Lasers

I work on the prinicpal that people who haven't tried coding dont know anything (about the time consumption of coding) and that I need to exagerate for them to get the message.

To me it's one thing to explain things to an ignorant person, and another to lie to them just to make a point, which can easily end up being exaggerated in their head and skewing their perception of other related items.

Mike

There is no doubt that you've got more experience coding in general and in sup com than me, but i didn't really think i was lying, sorry if i was.

Actaully I don't, I come purely from the Art side of things, but I pay attention to my coder and while I don't "Know" coding I know some of the theory behind it, particularly in regards to SupCom.

Think of it like this, it's like saying Bots and Regular Land units use different movement code, but while simple its not accurate, they use the same basics but merely have different parameters that make them seem like different movement types, even hover units use the same parameters, just with different settings to result in the different movement type.

Mike

Well actually the code to deal with the continuous beam lasers in supcom was different to the discrete packets of damage the projectiles had. It's been years since I've looked at the lua though. I cannot remember it being that complicated. There may have been more support code in engine also, but I'm not sure why that would have been.

The point I'm making is that the code difference between the different TYPES of beams wasn't different, just that the weapons section in the unit's BP applied different parameters to the beam, so the only difference betweenthe Rhino's Beam and the Monkeylord's weapon was how the parameters made them work. I do agree that Beam weapons are quite different from the rest of the weapons and would require extra work specifically for them as far as basic implementation goes.

Mike

Ah yes, from that side of things, there wasn't really any extra work to implement a beam or a projectile unit.

I don't actually understand what the technical difference between a projectile and a beam is. From my point of view; a beam is a collision check for the nearest object between point P (the tip of the gun) and some vector V (the direction the gun is pointing). A projectile is a series of little collision checks over a length of time between P and P + V*dt + A*dt^2.

The difficult part would be interpolating that from the low resolution sim-time to the higher resolution render/UI-time.

I liked how they did lasers in Mechcommander 2. It was the instantaneous type, with short duration. It felt a little less light-show-ey and for me at least had a good "feel" to it for the 3rd-person RTS-style view.

http://youtu.be/mjWBUia16N4?t=4m49s

I do like the Star Wars-style "projectile" laser...but with a thousand units will it be any more or less easy to render a short duration instantaneous versus the "projectile" laser?

The instantaneous also kinda makes projectile physics moot, and turns it into hitscan, but even with the projectile if it is fast enough then it's effectively the same boat.

Those are about the only reason I can think of for me preferring one over the other that didn't come down to an opinion.

Chonoblip, I don't think anyone is trying to say it should be one or the other.

That being said I'd rather have Beams over star wars style lasers simply because Beams are different, SWStyle act just like 'regular' projectiles, basically any unit with a SW style Laser could just as easily have a machine gun or cannon, while Beams work and behave much differently allowing for true variety in weapon design to better complement a variety in UNIT design, which is what the community wants.

Mike

This.

Ah, I didn't intend to paint it as if it were a black-and-white picture with one or the other being the only option. I hadn't seen anyone provide a good example of what I thought that particular graphical representation could look like, so I wanted to contribute at least that much.

You may return to your regularly scheduled topic.

I hope we can choose between which kind of laser we want. Pulse lasers and beam lasers of course. Pulse would have better accuracy and damage per hit, while beams had more damage overall but had to be sustained on the target. For beams if the laser veered off target then some of the damage would miss of course. Either way they do it I just want both kinds of lasers. Would be nice to have both types of lasers and also many kinds of lasers such as infrared, xray, gamma ray, etc..

This has nothing to do with lasers or units or whatever, and is an issue with the fog of war peculiar to supcom.

No, it was about how lasers will handle in PA but this thread ended up turning into an argument about the look of the lasers.

Those are kinda one and the same there, as Laser Bolts are handled differently from Laser Beams.

Also PKC was mainly referring this portion of your post;

He is trying to tell you that wasn't the fault of the Beam weapons themselves as much as how the Moho Engine's Fog of War system handled them.

Mike