3 replies to this topic

[Twilight Fenrir]

Hello there,

So, I spent a few hours playing PTS3 yesterday, and took a few notes, I'm gonna keep this part short and sweet, so I can dive into some in depth suggestions.

1. TAG should give you a lock regardless of radar range. It's Target Acquisition Gear for crying out loud.
2. Armor/structure quirks to Atlas/Victor/Highlander are awesome.
3. I still dislike lasers dependent on target lock. It is ESPECIALLY bad when your mech has a 350 meter radar range. Which brings me to...
4. The mech radar ranges seems INCREDIBLY arbitrary. The Raven 3L, the most advanced electronics warfare package in the Inner Sphere at this time, has a shorter range of radar than an Atlas? The Dire Wolf only has 350~ meter range?!? I don't even pilot a Dire Wolf, and I'm appalled.
5. Longer Gauss cooldown sucks.
6. Love the grid location over target locks n.n
7. Skill tree changes are meh... I don't really care either way... if you're going to stick with these numbers, however, a boost to heatsinks baseline stats is in order. It'd be nice if you adjusted all mech stats base lines so that the skill tree completion gets us a smaller buff, but still brings us to current levels, but I can understand wanting to make the machines more ponderous. Either way is fine by me, though.

Suggestions!:
Here are some ideas of ways IW can be accomplished without necessarily neutering aspects of the game...


1. Instead of limiting radar ranges... what about changing refresh rates based on range?

For example, consider the Dire Wolf. You want to limit it? Fine. Make it have a really low radar refresh rate past 400 meters. If you have line of sight, your target lock would remain as it does in the live servers now. But other mechs not locked would tend to 'warp' around on your map, instead of a constant 1 to 1 motion.

Actually, this could be a good way to affect the Clans in general, while having some lore to throw at it. The Clans focus on single combat, not so much an organized fight. So let all of their radars track a targeted mech perfectly, but anything not immediately around them gets hit with a slower refresh rate, varied to suit balance of the mech. In some cases, you could make it take up to say 5 seconds to track movement not directly targeted... This could be a big thing for faster mechs to take advantage of.


2. Instead of limiting the essential radar, what about making some mechs have longer, or shorter range Night vision/thermal vision? This isn't (generally) a necessary mode. But could tip the balance on the ever more common night missions.


3. Passive Radar
Most of the other games have it... why not this one? You can clearly change radar ranges, why not let us do it too? Make a mech operating under Passive undetectable past, say, 500 meters. While giving them only say, 250 meters to see with.


4. What if, instead of limiting radar of the mechs themselves, we limit the detectability of mechs? Fast, light mechs may not be picked up further than 600 meters unless they're just standing there... Mediums 700, heavies 800, and assaults 1000. With rate of data acquisition taking longer at longer ranges universally, but the degree to which it does varies based on chassis. Maybe my Raven can see other light mechs at 1000 meters. While my Urbanmech can't see them until 600 meters... Maybe even closer, since it was built for urban combat


5. Heat Vision Revision

Okay, this one's gonna have a lot to it...


Mechs give off a lot of heat, we know this... but they give off the MOST heat from their heatsinks. After all, that's literally their purpose. What if heat vision only showed the heat exhaust ports brightly (unless the mech was near overheating) and furthermore, what if we could shut off these heat sinks, per lore? Turn off your heat sinks, and you no longer show up on Thermal except as a slightly warm patch (again, unless you're in the orange) The obvious downside is just walking that way would start to build up heat, except on very cold maps.


Everyone remembers heat vision in Closed Beta. (Well, everyone who participated in it at least) The colors were awesome IMO. Bringing that back, balanced against an effective range would be great, and help reduce the glaring OP-ness of it originally.

Either way, the environments aren't all the same temperature. Buildings should have heat signatures, the tourmaline on Tourmaline should burn out your retinas if you look at the on thermal. Having the environments show heat would make mechs less glaringly obvious.

Edited by Twilight Fenrir, 06 November 2015 - 04:24 PM.

[Sonny Black]

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Published on Dec 18, 2015

[Koniving]

Sonny Black, on 21 December 2015 - 11:33 AM, said:

Detection ranges at first got me like "Oh boy," but seeing what you had in mind is pretty good.

Watching convergence, it is a little more complicated than that. There are two ray-traces. The first from the camera (first person) or cockpit (third person) to the target XYZ. Then the weapons to said XYZ, shots then trace the path to that said XYZ. On delays, shown here by the autocannon back when "delayed convergence" existed, a sudden change in target causes the raytrace XYZ feeder to suddenly reset to zero. Btw shots only trace the XYZ raytrace initially, also shown by the autocannon.



In the spoiler, the lasers had a very different behavior, converging on something far away and as the lasers fired, they 'tightened' to the new, decreasing range of the crosshair's XYZ feed.

Spoiler

On the third person: it isn't so much that you can see "more" in third person, it is that the Crosshair is drawn from the XYZ coordinate of the Mech's cockpit. If the cockpit is nose-deep in something, your crosshair gets really wonky. Unlike first person where it is drawn from the Camera's location at the XYZ of the pilot's non-existent head in a neutral position (and is often NOT where the cockpit even is; for example for a Spider it is located inside the chest as shown below), the third person crosshair draws the feeding XYZ from the cockpit. This is also why the crosshair bounces with mech movement, simulating Battletech's movement to accuracy ratio. This doesn't exist in first person since the 'cockpit head camera' will NEVER move or adjust with the world.

Now... Going to convergence by target location: The first part of your suggestion is simply Star Siege's convergence system. Target enemy, your convergence is set to that range dynamically. Do not target your enemy, and your convergence goes to where you aim. Later, the "no target" means never converge -- that part is interesting as it would need that counter interaction you mentioned, though the Star Siege system is a simplification to it (and hardly any good for competing against enemy lights due to having to lead most weapons, making you want to be able to target them).

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Far as making any of this happen, I think the issue may be less programing/design related and more company politics. Take a look at the personalities and think for a moment. Resistance to changing ECM for years, bandaids instead of solutions. You're smart, won't take you long. All I can say.

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Also: Downloaded your video. Some of the info here will be useful in the design of my "What I wanted out of a Battletech/Mechwarrior simulator."

[Koniving]

(Also realized this might not be your video and you might just be sharing it, so I posted a link to this to Kanajashi.)

Side note: Twilight: 100% agree on most.

Laser lock -- kinda arbitrary but can make sense... Only if we get Battletech's Anti-Laser Aerosols and other laser counters from the 1987 lore (which isn't really in tabletop, they just exist). Smoke particles, ash, even flames can disrupt and weaken laser effectiveness. So requiring a lock to have the lasers 'focus' properly does make a bit of sense. But only if we get the full information warfare suite...more to Kanajashi and your refresh rate idea (which old MWO closed beta had this, the minimap refreshed once per second).

Thermal vision -- I want a real thermal vision with many, many colors indicating gradients of heat. Not this "world is X color" and "Mechs are multi-color" like in the original thermal vision. Everything should be multi-color. And yes, exhaust ports make a crap load of sense. This can go further by pointing out that mechs with ~more~ heatsinks would show more heatsinks than mechs with less. Giving you a reason to try things like not filling your mech to the brim with heatsinks... or favor autocannons.