1768 replies to this topic

[Wintersdark]

Bug Report:

You cannot add DHS to your Engine if you don't have 3 slots free elsewhere, so you need to pull off a weapon or something, put the DHS into your engine slots, then re-equip the weapon after.

[Khrull]

Great JOB! PGI should hire you and incorporate your site into their website.

[twibs]

[BUG]
AC/2 heat efficiency seems to be the same as AC/5

[SUGGESTION]
Either start the armor at MAX or make button to easily get it to MAX, since that's where most of my mechs are, or close to it. It's bit tedious to have to run each armor to max value.

[Blark]

twibs, on 25 December 2012 - 01:44 PM, said:

[BUG]
AC/2 heat efficiency seems to be the same as AC/5

It's not really a bug, but how the in-game heaf-efficiency display works: it seems to be based on the heat one alpha strike generates, not on the hps produced.
There have been some suggestions regarding this, and smurfy is considering to integrate his own, more representative heat efficency display as well as some other values regarding heat (AndyHill had some nice Ideas on this).

twibs, on 25 December 2012 - 01:44 PM, said:

[SUGGESTION]
Either start the armor at MAX or make button to easily get it to MAX, since that's where most of my mechs are, or close to it. It's bit tedious to have to run each armor to max value.

Thats not a bad Idea, the only question would be how to distribute the max armor between front/back; I guess something along the line of 70%/30% or 80%/20%.

[Wintersdark]

Blark, on 25 December 2012 - 01:55 PM, said:

It's not really a bug, but how the in-game heaf-efficiency display works: it seems to be based on the heat one alpha strike generates, not on the hps produced.
There have been some suggestions regarding this, and smurfy is considering to integrate his own, more representative heat efficency display as well as some other values regarding heat (AndyHill had some nice Ideas on this).

I'd like to see a small chart:
Heat Produced Per Second (all weapons firing)
Heat Dissipated Per Second
Net Heat Per Second
Time to Shutdown

Then, a player could check out weapon groups by just installing those groups, and get a much better feel for how fast their current HS setup dissipates heat.

Quote

Thats not a bad Idea, the only question would be how to distribute the max armor between front/back; I guess something along the line of 70%/30% or 80%/20%.

Yeah, whatever really. I'd go with 75%/25%, but it doesn't matter: It's pretty easy to tweak. I'd MUCH rather make a small tweak there if I cared than have to tediously bring them all up from zero.

Edited by Wintersdark, 25 December 2012 - 02:09 PM.

[AndyHill]

When thinking about heat display for quick reference and in-depth testing, I would look at two different things.

First, a quick value that will give you a neat comparison figure. I would actually personally go for the heat dissipation per second divided by heat generation per second figure. It's easy to understand and normalizes nicely between 0 and 1, which in turn can be presented as a percentage (you can go above 1, but any number above that is pointless as 1 would be a completely heat neutral design).

Of course, since we already have a comparison figure (although IMRO meaningless, if it doesn't even calculate heat sinks correctly) in the game itself, it would make sense to also include that (if possible some day), but mostly just as a curiosity.

I already mentioned a couple of ideas about more in-depth figures, but I think another relatively simple addition that would also describe the 'mech's character to an extent would be heat capacity / alpha.

Second, you could have a graph that shows heat build-up as you fire alphas or the weapons at their respective cooldowns or maybe checkboxes for selecting just some weapons or and or and or and... ...Naturally with the related charts on accumulated damage. Naturally.

Edited by AndyHill, 25 December 2012 - 02:22 PM.

[Blark]

AndyHill, on 25 December 2012 - 02:21 PM, said:

When thinking about heat display for quick reference and in-depth testing, I would look at two different things.

First, a quick value that will give you a neat comparison figure. I would actually personally go for the heat dissipation per second divided by heat generation per second figure. It's easy to understand and normalizes nicely between 0 and 1, which in turn can be presented as a percentage (you can go above 1, but any number above that is pointless as 1 would be a completely heat neutral design).

Of course, since we already have a comparison figure (although IMRO meaningless, if it doesn't even calculate heat sinks correctly) in the game itself, it would make sense to also include that (if possible some day), but mostly just as a curiosity.

Now I start to feel bad: it was my idea to try and represent the heat efficiency like in game so that people don't wonder why they get completely different values.
But you are right, something more representative would be better, some nice suggestions and I'm in TS with smurfy right now taking about how it could look, the imput is very much appreciated (also the Input from Wintersdark of course )
I'm not doing the work, so I can't promise anything, but I guess you can expect some changes to heateff. soon, but not yet in the next version (which should be released today;) )

AndyHill, on 25 December 2012 - 02:21 PM, said:

[..] checkboxes for selecting just some weapons or and or and or and... [..]

This one is already on the dev. build, should come online very soon

Wintersdark, on 25 December 2012 - 02:08 PM, said:

[..]
Yeah, whatever really. I'd go with 75%/25%, but it doesn't matter: It's pretty easy to tweak. I'd MUCH rather make a small tweak there if I cared than have to tediously bring them all up from zero.

