56 replies to this topic

[Kiiyor]

Well, we probably don't need more heat discussion... but I made a thing, and I like it.

I've seen some of the proposals put forward by the community, and while many seemed spectacular to me, pessimist Kiiyor thought that they would never see the light of day because they made sometimes drastic changes to our existing systems. Also, some of them were downright brutal as far as penalties go - so I wanted to strike a happy medium between the more arcade system we have now, and the brutal and unforgiving system so popular in TT.

So, inspired by some of the suggestions in other threads, I tried to think of some sort of heat penalty system that modified our existing mechanics, rather than creating new ones. And then I got excited and created new ones… Anyhoo, rather than our current two tier heat system of "nope, no problems here" and "death", I tried to imagine a graduated system of worsening quality of life effects, rather than a sudden end of life effect we have now at the top of the scale... so here:



The numbers aren't hard and fast by any means, and would likely need tweaking specific to the weight class of mech involved. I just wanted to throw some sort of guide out.

You might notice that the initial penalties for operating after shutdown (as far as life expectancy goes) aren't quite as severe as those we have now. That's because your movement, recharge and other penalties are quite stiff at this stage - you're basically a barely functioning turret. I liked the idea of trying to make your failing war machine dish out the hurt for just a little longer.

Also, internal damage can start appearing randomly after 50% - and though I know how much most people hate the thought of random numbers, I like the thought of intermittent ouchies.

Some other points:

• The flickering hud, and perhaps even new sound effects could leave more immersive queues as to your current heat situation, rather than relying on the heat gauge alone.
  
• If you were to shut down at any stage above 50% heat, all detrimental affects would stop.
  
• I'd love it if pilot effects were possible - blurred vision and the like, or even a heat haze filling the cockpit (which would probably tank FPS, but a guy can dream).
  
• Want to unleash a death star style torrent of laser vomit? Well, you CAN, but your machine will protest strenuously. Good luck getting back into cover after your 60 point alpha strike!
  
• Want to forgo heatsinks in the name of allowing yourself to fling more and more missiles downrange? Well, you CAN, but don't be alarmed when they start exploding in your face. Same goes for Dakka; you might really want to rethink firing at high heat if you're playing AC20 russian roulette.
  
• Maybe... just maybe, this system would encourage mixed builds. Lasers to open the fight with, ballistics to use when things warm up, and SRM's or LRM's to finish the job with... maybe.

Overall though, the moral of this story is that you CAN push your heat scale, but you'll need either exceptional skill, luck, restraint or all of the above to prosper during those times when the water boils and the the terrain bakes around your mech.



What do you guys think? I'm thinking that it would maybe solve some of our more pertinent laser vomit issues, but might create some in other places, like elevating ballistics.

EDIT: SO, COOKOFF CHANCE. I explained this like a chump! It's not a chance for ALL your ammo to go up - it's the chance for a chambered round to go off. So, if you're piloting your AC10 wielding urbie, and have managed to heat your tin can to around 110% after overriding because not overriding is for chumps, your next AC10 shot has a 15% chance of exploding when you fire it, and doing it's damage to your internal structure. So, 10 damage, no spectacular kaboom, but a definite ouchie.

IN SUMMATION: No ammo explosions here! They happen enough when a DireWhale fills your ammo bins with dakka.

Edited by Kiiyor, 13 July 2015 - 02:02 AM.

[One Medic Army]

No internal damage unless you go past 100%, don't care what percentage chance, just no. Similarly no cooking off ammo until past 100%.

Everything else is fine, but random chance of killing yourself and/or blowing off your own sections is a no-no. See MASC implementation for how to do self-damage correctly. It's not purely random (amount is random, occurrence is guaranteed), there is an obvious HUD and audio indicator when it starts. The way MASC is enabled it's not like you can blow yourself to 100% without having a chance to stop on the way up when the warning starts, weapons fire jumps the heat gauge instantly.

There should be penalties for high heat, but make them consistent, and non-fatal.

[edit] Well, if they're fatal at least make them predictably and uniformly fatal. Not "crap the RNG gods decided my cockpit ammo blew out and killed me because I hit 52% heat scale".

