35 replies to this topic

[Kilroy]

No skill, Kit Fox Only, Mechwarrior 2!

Edited by Kilroy, 29 August 2019 - 11:04 AM.

[MeiSooHaityu]

I've been listening to the series while I work (sneaking a peak here and there) and it is a fun run so far.

Ep.1...

I understand running modded builds and installing the weapons torso mounted. The mech is hard enough as it is, I think anyone would agree that he needs all the help he can get with that mech .

I miss the Heat Vision as well. I think Enhanced Imaging would be cool too, however given the time frame of MW5, I kind of understand why it wouldn't be there. The satellite view would be great.

Hitboxes and weapons fire has always been wonky in MechWarrior 2 (even worse in MW2:Mercs). That was cheap that the turret was firing through the building to hit the mech, but sadly it wasn't surprising :/.

Lastly, I also love the music in MW2. It still has to be one of my favorite game soundtracks (up there with FTL and C&C).

Edited by MeiSooHaityu, 08 August 2019 - 02:57 AM.

[Nesutizale]

The Betas heat vision wasn't pulled out because PGI dosn't allow fun but because it cost to much performace. That is what I remember.

[MeiSooHaityu]

Nesutizale, on 08 August 2019 - 07:08 AM, said:

The Betas heat vision wasn't pulled out because PGI dosn't allow fun but because it cost to much performace. That is what I remember.

I was under the impression that the original heat vision was too overpowered, and that is why it was changed to the one we have today.

Back in the day with the old heat vision, I could see enemy mechs moving at spawn clear across Forest Colony, and because the map was smaller at the time, sniper builds could ping players right off the bat.

I think that is why the new heat vision doesn't have the range, and also doesn't have the stark red/blue contrast of the original vision.

I could be wrong about this, but that is how I seem to be remembering it. Things like inverse kinetics were a performance thing, and that is why it was removed. This may be true for knock-down too, although it may also be due to it being abused as a bullying tactic. That one is hard to say because there was massive rubber-banding of mechs upon knockdown, and there is also footage of Russ being stun locked from knockdowns, so the actual reason may be one, the other, or both of those reasons.

[Nesutizale]

You are right that heat vision and night where both reduced in range because the data showed that people where using it to an unfair advantage and basicly play the game in that vision only.

Still like with lots of stuff from the Beta it was to resource intensive. Same problem where those corcsrew (I thats what its called) missile flightpath. Very cool to look at but to complex in fligthpath.
Overall I remember the beta, early game to look much better then what we had later on and it was still damn CPU heavy.
PGI said in one interview or AMA that the way they did stuff in MWO, espacialy how the mechs are build, is something that they should have done differently but its to late to change now. Also they changed it for MW5 so lets hope performance will be better with it.

As for your little KitFox challange, I hope you go through with it, its an cool idea and I feel nostalgic seeing MW2 again.
PS: I think I never torso twisted back then? Can't remember but I think I only realy started to use in when I played MWO.

Edited by Nesutizale, 08 August 2019 - 09:00 AM.

[Kilroy]

I'm glad you guys are enjoying it so far. I'll try to upload as frequently as I am able.

[Rorik Thrumsalr]

Ack! The std kitfox is a deathtrap in MW2. No torso twist and no JJ's with super light armor make it suicidal for all but the most minor engagements. Kilroy, you are far braver soul than I.

Edit: Just watched video 7. When you said "catharsis" and switched to a MAD IIC I did a perfect spit-take.

Well played. Bravo.

Edited by Rorik Thrumsalr, 08 August 2019 - 11:29 PM.

[Koniving]

Nesutizale, on 08 August 2019 - 07:08 AM, said:

The Betas heat vision wasn't pulled out because PGI dosn't allow fun but because it cost to much performace. That is what I remember.

As someone that was there, the game had two major issues with it....but neither of them had anything to do with performance. Supported with videos including two from that early-closed-beta performance-at-a-crawl. As well as videos using the thermal vision for almost the entire fight, both in slow and fast mechs, with no performance hits.

Spoiler

The first and foremost is yes, while players showed their temperatures.. environments only did this if the developers went through and coded it especially for thermal vision. As such Caustic, while very well done, still had some invisible elements in thermals that didn't show up. River City, half the fires had no heat signatures and once they made the first little performance pass on River City, (especially when the night version was done), the entire environment was made invisible. They tried to compensate by adding a "sonar ring" that would help you notice buildings but basically it was a compromise of depth perception or making the enemy so easy to see you can snipe him from the opposite end of the map for an instant kill headshot.

Frozen City, in turn, was just given an alternate set of lights so that the map could be visible in the cold. Such wouldn't make much sense in river city, however, with so many local heat sources.

