This is an extremely complicated thing to explain, so bear with me as I try. What I'm talking about is the 'feel' or 'weight' of the units, particularly relating to movement. As it currently exists, the units all feel rather... floaty, or light. Like there is no substance to the world. Compare this to SupCom, where you actually feel like you're controlling the units. A large part of this could be due to the lack of sound effects in the current state, but I just wanted to go ahead and get this out here for other opinions. Discuss.
Remember that the smaller units in SC like small bots also felt weightless because they kind of floated around. Thats currently happening with most units in this game. When the floating is fixed and you get the right sound effects its probably going to be fine.
I'd wait till well into the beta before worrying about the feel/look/audio of anything, at this stage in development none of those things are finalized because they are the sorts of things that take iteration to get right and you can bet Uber already plan to improve them.
Things seem to float because they have huge blue boxes on a very spherical world. It appears they have no weight because they just clip along.
I expect them to feel a similar Supreme Commander 2 units. The movement and pathfinding were some of the only good things about that game because of flow fields. So glad they are doing the same thing with PA.
I hate to use this term, but currently it has a very "supcom2" feel to it with the flowfields. Hopefully we can get a good looking solution that has the benefits of flowfields.
Well, if units just turn in the direction they are moving (including being "pushed"), that might solve it. As it is now, you can see a tank side-skid while being pushed by tanks next to it. If that said tank automatically turns to face the direction of motion, it would instead look like the tank did a little turn to keep distance from the "pushing" unit, rather than just side-skidding with it.
Could have pushed tanks leave a scratch mark on the floor for a few seconds, showing that the unit was physically pushed rather then the slidey slidey action of the flow field. But it should look fine on hovercraft. Of course we could make things like tanks be pushed a lesser distance, and have bots or cars be pushed much further, indicating the weight of the units, T2 tanks might just simply have a priority to only ever be pushed by other T2 tanks, causing little bots to be knocked around quite violently as they bounce off the hull.
I think feel should be discussed early on because it's one of the earlier things to really start to take form. Art, sound, and underlying code gets changed all the way up to, and past, release. The feel however, tends to finalize out much faster. Waiting for proper collision boxes before resuming discussion would be a good idea though.
I share your concern about the "weight" and I'm in your camp. We simply haven't had time to dial this stuff in yet. They are doing a lot of things right now which aren't as intended.
Would you have any idea as to why this happened, then? "I christen thee: H.M.S. Preemptive Titanic!" I'm actually really curious as to why this would occur.
Very amusing launch fail! :lol: Getting back on-topic, I think that as long as the game maintains the look, feel and vibe as the promo videos (and there's no reason why it shouldn't look and behave in a very similar way), then the unit animations and interaction with their environment should be excellent...