Edited by One Medic Army, 12 July 2015 - 11:26 PM.

[TheCharlatan]

Numbers and effects need to be tested and tweaked, but i really hope we see this get implemented one day.

Edited by TheCharlatan, 12 July 2015 - 11:33 PM.

[El Bandito]

Not only ammo, but make it so DHS will also have a chance to explode due to stress. It the novels, it did, when mechs seriously overheated.

Making heat punishing for those who have more than 50% heat will also mean Flamers are now slightly more useful.

Finally, where are my Inferno SRMs and Inferno SSRMs?

Edited by El Bandito, 12 July 2015 - 11:46 PM.

[Kiiyor]

One Medic Army, on 12 July 2015 - 11:24 PM, said:

No internal damage unless you go past 100%, don't care what percentage chance, just no. Similarly no cooking off ammo until past 100%.

Everything else is fine, but random chance of killing yourself and/or blowing off your own sections is a no-no. See MASC implementation for how to do self-damage correctly. It's not purely random (amount is random, occurrence is guaranteed), there is an obvious HUD and audio indicator when it starts. The way MASC is enabled it's not like you can blow yourself to 100% without having a chance to stop on the way up when the warning starts, weapons fire jumps the heat gauge instantly.

There should be penalties for high heat, but make them consistent, and non-fatal.

[edit] Well, if they're fatal at least make them predictably and uniformly fatal. Not "crap the RNG gods decided my cockpit ammo blew out and killed me because I hit 52% heat scale".

Yeah - it's not necessarily killing yourself though, it's an overall % of internal damage, so a 1% chance of 1% damage to a location. That's a miniscule amount of damage, and it's there to make you think about reaching high heat. There's no ammo explosions, as they are pretty much an instagib - it's internal structure only. SO, if you're at full internal health, 100% damage chance only kicks in past normal shutdown levels, and you'll be able to operate for quite a while over that, even in lights, as it's a percentage. For example, If you're over shutdown but below 125% heat, you take 5% damage per second - that leaves you with 20 seconds of operation over that threshold, albeit with some pretty crippling mobility issues.

I liked the thought of your mech slowly cooking around you, rather than instantly exploding like it does now.

[Quicksilver Aberration]

I'm gonna echo One Medic here, no chance of death should happen below 100%, that is a deal breaker for me. Whether it is exploding ammo or exploding DHS, random internal damage, or exploding weapons because reasons, it shouldn't have a chance of happening below 100%.

I also feel movement penalties should be uniform (and include turn speed) except jump height. Considering JJs already add heat I don't think they need a movement penalty since technically things like MASC would also help mitigate these penalties (and without adding heat). Though I agree neither should be able to be activated above 100%, or maybe allow them but with an increased internal damage penalty or something.

While I like the idea of having weapon specific penalties, they are too specific and may be a pain to implement depending on how weapons are coded; in other words they should be blanket nerfs or something akin to an anti-targeting computer. That said, I don't think weapons should be touched at all with heat penalties considering all the other penalties are large enough to be problematic and force pilots to err on the side of caution when passing 50%.

Btw, mixed builds are already strong (for Clan mechs that is), the problem has always been the lack of synergy between weapons though . Gauss Vomit is still the better option than pure laser vomit imo.

Edited by WM Quicksilver, 13 July 2015 - 12:24 AM.

[Alistair Winter]

Looks great to me! I agree about no damage or ammo cook-off before 100% heat though. If I was a mech engineer, I would set 100% as the limit my mech can handle with no chance of suddenly blowing up. That seems to be a good place to set the power down function, if you're designing a war machine that should last decades or centuries.

Aside from that, I would be really, really, really happy to see this in game.

This would be absolutely fantastic. Heat management is much too easy and insignificant in the game right now.

[stjobe]

Kiiyor batting it out of the ballpark again, well done.

This game sorely needs TT-style heat penalties (please read; TT-style, not necessarily exactly TT ported over), it is one of the things that sets the BattleTech universe apart from other universes - you fight your heat as much as you fight the enemy. Riding the redline is a skill that can be learned and it is one of the things that separates good pilots from bad.