So in other words, if they didn't go through a lot of extra work on a map to make a "Thermal map", basically the only things that would light up are mechs. That's further compounded by how Night Vision uses a separate light map as baked light sources don't exist in the NV mode, so the factory map when it first came along...night vision basically didn't work. In reality they have to make each map 3 times for the two modes to work. They cut the thermal mode for that reason. It was easier to force a monochrome filter than to deal with it. But then a cross of version histories led to green weapon effects. (Did they ever fix that?)

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So that was issue one. The second issue is that the thermal mode had its own version of things especially mechs. As such one of the early cheats that got advertised out there basically activated part of this in order to 2get mechs to show where they shouldn't. Take the unique effects out, kill the cheat. The current highlight effect generates a brighter light onto the mech as it gets hotter and generates a black light as they get further out of range. You can exploit this by taking advantage of hotmaps where the environment is given a forced white light and then enemies at long range are 'illuminated' with a black light source.

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Far as resource intensive, that's well documented.

The game lacked any kind of texturing standard, there were 2k textures on special mechs, 1k to 512x512 textures for many other mechs as they got introduced, and overall completely wild ranges played havoc with the Cryengine. (Lordred's Perfect Screenshot thread contains much of this information, he also started a separate thread trying to propose solutions to the issues PGIwas causing as well as supplying custom cfg files to get the amazing visuals he was showing us in his screen shots in addition to significantly superior performance).

Beyond that, you could simply hit Right Shift and F11 at the time to shut off the hud, and for me I'd make a jump during the worst days of MWO's frame rate from 25 frames per second while recording to 70 frames per second, as they had used some sort of script.. I think it was called Scaleform? Whatever it was it was done for the UI/HUD and if you deactivated the HUD performance improved significantly. This was improved upon over time with the biggest improvement being the return of DirectX 11 support.
This video is during closed beta, before support was disabled. WARNING: The audio is terrible it was very early for me on youtube.

But as you can see, it had absolutely nothing to do with running the vision mode; the performance was **** globally.

Where with the vision mode, improvements to the scaleform UI code and optimization...

But no performance issues. This video is before the update that turned River City pitch black and un-navigatable.
In night vision, you can tell the light sources completely change to a light generated dead-center on me (even see reflections on windows of the light coming from just behind the camera, those are even on the monitors)
For thermal a dim light is emitting from the camera, but the map has its own lights which completely ignore the fact that there are no light sources when in normal vision mode. Much like Night Vision continues to ignore most light sources in game even today. But between having to do these light sources for each vision mode, set "temperatures" of objects placed into world to get them to do the heat vision effect, and numerous other issues... it was just easier to not do that work.


And high speed for those so skeptical.

And one more for good measure which also showcases another commonly mistaken "performance issue", the blinding light of laser burns. Notice the fading to black? That's because the laser burns were set to be so bright that monitors can't achieve it... so it dims everything else to create the effect, blinding you.

Given the thread we're in, MWO with MW2 computer voice.

MWO with MW3 computer voice.


Nothing performance related there when considering thermal vision, except perhaps economically and in terms of workflow..

Now you might be thinking of the "halt" that lower pings will get when making the switch between vision modes; that had less to do with the vision mode itself and more to do with the fact that the game had significant delays in requesting permission from the server back in the day. Run a ping of 400+ and you'll be able to recreate the exact same issue today...so no change there.

You can see that issue during this packetloss bug.

As for performance, the game's performance has always been on the ****** end. Check out this LoD popping that I dubbed temporal distortions.


And if performance was related to network performance (which is impossible as the visual effects are handled locally and there's only asking for permission to enter the vision mode), well, HSR wasn't created because of an issue with thermal, but because the game had an issue with its architecture from the very beginning. .

The lag between server and client was the biggest performance issue of the time.
The early piss poor frame rate was a mix of things from the scaleform UI to completely wild texture work, a rumored built in ENB (doubt there's any truth there but visually between May 2012 and August 2012 the color pallette dropped significantly as did many glows, Depth of Field, the PERMANENT MOTION BLUR THAT DIDNT TURN OFF EVEN IF YOU FORCED IT THROUGH THE CFG COMMANDS), poor optimization, etc. The issues with the texture work lasted until well after 2015 before they were being universally fixed around the same time that unique geometry was dropped.

On hindsight, I believe it was the motion blur that caused that big slowdown. If you watch that directx11 video in July 2012, it is plagued with motion blur. In fact, I also remember that changing the graphics settings at the time did nothing to the graphics. Couldn't tell the difference between very high and low, and that video is recorded on "medium".
Note the details on the snow here. WARNING: The audio is terrible it was very early for me on youtube.

Now jump into MWO on the highest settings and tell me if you see anything like that.

(Lordred even had a big thing in the screenshot thread or its own about how every camo pattern had different scales in texture quality, so by wearing specific camo skins you could play havoc with someone running a computer with the graphics set to a certain spot.)

