41 replies to this topic

[General Solo]

But that's what happens behind the scenes, when theirs sheetreg, you just can't see it no more.

[Koniving]

Spheroid, on 08 October 2019 - 10:44 AM, said:

why melee is not desireable or effective in a realtime BattleTech setting.

I want you to know that I agree and disagree with you. Lemme make my case by first agreeing with you.

It could be done and made very desirable, but ignoring the technical challenge, there's no reason to in MWO. As you say, it is completely undesirable in how MWO is done.
An AC/20 does 20 damage in a single shot. Therefore what advantage can there be in opening yourself to a lot of risk to produce a 20 damage kick?

The way MWO has translated the base universe's lore-rooted damage over time weapons into "per shot" values rather than "per use/turn", the advantage of putting 10 to 50+ tons of force behind a physical attack is completely lost (without the use of leverage you cannot put 100% of your weight into the force of an attack unless landing on the target completely).

For that reason, the risk involved with a full torso swing in a melee punch or being off target with your weapons for a kick is completely unwarranted. There's nothing to be gained from it and everything to lose. In this I completely agree.

For melee to work, the weapons would need to be overhauled to a damage over time rating system rather than a damage per bullet. This in turn seriously curves mass alpha damage, too, but at that point we'd have to cut armor/structure in half to make up for it and whaddya know, we've got Battletech in real time where damage is over time.

But, none of this is gonna happen in MWO, although this would be necessary in order to make a melee strike worth the risk and potential self-harm, as also negative consequences for misses would also need to exist as well as being able to fall over whether from receiving successful and hefty enough strike or delivering a blow that fails to connect and throws your machine off balance.

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Melee works in Battetech for two reasons. Firstly it is turn based. Physical combat is an attractive option that carries little opportunity cost.

Beyond that, directed at the OP and on a technical side, no IK is involved as these are purely animations. This is why when you have an enemy at a ledge and you punch or kick them, even if more than half of their body falls over the ledge they simply float there. You can't fall down from the way you move, and the mechs are merely using a single animation. To be honest, HBS's Battletech could have gone steps further, having reaction animation linked to it so that the Comando in this case could react to the Hunchback's approaching punching and at least played out the Techmanual's mention of how mechs try to avoid all incoming damage, so that a 'miss' would be the result of the Commando evading the atttack and a hit is the Commando failing to evade.

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A mech with arm mounted UAC or RAC spam likewise will not surrender what is currently highly damaging weapon attacks for several seconds of paralysis. Physical combat can not be made unrealistically rapid either. Normal ranged weapons can be tweaked for any configuration of cooldown, range and duration. How do you tweak the skeletal animation of a giant war machine? You can't make swings arbitrarily fast or it will end up looking like a Benny Hill video. You can't extend limbs beyond fixed physical limits either.

Completely agree with you here as well. This is why my opening explains that its undesirable in MWO's current setup and what would need to be changed (and never will be) for MWO to support it.

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This gets to my second point, range. The boardgame uses extreme range compression with one hex equaling thirty meters. The compression is even greater when playing the abstraction which is melee. That is all fine and good in that setting, but short range has proven highly ineffective when stock weapon ranges and mech speed were ported over. All ninety meter or shorter weapons have received substantial buffs beyond their original values because their stock values were worthless. If ninety meters was inadequate how are you going to deal with 5-10 meters for a kick? You don't.

Close range weapons and the like received substantial buffs because all other weapons are also substantially buffed, an AC/5 in MWO without quirks or skill tree is actually a RAC/35 if you tried to put it back into tabletop. By the time you reach the ten second time slice, you've dealt 35 damage rather than 5, as well as generated 7 heat rather than 1 heat. (This is also the reason why standard heatsinks are worthless in MWO and why MWO needs a climbing maximum threshold) A melee strike within a 10 second period is anywhere between 4 and 25 damage. You'd also get a maximum of 2 punches, unless you're a melee specialist (melee master? I tend to get them mixed up) in which case you're permitted an additional punch or two kicks). But lets take the minimum of 4 and run with it. We'd have to buff it by a similar amount and get 28 damage for a punch from a 20 ton mech to get the tabletop equivalent for a blow delivered in a 10 second period.

