Lasers: Beam vs. Star-wars

Don't get me wrong, I will probably still have a problem with lasers being fired at different velocities when light can't travel at any other speed

But that's OK! I'm ok with having a problem with this. I'm ok with seeing them being different. I can accept that. It's more of my OCD vs gameplay. Gameplay will win.

Also, this is the future, where weapon technology can form plasma that should be able to hold itself together in mid-air for the length of time needed to reach it's destination. They are.. the best after all.

particle weapon means, its not photons, but particles.

They are just two different types of weaponry, if both were included, it would definitely make the game a whole lot more awesome though

Besides: Those Starwars style "lasers" are no lasers. They are plasma weapons, railguns or alike, but they are not even instant-hit. They just fire rather long, glowing proectiles, thats all. If you take a close look at the Stwars movies, these "lasers" even have recoil...

The difference becomes clearly visible when the gun turns while firing, with the projectile gun, the "beam" shows a visible arc. With the real beam, the free end of the point moves as soon as the gun starts turning. Although this isn't a good thing...
For projectiles, it's sufficient to check one per frame if it hit something (yeah, a quadratic equation must be solved for objects which move faster than 1/2 d per frame, but thats not so bad either) and it produces credible results.
With beams this is slightly more difficult. If the gun moves, not only a short line segment, but a large area is covered and calculating the affected area requires the use of trigonometric functions. Do that every frame, for multiple weapons, and watch your engine burn. Thats why you can't really test for the areas in between when rotating the beam, only a simple beam <-> borderbox collision test for the current orientation of the beam every frame.
Static beams (e.g. a fence or trap) is fine, same goes for any type of turret which is fixed while firing, but lasers on moving turrets is bad. Swiping over distant targets will not cover targets in between simulation frames, although the interpolation on the client clearly showed that they got hit.

But why not just "simulate" beams with massive amounts of even-faster-moving bullets?
Well, it would be a satisfying approximation when you look at the effects. But then again, it also requires even MORE computational power than what the real beam would have required. Not to mention traffic, don't forget that every single projectile needs to be communicated by the server.

That said, using "real" beams (and the according tests) is still cheaper than trying to emulate it with bullets. Although the engine must be capable of performing ray casting tests (which it is). It just has several limitations which limit it to rarely used and low range weapons, you can't just equip a T1 spam bot with beams, it needs to be limited to units which don't appear in large quantities. Building hundreds of tiny deathrays which fire from the moon wouldn't turn out so well either.

I must say I'd like to see some real Lasers rather than the current Plasma/Particle weapons they're calling lasers in the Alpha.

Even if they're just Pulse Lasers, where the Animation is simply a bright straight bar of light that connects the Weapon for half a second then vanishes (say a 1 second or half a second pulse Laser). It'd certainly make the battlefields more visually interesting.

Constant Beam or long Pulse lasers (say 5-10 second beam) would also be cool to see like the Cybran in SupCom. But at a bare minimum it'd be good to see those laser towers shift to a pulse laser weapon animation or change there name to Plasma/Particle cannon towers.

I like both. Beams could also be used to show info like their damage: the longer the beam is visible the more damage it does. Kinda like beams in Mechwarrior work.
Also some game use beams as weapons which do more damage the longer they fire. Which also is a neat idea.

Personally, I think starwars lasers make the whole thing look really cheap. I'm okay with there being projectile weapons, but lasers should be beams.

Maybe simulating projectiles are a good perk in the game because they don't always hit, but I see that as more of a targetting issue than a projectile issue. A real cannon will not always have a perfect aim on a moving target, if it can't track fast enough, and a real life tank would not leave a trail of shells falling after a moving target, but have an onboard computer compensate for that. Even if you are not going for realism, I think targetting is something you'd want to focus on for things to look better in the long run.

The idea is, a laser tower with a laser beam, would insta-hit it's moving target, but it's aim may not be good enough if the target is moving too fast, depending on the distance and speed of the target. This also enables for things like anti-air guns (and cliffside cannons) to actually make sense, if all weapons can target either air or ground.

That's why they usually refer to them as "blasters", although I'll admit that the ship versions are normally referred to as "turbo-lasers", whatever that's supposed to mean.