Also, I think that a small chance of internal damage at 50-100% heat isn't much of an issue - as long as the damage isn't enough to kill, just gently (or not so gently) remind the pilot that hey, your heat is building up, are you sure you want to continue firing?

Other than that though; good job, and a nice chart. I've been advocating, begging, pleading, and generally asking for this since closed beta.

On a related side note, most of the mechanics needed for TT-style heat penalties are already in-game:

* Movement penalties: Yep, look at legged 'mechs and hill-climbing.
* Accuracy penalties: Reticule shake. Could use some HUD flicker as well, which would likely be easy to implement
* Shutdown chance: Yep, just need to make it an increasing chance instead of a certainty at 100% and nothing before that
* Ammo explosion: Yep, it just needs to be adjusted (and frankly, your idea of cooking off one salvo is much better than cooking off the whole bin, which usually results in instant death).

So I guess there's not much more to say than: PGI - make it so.

[Kiiyor]

Alistair Winter, on 13 July 2015 - 12:55 AM, said:

Looks great to me! I agree about no damage or ammo cook-off before 100% heat though. If I was a mech engineer, I would set 100% as the limit my mech can handle with no chance of suddenly blowing up.

You make sense.

If there are quality of life penalties before 100%, like movement, targeting and the like, you probably don't need limbs cooking off. I included that because I thought 100% heat was more like the absolute maximum a mech can take before liquefying, and a mech had to be in pretty dire straits to be approaching shutdown. Maybe i'm thinking too much like TT there though, where heat management is far more calculated and deliberate as opposed to the panicked alpha strikes we have in MWO. The lack of penalty before 100% in MWO has probably anesthetized a lot of people to the dangers of operating at high heat.

Also, i've not included ammo cook offs at all in this - mainly because ammo explosions are pretty much a death sentence in MWO - and also because you have to carry far more ammo in MWO than you do in TT, compounding the chance of spontaneous mech combustion.

[Joseph Mallan]

Kiiyor, on 13 July 2015 - 12:09 AM, said:

Yeah - it's not necessarily killing yourself though, it's an overall % of internal damage, so a 1% chance of 1% damage to a location. That's a miniscule amount of damage, and it's there to make you think about reaching high heat. There's no ammo explosions, as they are pretty much an instagib - it's internal structure only. SO, if you're at full internal health, 100% damage chance only kicks in past normal shutdown levels, and you'll be able to operate for quite a while over that, even in lights, as it's a percentage. For example, If you're over shutdown but below 125% heat, you take 5% damage per second - that leaves you with 20 seconds of operation over that threshold, albeit with some pretty crippling mobility issues.

I liked the thought of your mech slowly cooking around you, rather than instantly exploding like it does now.

Gotta be ammo explosions. Its called "Cooking off" and it is an affect of searing heat. And should have an RNG factor until a specific temp is reached then Auto BOOM!

[Alex Morgaine]

Kiiyor, on 12 July 2015 - 11:14 PM, said:

Well, we probably don't need more heat discussion... but I made a thing, and I like it.

I've seen some of the proposals put forward by the community, and while many seemed spectacular to me, pessimist Kiiyor thought that they would never see the light of day because they made sometimes drastic changes to our existing systems. Also, some of them were downright brutal as far as penalties go - so I wanted to strike a happy medium between the more arcade system we have now, and the brutal and unforgiving system so popular in TT.

So, inspired by some of the suggestions in other threads, I tried to think of some sort of heat penalty system that modified our existing mechanics, rather than creating new ones. And then I got excited and created new ones… Anyhoo, rather than our current two tier heat system of "nope, no problems here" and "death", I tried to imagine a graduated system of worsening quality of life effects, rather than a sudden end of life effect we have now at the top of the scale... so here:



The numbers aren't hard and fast by any means, and would likely need tweaking specific to the weight class of mech involved. I just wanted to throw some sort of guide out.