Now when an Atlas punched, you'd be looking at a rough guesstimate of 70 damage. That'd be worth it. Now for a true comparison, one must account for double armor/structure, in which case the AC/5 is technically doing 17.5 and for 7 heat. Meanwhile that punch technically would be doing 35.. but I digress and continue that basically everything in MWO is overpowered and as such the machine guns and small lasers HAD to be buffed accordingly to be worth anything, as originally they were made to do 2 damage in 10 seconds at 0.2 damage per second or 0.025 damage per bullet (as it was 8 bullets at the time I really enjoyed playing with them [what? With the server authority they would tell you exactly where the 'real' target was hiding through the lag and thus allow you to hit them rather than shooting at what you saw; if anyone wondered why mechs tanked so much it's because most people weren't hitting them as much as they thought], they upped it to 10 bullets per second later along with our current damage levels).

Or, as I introduced at the beginning of the game, use the lore, change the weapons, reduce the armor/structure back to 1x, etc..etc..etc... and a 4 damage punch is worth while, though more likely to happen with the higher damage of a heavier machine. That same Atlas punch at only 10 damage would still be absolutely freaking crippling to its recepient.

The long and short.. It's not worth doing in MWO. But through mods, it would be worth doing as a demonstration of what could have been in MW5 Mercs, as any of us could modify the weapons with a damage over time ruleset in mind, such as 1 or more shots from a ML in 5 seconds or less should tally 5 damage (with single shots having lengthier charge-up and/or beam time and multiple shots having much shorter beam times), autocannons that act like autocannons, and PPCs and Gauss Rifles that shoot once or so in ten seconds but when they hit they would be devastating (the 1x armor structure, a single Gauss Rifle hitting would be like twin Gauss hitting now, made all the more threatening as in comparison an AC/20 can be anything from a multi-barrel chaingun pumping out 100 40mm shells in 2 seconds to 5 180mm shells at 1 shell per 1.25 seconds.)

Under those circumstances, interrupting the flow of an AC/20 that needs 3-5 seconds to reload and allow the barrel to cool to prevent weapon-heat related risks in order to deliver a 20 damage kick in a single blow...is completely worth every feasible risk associated with it. But again that will never happen in MWO.

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I believe those pining for melee falsely believe they will be swatting Piranhas off them left and right. This is false. Lights control the range, not the victim. To think otherwise is folly. A standard light attack is built around the circle strafe. Staying out of melee range is no challenge for them. Also leg humping doesn't need to be made from the front. Crotch humping can easily be replaced by side or rear humping with little effort. Unlike the abstraction which is the boardgame, reacting to those angles given realtime restrictions on vision and limb reach is not possible.

Agreed, to a point. While I don't believe in rear or side strikes as canonically they have to be in your visual field with your crosshair on target when you press the melee switch for the strike to work, simply having IK functional and collisions enabled would solve part of that problem.

This is without knockdowns but with collisions fully functional. Raven tries to hump my rear.
Because my foot lands on his and my collision mesh impacts his, and because low speed impacts could do reasonable damage unlike now... I broke his leg by stepping on him. Note that I am credited with the limb destruction despite the target behind me, not suffering from an ammo explosion, and otherwise not being fired upon by me in any way shape or form.


It's a pity they took that out, too, as it kept hapenning to congealed friendly mechs.

Siegegun, on 07 October 2019 - 11:25 AM, said:

About IK

I wanted to follow up on what I said earlier with a video I couldn't find at the time. The start point should be approximately 1 hour, 5 minutes into the video and it lasts 27 minutes (though it only would take 5 minutes to understand what's going on and how important it is if you had absolutely no idea what IK even was).
This has a very lengthy and interesting discussion about IK movement, which may shed light as to why it is necessary for everything from connecting attacks without pushing through enemies (as PGI's animation department is terrible and therefore they will NOT spend the thousands of hours necessary to make individual attack and receiving animations for every feasible combination of mechs, angles, etc...), as well as being knocked back, knocked down, rolling off cliffs, and every feasible edge case imaginable in relation to melee attacks in real time in first person as well as witnesses these attacks as a third party and the possibility of interrupting an attack with an attack from the intended victim or a third party.

Within the first two minutes you'll see the issues that I mentioned Battlefield 3 having when they turned off IK in their game in relation to soldier animations, where what happens after the advancements Star Citizen had made for their game is what was in Dice's Bad Company 2.

IK If you jump ten minutes prior to the skipped start point of the presentation (so 55-ish minutes), is also used in things like "look at player", where they're demonstrating variable IK for allowing actor subtlety in animation with priorities for what is being done. In the case of mechs, it would be necessary for the animation to lock the target location and react to it in a similar manner using IK for that to work.