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Koniving, on 30 April 2017 - 03:17 PM, said:
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i think my main issue is with the way the guns are depicted in mwo vs how they behave. we cant have them work 100% according to lore, but the way they are depicted in mwo has to make sense in the context of mwo. they simply dont look as they behave. it would be awesome if they worked according to lore. we get mere 4 round salvos when in lore/reality it might be 40 rounds. i would love guns that act and behave like they do in the lore or like the real world guns off which they are based, or even better have weapon manufacturers with different configurations and stats. but then reality sets in.
there are practical limits to fire rates in game. physics or network tick rate will set a minimal cap to repeat rate. as well as the load on the physics engine as it has to deal with multiple collisions per frame if the fire rate is too high. so you want your rate of fire to be 2-4 times slower than what the game can simulate. so weapons exceeding 15 rounds a second are problematic. network rate is even a bigger cap, because you could easily have thousands of objects to track if everyone is spewing tracers everywhere, and that quickly fills up your network packets. minimal of 2 vectors (position and velocity, likely 4-byte floats for each component) and some kind of weapon type identifier and who it belongs to and a unique object identifier, so this object update can easily eat up 32 bytes, and those stack up fast. then everything has got to be server authenticated before the server tells the clients where everything really is at. its a lot of data.
uac20 kind of makes the most sense. the gun is always ready to go with two rounds in the chamber alternating the firing pins to fire one and then the other. its set up to quickly chamber the next pair of rounds off the feed conveyor. you could continue this until the gun heats up and jams. the point where it would jam would always be during the breaching cycle. perhaps also have a slow feed system like through the mech chassis, to load up a high speed clip that can keep up with the fire rate. this would actually work out better if you had a multiple ammo feed. this certainly would explain the long cooldowns. the feed systems in battletech likely make the gau-8 look simple in comparison.
the uac10 makes slightly less sense as it fires 3 rounds, meaning it has to reload one barrel after firing two. it could be done if the barrels have independent breaches or keep with the dual loading and simply not fire the 4th round (because heat i suppose). it would be fired before breaching the next 2. this weapon would make more sense firing in 4 round bursts. of course jams would occur during the breaching action or on ejecting the cases. things would be better if the jams weren't an all or noting thing, you get all or nothing (ive posted a lot about alternate jam mechanics that make more sense). maybe fire the fourth round and then jam sometimes, or jam on the final case eject allowing all the rounds to fire despite the jam.
the gatling loaders on the 2 and 5 (is and clan) seem completely counter intuitive especially with their low rate of fire and high jam rate (gatlings are specifically designed to counter these issues). these guns also have the issue of more barrel than clip. it would feel more correct if these had 3 or 6 round salvos. of course with guns like the uac2 we hit the reality ceiling dispite the gun only being able to fire at about 83-167 rounds a minute, which is terrible by modern standards for similar calibur guns (reality of game network and physics code). i would love having uac5s with a 3 round bursts, both 10 and 20 getting four round bursts. and then the uac2 firing every 0.36 seconds with a jam roll every other round (or half chance every round). that would make sense.
