited by kapusta11, 21 April 2015 - 12:34 AM.

[Tincan Nightmare]

Its pretty short sighted of PGI not to factor in ammo swapping (or alternate modes of fire) considering some of the later tech available in BT. Just for missiles, theres the MML system for the IS that can fire either LRM's or SRM's, and the ATM for Clans that can also fire variable ammo types. Not to mention the 'special' ammo types that were developed for standard AC's that the Ultra, LBX, and RAC's couldn't fire (which made standard AC's not so obsolete). Plus the improved NARC that had various ammo loads. Unless they are going to freeze us at the current weapon tech level indefinetely this is a problem they will have to face sooner or later.

[Reitrix]

One Medic Army, on 20 April 2015 - 08:09 PM, said:

From what I understand, CryEngine doesn't actually support multiple ammo types. Instead it uses a work around where multiple weapons are defined, and the "ammo toggle" switches between those multiple weapons that all look identical, possibly queueing reload animations instead of weapon switch animations.

Now, there's any number of reasons this could be an issue with PGI's code, and how they defined the weapon "object" with regards to the mech "object", and various ammo/cooldown/valid build code checks.

Would it be impossible to clone this effect by having a 'ghost' AC2/5/10/20 attached to the LBX?

By this i mean that when you install an LB of any size, a hidden, weight and critslot free AC of the same size is installed at the same time, and the toggle switches not the ammo, but literally the whole Autocannon?