5 replies to this topic

[SquishiestSquish]

I have a suggestion for a feature that has been sorely missing from this game for a long long long time.


ACTUAL GEOMETRY THAT MATCHES THE VISUAL REPRESENTATION!

there is no reason that ANYONES shots should be hitting things on the map THAT DON'T EXIST!

[Naitrael]

That would be an enormous hit to the performance, which is sub-par as it is.

[TheoLu]

If they'd let us players enable a mode on training grounds to see bounding boxes and let us go over maps and compile a list of areas which need tweaking though, things might be able to improve without inherently negatively impacting on performance.

Right now there are many areas of the various maps which are impassable even though there's absolutely zero reason for them to be such, so those are bounding boxes which could at least be fixed up some.

Then there may be other areas where players could find boxes which are unnecessarily detailed relative to surrounding areas which would benefit from more detail instead.

I'm confident there's an immense amount of bounding boxes which would trigger weapons-fire collisions around the bases of buildings on maps such as River City which are completely unnecessary while there are ones at at least light-mech height which are important owing to such mechs potentially wanting to shoot around geometry or other mechs wanting to shoot back at them.

But then... it's unlikely we'd ever be afforded that functionality, because for PGI to do that would be an admittance that they could have, should have, done better but have let glaring issues remain in place for years on end...

[Elizander]

TheoLu, on 18 June 2018 - 03:42 AM, said:

If they'd let us players enable a mode on training grounds to see bounding boxes and let us go over maps and compile a list of areas which need tweaking though, things might be able to improve without inherently negatively impacting on performance.

Right now there are many areas of the various maps which are impassable even though there's absolutely zero reason for them to be such, so those are bounding boxes which could at least be fixed up some.

Then there may be other areas where players could find boxes which are unnecessarily detailed relative to surrounding areas which would benefit from more detail instead.

I'm confident there's an immense amount of bounding boxes which would trigger weapons-fire collisions around the bases of buildings on maps such as River City which are completely unnecessary while there are ones at at least light-mech height which are important owing to such mechs potentially wanting to shoot around geometry or other mechs wanting to shoot back at them.

But then... it's unlikely we'd ever be afforded that functionality, because for PGI to do that would be an admittance that they could have, should have, done better but have let glaring issues remain in place for years on end...

This would be great. A wireframe of the hit boxes of terrain.

[SquishiestSquish]

if they cant make the PHYSICAL hitboxes of maps match the visual then i propose going the other way and make the VISUAL hitboxes match the physical. i should not be able to see something to shoot through an object i cannot shoot through

[MechanicalWraith]

Terrain is a special type of dynamic mesh using a heightmap (grayscale image storing vertex height), the visual doesn't match the physical terrain because the physics engine uses a single resolution all the time, and the visual side is constantly subdividing and simplifying the mesh to improve render performance on distant areas.

The only way to make the visual match the physical at all times would be to force high-res on the terrain mesh regardless of view distance - this would grind the game to a halt for many PCs, ultimately the problem is that MWO's level of ground detail is excessive, without infantry running around we don't need to see all the pebbles, halving the terrain detail would yield a 4x improvement to some terrain performance issues.

About buildings... Same problem, too much detail for a mech sim, but fixing them is significantly easier than terrain, for one most tall buildings could be given more squared corners - properly aligned with the object's colliders this would make buildings at any LOD much better to play with.

In any game, collisions are made significantly less detailed than the render mesh for obvious reasons, but MWO is trying to (pretend) to be a sim, decorative objects should be designed to fit a sim element, not made to look pretty and then have colliders slapped on as an afterthought

Edited by MechanicalWraith, 07 July 2018 - 05:56 AM.