Smurfy is working on it right now, I could be in todays update if we're lucky

Edited by Blark, 25 December 2012 - 02:42 PM.

[Wintersdark]

AndyHill, on 25 December 2012 - 02:21 PM, said:

When thinking about heat display for quick reference and in-depth testing, I would look at two different things.

First, a quick value that will give you a neat comparison figure. I would actually personally go for the heat dissipation per second divided by heat generation per second figure. It's easy to understand and normalizes nicely between 0 and 1, which in turn can be presented as a percentage (you can go above 1, but any number above that is pointless as 1 would be a completely heat neutral design).

Of course, since we already have a comparison figure (although IMRO meaningless, if it doesn't even calculate heat sinks correctly) in the game itself, it would make sense to also include that (if possible some day), but mostly just as a curiosity.

I already mentioned a couple of ideas about more in-depth figures, but I think another relatively simple addition that would also describe the 'mech's character to an extent would be heat capacity / alpha.

Second, you could have a graph that shows heat build-up as you fire alphas or the weapons at their respective cooldowns or maybe checkboxes for selecting just some weapons or and or and or and... ...Naturally with the related charts on accumulated damage. Naturally.

The quick percentage value is pretty cool, but abstract. You'd be able to compare loadouts well, and between mechs... But the number wouldn't really mean anything on it's own other than how close the mech is to being heat neutral (which, lets face it, is usually at best a silly goal)

Net heat per second and time till shutdown is a much easier number for your average player to grasp intuitively, and is extremely easy to implement. Showing combined heat gain and dissipation helps players assess just how "hot" their loadout is irrespective of the opposing value. Less useful, perhaps, but still informative values to show.

Edit: My concern, here, is that these tools can become very complex and abstract. That's awesome for the experienced player, but makes things very confusing for a new player. I suppose a lot depends on your target demographic, but as this web based mechlab is by a very large margin the most accessible tool for your average new player, it's probably a good idea to make things easy for them

The java based mechlab, for example, will require java installs for many, and is ridiculously complicated to use, and the excel version... well, I don't use MS Office, so I've never tried it.

Edited by Wintersdark, 25 December 2012 - 02:46 PM.

[Wintersdark]

(sorry for the stream of posts/thoughts)

For example, to this day I have absolutely no idea what the Heat Efficiency value actually means. Obviously, a higher number is better... but it's a meaningless, abstract value to me. If it's 1, how quickly will I have to stop firing or risk overheat? 1.12? Is that a lot better, or just a little? Sure, I can compare two mechs, but the number in an of itself is meaningless.

I imagine the folks who've been around a while understand it better, but it's useless to the newbie

Edited by Wintersdark, 25 December 2012 - 02:49 PM.

[AndyHill]

The idea of displaying the same heat efficiency figure as in the in-game mechlab is by no means a bad idea and as I said it should be there for comparison purposes. But if it doesn't even actually calculate the correct effect of the heat sinks, it probably shouldn't be the only figure.

My idea of showing percentages for heat dissipation per heat production was based purely on intuitiveness. Although complete heat neutrality at 100% is perhaps not a desirable goal in itself (and I think this is the biggest problem in my suggestion), getting close to it is and it's easy to understand that values above 100% at least aren't desirable. But perhaps a note saying that it's best to run at somewhat less than 100% would do the trick? Also, the scale would tend to correlate with "hit and run ... stay and wight brawler" type of the 'mech, which dould perhaps even be indicated next to it at some point.

Edited by AndyHill, 25 December 2012 - 03:04 PM.

[AndyHill]

Hmm taking it one step further, maybe heat efficiency and speed could actually be used as a combined number for evaluating the sensibility of builds? Since 150 is about the maximum speed available, we can turn that into a percentage figure by dividing any speed by 1.5 (but it may not be useful, actually). Thus for example a build that gets a combined speed and cooling score of 100% at least would be considered ok. So if someone for example creates a super-hot Jenner with 5% cooling and 99% speed the system could tell you that "the build is extremely hot, but you may get away with it as a hit & runner because of its speed". The numbers and relations would need to be looked at more closely, but in general I think such meaningful relativities could be found and turned into useful metrics for all and especially those just getting into the game.

Anyway, I think this is a bit out of scope for your fine program, at least in the near future. However, I think this underlines a bit how little PGI actually did, when you have already created a much more useful UI than their own 'mechlab.

[Wintersdark]

AndyHill, on 25 December 2012 - 03:04 PM, said:

My idea of showing percentages for heat dissipation per heat production was based purely on intuitiveness. Although complete heat neutrality at 100% is perhaps not a desirable goal in itself (and I think this is the biggest problem in my suggestion), getting close to it is and it's easy to understand that values above 100% at least aren't desirable. But perhaps a note saying that it's best to run at somewhat less than 100% would do the trick? Also, the scale would tend to correlate with "hit and run ... stay and wight brawler" type of the 'mech, which dould perhaps even be indicated next to it at some point.