Actually, since photons propagate at a finite velocity, lasers also arc when the emitter turns. It's normally only noticable when you are looking at an exceedingly long beam though (i.e. an appreciable fraction of a light second, say a few thousand kilometers)

I'd be happy with the SupCom solution; the Cybran T2 PD fired multiple pulses rather than a continuous beam. If you use a pulsed attack, you only need hitscan each pulse and apply damage appropriately. You can also fake a continuous beam with a pulse each engine tick, and as long as the engine ticks are short enough compared to framerate then the player won't even notice.

I'm just waiting to see what Uber come up with next; once the engine is down as stable enough (and it's getting better each build) they'll be able to switch resource from bugfix to content addition, and things will start to get really interesting

I wouldn't be against beam weapons, but I believe that can make battlefield look "messy". I know when we have tons of units all firing and explosions that might be considered "messy" by some also, but I just mean that having anything that is static like beam where it stays visible for an extended period of time is annoying, at least to me, as it covers up the visibility of things you might want to see. This is because I like to micro in this macro game, which with incomplete pathing and terrible targeting AI is quite necessary at times.

I like really would prefer most units that have lasers of any sort to stick to a starwars blaster style like in the initial kickstarter video. I don't think they look cheap and with some post-processing effects, which this game has none yet, could end up looking really pretty.

Don't think of them as lasers, think of them as cheap special effects enshrouding a painted PVC tube.

Just like lightsabers!

He, don't call lightsabers PVC tubes. They did use real aluminum for this purpose, PVC tubes were not durable enough.

Although these fake projectile lase canons have a distinct advantage:
You can clearly see in which direction the projectile is flying. This isn't so easy with lasers, it can get quite difficult to tell WHO is firing and who is getting hit when both sides use laser beams, even more so when the laser beams have the same color.

Another reason why real laser mechanics can only be used for very few units and not for mobile units either.

I liked the projectile lasers in TA but less so in supreme commander, they were a little slow and floaty looking to me in that.

In this respect I'm like an old man. I like the way they did it in the past (i.e. TA) which was star-wars type lasers so I want that =3

You know, this is the beauty of having one faction. Beam and projectile weapons can be used, and everyone has them, so there's no faction imbalance.

FWITW I don't think that counts as imbalance. If someone's spending time micro-managing to doge projectiles then they're doing it wrong. When you have ten GC's lumbering towards an enemy base, who cares how many beams/projectiles strike it?

Defo hoping this gets implemented. Ohh! Will the curvature of the world limit the range of these beam weapons?

There should defiantly be both, but they should have distinct names that match what they actually are. Actually I would even say neither a beam nor a bolt is really a laser as real lasers almost never are seen traveling the distance between the source and the target (unless they're scattered by particles), just like any light source, and as mentioned they're usually a flash like pulse or series of pulses.

So beams should be particle beams and bolts should be projectiles (rail-gun tracers or plasma). If actual lasers are used in game they would probably most realistically be shown as simultaneous flashing lenses flares at the source and the target. Also lasers and beam weapons "instantaneous" speed should not be quite so fast when used at interplanetary distances by super weapons, they should be at least a few seconds delayed at their maximum range.

Off-topic, but awesome: the "seismic charges" explosion / sound in episode 2 of Star Wars (probably the only thing I liked about it) was awesome and should be utilized...

I really hope there are some beam weapons in the game, right now I don't see any in alpha. Star Wars style "lasers" might as well be machine guns or cannons, beam type lasers like the T2 Cybran PD or the Monkeylord's microwave cannon in Supcom added depth and flavor to combat.

Neutrino/Mavor has posted how he prefers Star Wars stuff because he doesn't have to work as hard to get them right in the engine, but maybe he'll keep an open mind. This poll indicates the majority of us want beam weapons on at least some units, I hope Uber listens even if it is more challenging for them to implement. If there isn't some type of unit in with beam weapons before beta starts I'm going to be worried. They likely aren't going to change combat with a new weapon type that late in the development cycle.

Well SupCom had both, both looked awesome, they aren't mutually exclusive. Beams really have that feeling oh "holy crap I hope I'm still alive when it stops firing" feeling that should be saved for super weapons, as it was in SupCom. Used to similar effect in Freespace 2

I remember those beams and they were freaking monster death lasers. It was beyond awesome

Seems like you guys have covered it all pretty well.
Go for both, 'nuff said.