Vehicles Feel too "Floaty" Missing Details

I was playing some PA last night and realized something wasn't quiet right with vehicles. Upon further examination I realized that they lack a lot of features you'd expect.

Vehicles completely lack any kind of suspension. This gives them the appearance of hovercrafts that sort of float around the surface like it's water. I'd love to see a bit of suspension added for going over hills, pumps, ect.

The other thing that seems odd, is the acceleration and deacceleration of many vehicles is either nonexistent or so low it isn't noticeable. Vehicles just stop in place or start at top speed almost instantly.

Vehicles are missing lots of little touches. Tanks don't rock from recoil, there are no tank tracks or dust. There is little to no attention to detail.

Hopefully this is something the Uber team would consider adding some polish to.

You probably won't get realistic suspension on hundreds of tiny units, but the could add a similar effect the t2 tank fabber has of the suspension kind of bumping around to make it look like its going over little rocks, and the recoil suspension (is gun barrel recoil in?) wouldn't be too hard if they kept it simple as well, but it would definitely give more punch to tanks when viewed up close

I'm sure the guys who made the naval and air trails mods are already thinking about ground trails, assuming having every vehicle report what biome its on to make an appropriately colored dust trail wouldn't cause lag

Oh man, you need to see the acceleration values, acceleration really is practically non existent.

Ant
Max speed: 10 m/s
Acceleration: 90 m/s/s
Time to max speed: 0.11... seconds

Dox
Max speed: 20 m/s
Acceleration: 720 m/s/s
Time to max speed: 0.027... seconds

I mean, why even have acceleration if time to top speed is that incredibly low?...

That's crazy!! The first thing that comes to mind is... WHY?! haha

because pathfinding probably, it becomes a bumping nightmare if acceleration is too bad

Sounds like you are talking about a lot of aesthetic rendering improvements c oupled with physics calculations. Calculating suspension physics for each vehicle is not going to happen based on performance/CPU time considerations. Too costly, too fiddly, not enough benefit. Sure it'd look nice but it offers nothing for gameplay.

Not all physics calculations are expensive. Especially really fake ones, which is what you'd need in this case, as units are generally traveling on flat polygons much larger than themselves.

I suppose you need to simulate it, even if it's not used.

TA has a lot of these features and it's from 1997. I don't think they would be as costly as you think. Something should be done, because vehicles in their current state look REALLY bad. Probably some of the worst I've seen in a game too date.

I've made multiple mods that use this in fact, acceleration has no hit on perf.

Also it offers so much gameplay, for example- dox wriggling would become impossible/much more difficult if acceleration was at least reasonable.

No pathing issues? Seems like a really strange design decision to not include acceleration.

Not really, though admitedelly I didn't play on super filled up maps, so who knows?

Costly can also refer to developer's time, not just CPU time! As I said, these changes are mostly cosmetic so aren't really worthwhile, except as final polish a year or so from now when the gameplay is nailed down and everything is awesome

I'd argue the opposite, that the game has gone on development for a long time now without polish, and polish is exactly what it needs at this point.

Disagree, Uber have been polishing nicely lately, just look at recent patch notes. Gameplay before graphics, the game still needs work. Graphical niceties can wait.

We got the new beam effect for the anker and sxx though also an updated anker model. So slight graphical improvements are constantly coming

I just can't agree, since a bought this game 10 months ago I've seen almost zero polish or graphic improvements. Look at most of the negative reviews on steam and meta critic. One of the major complains that comes up time and time again is lack of graphical polish (lifeless planets and units). Reviews don't lie. Yes, I'd like some game play improvements as well, but artists and programmers are separate departments. There is no reason they can't both happen hand in hand.

I don't think suspension should be much of an issue - you can do 'faux' suspension with animation, as Tripod said. Would be enough to make it pop a bit and I don't think it would have a performance hit.

Tank tracks and dust would be cool.

Suspension requires keeping track of dV history to correctly calculate the suspension, either that, or during an iterative calculation of the suspension height each single client frame. It's not for free. Even more, it's not replicable without observing the history, so forget about doing that purely client side.

Tracks however shouldn't be that complicated, however, they require aging. The mechanism which generates scorch marks isn't suitable as persistent tracks would accumulate much faster.

And dust? Well, that's actually even something you can implement yourself as a client side mod. Just add a particle emitter to the model and copy the code from the aircraft which controls the thrusters. Beware, particles with alpha blending have an impact on performance.

1) the improvements you are talking about require programmers more than artists.
2) I don't need to look at reviews, negative or otherwise, because I have formed my own opinion of the game by playing it a lot.
3) reviews lie all the time!
4) I think you and a lot of people who have written negative reviews on Steam might well be the kind of gamers who want a game to look as shiny as possible, quite possibly to the neglect of the game itself (the gameplay!!). Off the top of my head I could list numerous things I would like to see improved in PA, but I am actually very happy with how the game looks from an aesthetics-only viewpoint. I think it looks great. Sure it could look better with unlimited development time but the realities of the industry are such that a game has a limited budget, and developers don't get to spend as much time as they would perhaps like to making the game look better.
5) there is a core distinction in a videogame between the assets that artists make (textures, models, animations...) and the source code that the programmers write. The assets are basically all done. The artists have little to do for PA, they are probably working on another game right now. Now and then a new unit will get added to PA, for instance the new Phoenix T2 air unit. And thus some artists will be tasked with creating a new model, animations, and texturse for the new unit. That's it. So getting back to your point about artists and programmers being separate departments (indeed, separate people!) - well it is a completely moot point.
6) I have semi-ranted about this for some reason, I'm not sure why You bought this game ten months ago, I bought it back when I pledged $40 to the KickStarter, and then another $10 to upgrade to alpha. I've been happy with how it looks since beta frankly, and all graphical improvements have been a welcome and pleasant surprise since then.