I'm questioning how intuitive the percentage is. For a mathematically inclined person, sure... but like I said in my last post, what does, say, 70% mean in gameplay terms? How long can I fire before overheating?

An numbers-free example:
I build a mech that generates a fairly small amount of heat (lets say a ballistics heavy build), and a minimal amount of heat sinks. I shed heat slowly, but it's not very important as I can fire for a long, long time before overheating. However, this mech will have a fairly poor efficiency rating.

Or, how about a mech sporting, say, 4 ERPPC's. It doesn't matter how many DHS you pack in there, it's going to overheat pretty much instantly. However, with a bunch of DHS it could have a great rating.

Not that it shouldn't be there, but I strongly think you need to have some "real world" numbers that make sense to your average non-mathematically inclined players

[Grey Ghost]

Thank you for this great resource smurfynet! I really appreciate what you've done (are doing)! The Mechlab is especially wonderful.

[AndyHill]

As I mentioned earlier, I think that there should be a number of different figures. Getting one to describe everything is probably quite challenging as you stated. I am quite awful at math (but I'm comparing with people who study physics & astronomy so they're probably not an average group), but to me the percentage figure is a quite intuitive one, since it has clear boundaries that are pretty generally understood (0 - 100).

Time to overheat is another useful figure, but like the 'mechlab number, to someone who doesn't know much about the game it doesn't say very much. Is 30 seconds good? How long does it take to kill another 'mech (personally I'd probably rather want to know how much damage I do before I overheat, but then again I have a lot of experience and I can estimate how much I need to drop a 'mech)? In your example, the 'mech would actually be pretty screwed once it reaches the limit because of the drop in dpm even though it would get a relatively good figure in time before shutdown, and on the other hand a 'mech with hot weapons and lots of sinks would get a poor figure, although it would keep producing good dpm even after hitting the limit.

Don't get me wrong, I don't think your ideas are bad at all, I just like to talk about the subject since I find it so interesting (and am so excited about the online-mechlab). Actually the time before shutdown you mentioned would probably correlate quite well with the percentage figure I proposed, since the number of sinks affects not only the heat dissipation but also the maximum heat treshold (do we know the exact formula for that btw?). The "damage before shotdown" I mentioned earlier probably isn't as useful, since it's dependent on the 'mech size. I would like to see that figure as well, but I think that to not intimidate most people and especially the ones just learning the system, we need to have some kind of a very simple, but descriptive general figure.

It's interesting to see what smurfy & co come up with, but now I need to rest both of my brain cells.

[smurfynet]

Hey Guys,
thanks for all your feedback, especially on the heat efficiency topic.

I just released a new version of the site:

* Stats: now also shows the missile tubes
* Mechlab:
- You now also can remove weapons and equipment by clicking the x (know issue, you cant remove heatsinks in the engine slot using this method yet)
- Added filters for weapons and equipment
- Fix in engine issue with no crit slots left bug
- Add a "add max armor" function to tools menu which distributes the armor across the mech. 1/3 rear 2/3 front
- Free tonnage is now also displayed
- Adding current variant name to the page title, which helps with bookmarking or history.

[Wintersdark]

A couple bugs with the right hand menu, for me at least - Win8, Chrome (Version 23.0.1271.97 m).

The filters don't do anything, the tabs along the top have no lables/icons (intended or bug?) and the armor section is empty:






Works fine in Internet Explorer, though. *shudder*

[Blark]

Wintersdark, on 25 December 2012 - 05:04 PM, said:

A couple bugs with the right hand menu, for me at least - Win8, Chrome (Version 23.0.1271.97 m).

The filters don't do anything, the tabs along the top have no lables/icons (intended or bug?) and the armor section is empty:






Works fine in Internet Explorer, though. *shudder*

Just tested it under Win7, Chrome (23.0.1271.97 m): works.

Perhaps it has to do with the brower chache: Try STRG+SHIFT+R to force a full reload, hope it helps

Edited by Blark, 25 December 2012 - 05:12 PM.

[Wintersdark]

Blark, on 25 December 2012 - 05:10 PM, said:

Just tested it under Win7, Chrome (23.0.1271.97 m): works.

Perhaps it has to do with the brower chache: Try STRG+SHIFT+R to force a full reload, hope it helps

STRG?

Anyways, yeah, ctrl+shift+r did the job. I'd tried ctrl+F5, the classic full reload button, but apparently it doesn't work that way in Chrome.

[Keisuke Nagisa]

Srsly this needs to be stickied. Ohms guide was good but its sometimes out of date and has some inaccurate info.

[Blark]

Wintersdark, on 25 December 2012 - 06:01 PM, said:

STRG?

Anyways, yeah, ctrl+shift+r did the job. I'd tried ctrl+F5, the classic full reload button, but apparently it doesn't work that way in Chrome.

Sorry, german Keyboard layout I meant ctrl of course.

Keisuke Nagisa, on 25 December 2012 - 06:12 PM, said:

Srsly this needs to be stickied. Ohms guide was good but its sometimes out of date and has some inaccurate info.

It should be stickied for the online mechlab alone.