[Nesutizale]

Interesting, didn't know that. I thought I remebered that it had something to do with performance...well not beeing able to see the envoirment also hits performace...yours by running into things but yah thats a different performance.

[MeiSooHaityu]

Thank's for the info Koniving, that was extremely interesting. I had always assumed it was something different. Thank you for shedding light on the reasons why it was removed.

[Koniving]

MeiSooHaityu, on 12 August 2019 - 02:44 AM, said:

Thank's for the info Koniving, that was extremely interesting. I had always assumed it was something different. Thank you for shedding light on the reasons why it was removed.

If you think about it, thermal vision with a kilometer's worth of distance is supposed to look like this.


Now find the Battlemech and remember its blue when it's surface is cold and red when overheating. So in general use and combat, a mech would have been varying colors between the two (purple if I remember though yellow would have made more sense and here it would have blended better). And when it is powered off, it'll be nearly invisible among these....but not nearly as invisible as they were in closed beta's version in which the entire color effect could disappear if heat was 0 (or below and yes there's a below 0) and power was off.

And that's at night from a drone, meaning it was removed from the heat. Something that's in with the heat/generating heat would have an even harder time. Should the sun have been up, the sky would also be showing heat particularly on a sunny day, giving quite a backdrop.

These are also about winter, and the redder buildings are bleeding their heat due to poor insulation. The article was about wasted heat energy while heating buildings and energy consumption/waste.
Which brings up another thing, mechs are very well insulated... The only parts that should be illuminating, short of areas of their surface hit by lasers/flamers/other weapons would be their weapon barrels and exhaust ports for the heatsinks.. of course I could see them illuminating when they get seriously hot...which is another big thing PGI lacks any effects for. Distortions from heat emissions, possible smoke (probably not realistic but might help portray the image; appropriate if there was a coolant leak though even if the leak stops the stuff is gonna steam off), etc.

Mech armor in the Techmanual, in the BattleTechnology magazines (where it is first mentioned) and in the Battletech Battlemech Manual (2018) is stated to have amazing heat distribution properties so the heat from weapons fire and the like dissipates within just seconds without intervention from the heatsinks. This is why PPCs and lasers don't transfer any heat energy... and apparently why flamers have to be "switched" to a mode to generate heat in the mech. (To be honest that doesn't make any sense, but if you were to flame the heat exhaust ports......)

Anyway. There's no mention of this ability by the structure, so... as armor strips the more you should show up on thermals, even if it is just floating blobs shaped like your exposed structure.

------------

But back to PGI.
In order to fix thermals to not be so unfair, every map would need every asset having an established heat value. Some of the smoke and flames on River City don't even show up on thermals because they aren't set. It was simpler to say Screw it and take it out. Since the color is basically white or black, the (edit: lack of) various distinct colors makes it harder to spot a specific part of the shape and go "I've got your head!"

And while the balance is a bit better, the game is worse for it.

Edited by Koniving, 14 August 2019 - 12:10 PM.

[Kilroy]

Part 8 is up now!

[Kilroy]

After a week or so, I finally continue. The Golden Spade mission with a Kit Fox is uh... yeah... You'll see.

[Rorik Thrumsalr]

Ouch....PPC sniping just won't do this time around I guess.

Edited by Rorik Thrumsalr, 20 August 2019 - 09:59 PM.

[Nesutizale]

Just thought, are there any mods for MW2 games to update graphics? I mean when Minecraft or Quake gets raytraceing, how about MW2?

[Rorik Thrumsalr]

Nesutizale, on 21 August 2019 - 03:26 AM, said:

Just thought, are there any mods for MW2 games to update graphics? I mean when Minecraft or Quake gets raytraceing, how about MW2?

There were the titanium and 3d accelerated versions, but I always found the original to look best and feel best. There is a mod somewhere around that lets you change the draw distance. That's the hardest part about replaying it, not being able to see more than 750m away.

[Surn]

How did you get the game to run?

[Kilroy]

Surn, on 21 August 2019 - 08:20 AM, said:

How did you get the game to run?

Rorik Thrumsalr, on 21 August 2019 - 08:06 AM, said:

There is a mod somewhere around that lets you change the draw distance. T

I use MechVM. You can get it from http://www.mechvm.org/

It's pretty simple, assuming you have the actual disc. If not you need the iso/bin file and to mount it to a virtual drive with something like Daemon Tools. Once you have that just click install on the MechVM menu and you should be ready to go.

In the MechVM files there is an executable called _farPatcher which will bring up a DOS prompt where you can edit the draw distance. This can cause some minor issues in the game but it's definitely worth it. I set mine in these videos (after Silver Staff) to 1200 meters. Simply type that and hit enter.

[Kilroy]

And finally finishing off the Wolf Campaign!

[Kilroy]