You might notice that the initial penalties for operating after shutdown (as far as life expectancy goes) aren't quite as severe as those we have now. That's because your movement, recharge and other penalties are quite stiff at this stage - you're basically a barely functioning turret. I liked the idea of trying to make your failing war machine dish out the hurt for just a little longer.

Also, internal damage can start appearing randomly after 50% - and though I know how much most people hate the thought of random numbers, I like the thought of intermittent ouchies.

Some other points:

• The flickering hud, and perhaps even new sound effects could leave more immersive queues as to your current heat situation, rather than relying on the heat gauge alone.
  
• If you were to shut down at any stage above 50% heat, all detrimental affects would stop.
  
• I'd love it if pilot effects were possible - blurred vision and the like, or even a heat haze filling the cockpit (which would probably tank FPS, but a guy can dream).
  
• Want to unleash a death star style torrent of laser vomit? Well, you CAN, but your machine will protest strenuously. Good luck getting back into cover after your 60 point alpha strike!
  
• Want to forgo heatsinks in the name of allowing yourself to fling more and more missiles downrange? Well, you CAN, but don't be alarmed when they start exploding in your face. Same goes for Dakka; you might really want to rethink firing at high heat if you're playing AC20 russian roulette.
  
• Maybe... just maybe, this system would encourage mixed builds. Lasers to open the fight with, ballistics to use when things warm up, and SRM's or LRM's to finish the job with... maybe.

Overall though, the moral of this story is that you CAN push your heat scale, but you'll need either exceptional skill, luck, restraint or all of the above to prosper during those times when the water boils and the the terrain bakes around your mech.


What do you guys think? I'm thinking that it would maybe solve some of our more pertinent laser vomit issues, but might create some in other places, like elevating ballistics.

THIS!
we need this system, just um... that whole not exploding ammo until 100% like everyone else. Maybe give a warning [audio/turn ammo based systems a warning color] if the next AC/missile round is going to cook off til the heat bar drops to a safe limit?

[Matthew Ace]

One Medic Army, on 12 July 2015 - 11:24 PM, said:

No internal damage unless you go past 100%, don't care what percentage chance, just no. Similarly no cooking off ammo until past 100%.

...

There should be penalties for high heat, but make them consistent, and non-fatal.

[edit] Well, if they're fatal at least make them predictably and uniformly fatal. Not "crap the RNG gods decided my cockpit ammo blew out and killed me because I hit 52% heat scale".

WM Quicksilver, on 13 July 2015 - 12:10 AM, said:

I'm gonna echo One Medic here, no chance of death should happen below 100%, that is a deal breaker for me. Whether it is exploding ammo or exploding DHS, random internal damage, or exploding weapons because reasons, it shouldn't have a chance of happening below 100%.

I also feel movement penalties should be uniform (and include turn speed) except jump height. Considering JJs already add heat I don't think they need a movement penalty since technically things like MASC would also help mitigate these penalties (and without adding heat). Though I agree neither should be able to be activated above 100%, or maybe allow them but with an increased internal damage penalty or something.

Alistair Winter, on 13 July 2015 - 12:55 AM, said:

Looks great to me! I agree about no damage or ammo cook-off before 100% heat though. If I was a mech engineer, I would set 100% as the limit my mech can handle with no chance of suddenly blowing up. That seems to be a good place to set the power down function, if you're designing a war machine that should last decades or centuries.

Aside from that, I would be really, really, really happy to see this in game.

So we'll just set 100% to be a % of our existing heat capacity, with penalty past that then insta-boom the moment you hit the absolute cap? (Evil grin)

See, there ya go, you wont just go boom at 100% anymorr.

[Sergeant Random]

The mech alarms start firing at around 70% to 90% - that might be a more conservative place to start applying the penalties.

But I'm more afraid of coding all that dx/dt chasing around the dh/dt (h=heat).

Most of all, it might not be very popular among the FPS crowd.

Edit: Good effort at design though.

Edited by Sergeant Random, 13 July 2015 - 01:57 AM.

[Kiiyor]

Joseph Mallan, on 13 July 2015 - 01:33 AM, said:

Gotta be ammo explosions. Its called "Cooking off" and it is an affect of searing heat. And should have an RNG factor until a specific temp is reached then Auto BOOM!

