TA acceleration and unit speed.

Okay, so a unit in TA normally has very low acceleration, but generous speed. A stumpy for example has 20.4 m/s speed, and 0.19m/s/s acceleration. Translate this to PA and you get... Terrible results, units are horribly slow starting up. What I'm wondering is if it's the same unit of measurement, why does it feel (and seem) so vastly different?

My theory is it must have something to do with unit size, in TA a peewee is roughly 3/4ths the size of the commander, in PA the doc is no where near that. Or could it be as simple as me being too used to PA's incredibly fast (and frankly over the top) acceleration? Or is it just the sense of scale PA provides...

Any thoughts?

Are you sure the games interpret the values in the same way?
0.19 m/s^2 for a max speed of 20.4 m/s means the unit would take 107 seconds to reach top speed.
(at least I think it does it, has been years since I've last thought about the mathematical definition of acceleration)
I don't remember TA being THAT slow tbh. 107 seconds for a unit to reach top speed is crazy.

It definitely wasn't, and that's why I'm so confused

So your values are just wrong or TA handles them wrong.
I guess you could measure the right values TA REALLY used by doing measures. Like you probably did in school some day in the past.

For reference I believe the Peewee is 21.6m/s as its top speed with a acceleration of 1.20m/s/s which is much more realistic, yet still quite low... I'm very interested in knowing how the acceleration of TA was so impossibly low yet not feel incredibly slow.

As I said, it probably just wasn't really working with those values as you would expect. Where did you get them?

The wiki, everything else on it seems accurate, so maybe it is the engine? I might try to look at TA's files, even though last I saw they were incredibly unuser friendly... All just answers and no questions.

(Basically you look through the text and it only gives values, people found out what is what by tweaking stuff and seeing what happened in game. )

These are TA -> PA conversion metrics I use for PATA (conversion from the TA data file values). I haven't touched PATA in a while, so can't remember how accurately I got these. I think the (30.0) is something I added in there, because something was missing and the acceleration was way too slow. I'll see if I can dig up the rationale behind these figures, they are carried over from the research I did for my Sup Com conversion mod (I got those figures perfect).

Acceleration: TA * (30.0) * 12.0 * 3.0 = PA
Brake: TA * (30.0) * 12.0 * 3.0 = PA
Velocity: TA * ((4.0 * 12.0 * 2.5) / 16.0) = PA
(I then halved the speed for projectiles for some reason)
Turn Rate: TA * 1.0 / 6.08= PA
Distances: TA * 1.0 / 4.0 = PA

Can I ask where you get your unit values? Is it directly from TA's files or somewhere else? If TA, how so?

Thanks by the way, I'll give these a try! Any idea why it'd even require a conversion? Did TA just handle acceleration weirdly?

I hope that Squishy's pulling his values from here: http://www.tauniverse.com/forum/showthread.php?t=43692

I don't know where to get the unit values from it, so no, I was using TA's values... But being more reasonable. I made sure to make things balanced. In fact the TA wiki gives no health/weapon values; only movement. Which means all the balance is done by me. I make sure to do a lot of metal to metal fights, until units are very close.

They just used weird values. For example, the Peewee has:
MaxVelocity=1.8
BrakeRate=0.19
Acceleration=0.1
TurnRate=1120

I'll do a short write up a little later on how to read the TA data files (I assume you have the game, if not it's like $2 on GOG).
Edit: Or get them from UnitUniverse: http://units.tauniverse.com/?p=u&v=158

So do you do your conversion method with the actual game values, or with the normalized values? (Normalized being the values from the Total annihilation wiki), I'm guessing the actual TA values?

Also the write up would be incredibly appreciated.

You don't even need the game, the rev31.gp3 from the mod I linked to gives you everything you need.

You need hpiview: http://no-ones.clan.su/load/3-1-0-19

Open it and use it to extract the rev31.gp3 somewhere. Everything after that should be fairly explanetory.

Doesn't sound totally implausible (pun!). Vehicles in TA have terrible speed but they can go pretty fast if they find a stretch of smooth terrain... I've never seen a stumpy able to travel in one direction on smooth terrain for more than 10 seconds.7

Yes but it means the start up speed would be very very slow! You should see the values when applied to a unit in PA. It goes at a slugs pace for the first 10 seconds at least. (And I mean a SLUG)

Maybe TA had some hack that made it accelarate faster at first. I do remember that vehicels did speed up quite a bit on longer straight lines as well.

Did you take into account that TA has user variable gamespeed -10/+10 and PA does not ?
I know I mostly played on +10ish and anything slower seemed weird to me.

There wasn't anything like that. It's just a matter of finding the conversion ratio to bring the acceleration up to what is visible in-game. I don't even think they slowed down going up-hill, it was more a visual trick due to the camera angle