Yep, the auto boom bit at the top could serve for that.

I'm not sold on ammo explosions that much though - my idea for cookoffs was for rounds to explode in the chamber, rather than having the whole bin cook off. The threat of ammo explosion is already there from critical hits, so I thought that adding it to heat was a bit masochistic.

I imagine that BT engineers would have devoted a lot of protection and insulation to ammunition bins, but you can't insulate the rounds themselves. Just like in real warfare, cook offs from red hot barrels are quite common, and dangerous. I had a MAG58 explode in my face once when we were stress testing them. Mind you, the barrel was glowing white hot and was curling towards the ground (I had to fire with a piece of wire in the end to distance myself from the heat) so we were probably asking for it

So, the higher your heat, the more chance your chambered round has of exploding when you fire it.

Let's say a Hunchback is at 55 heat, 92% on that chart. It's next shot has a 10% chance of exploding and doing 20 internal damage. So, it's a wasted shot, a big surprise to you, and though 20 damage is nothing to sneeze at, at least you haven't gone up in a fireball. A compromise! How do the weapons themselves survive? erm... it's... battletech physics, that's how. Yeah, let's say battletech weapon barrels are so strong that the blast just.. backblasts... without destroying the weapon. PERFECT.

Same deal with missiles. Each missile at that heat point has a 5% chance to do it's damage to you, rather than the enemy. For an LRM20, that could be... hilarious.

Edited by Kiiyor, 13 July 2015 - 01:54 AM.

[Joseph Mallan]

True a Cook off is usually the first round in the chamber bakes then fires which in a MG "CAN" cause the weapon to just continue to fire. But those are standard bullets not HEAP! Which has Explosive right in the name.

55 Heat should be damaging the Pilot due to breathing air that is hot enough to burn the lungs!

Edited by Joseph Mallan, 13 July 2015 - 02:00 AM.

[SaltBeef]

http://www.bing.com/...Mheg&ajaxhist=0

The heat is too damn high

[Sergeant Random]

Uh oh. Now you have to damage weapon crit HP when rounds explode in the firing chamber.

Edited by Sergeant Random, 13 July 2015 - 02:01 AM.

[Alistair Winter]

Sergeant Random, on 13 July 2015 - 01:51 AM, said:

Most of all, it might not be very popular among the FPS crowd.

Kiiyor, on 13 July 2015 - 01:33 AM, said:

The lack of penalty before 100% in MWO has probably anesthetized a lot of people to the dangers of operating at high heat.

Also, i've not included ammo cook offs at all in this - mainly because ammo explosions are pretty much a death sentence in MWO - and also because you have to carry far more ammo in MWO than you do in TT, compounding the chance of spontaneous mech combustion.

Ah, I didn't read the fine print. I thought it was an ammo cookoff. I'd say the ammo exploding in the weapon should destroy the weapon though. I can't imagine how a round would go off inside the weapon without doing catastrophic damage.

I do agree that people have become too lax about overheating, but I think the 15 different negative consequences in your chart should be enough to change people's tactics real fast.

[Kiiyor]

Joseph Mallan, on 13 July 2015 - 01:58 AM, said:

True a Cook off is usually the first round in the chamber bakes then fires which in a MG "CAN" cause the weapon to just continue to fire. But those are standard bullets not HEAP! Which has Explosive right in the name.

55 Heat should be damaging the Pilot due to breathing air that is hot enough to burn the lungs!

Can you imagine pilot effects? Pained breathing, blurred vision, blacking out! I think many would hate it, but man, i'd love it. Pilot injuries too - cracked cockpit glass, the hiss of oxygen escaping if you get head critted on HPG, wiping blood from your eyes!

AAARRGGGH, IMAGINE IF YOUR COCKPIT GLASS WAS DESTROYED AND YOU COULD LEAP FROM YOUR COCKPIT WITH A SIDEARM!

Ahem. Carried away

[Joseph Mallan]

Alistair Winter, on 13 July 2015 - 02:04 AM, said:

He was one fun Doctor!