Something I thought about is that recoil observed in handguns, rifles, and some cannon models is often not just "straight back", I.E. the barrel pitches up some due to how the barrel forces transmit through what's holding it (though from my research, this barely happens on tanks). I think that directional knockback on appropriate weapons would be acceptable fictional exaggeration and go a long way towards making said tanks and battleships look less stiff and simulated. Thoughts?
I'm not sure if I'd be in favor of that. Exaggerated recoil / knockback is one of the things that bugs me about the old Total Annihilation intro. Watching the barrels on the HLT recoil and the ARM tanks wobble wildly while firing just looks really out of place. Aside from that, battleships don't have any visible recoil to exaggerate, even when firing all of their cannon: http://www.navweaps.com/index_tech/tech-022.htm
I think on things like tanks the "pitching up" comes more so from the tank's suspension the the actual barrel. If this were a smaller scale game like CoH, I'd say this is somewhat important for suspension of disbelief, but in PA not so much, great if you can squeeze it in but otherwise not required. Mike
So our animation system will probably allow us to do this fairly easily. I haven't talked much about the animation system but it's a fairly radical departure from how we've doing things in previous games. It's going to allow us to do more complex animation and control it in a simpler manner. More about this after it's finished (I'll probably do a blog post about it).
That's pretty nice to hear - I installed FA again the other day and it really struck me how stiff the animations on the commanders are. Hopefully PA will be able to improve on that (and so far, even the startup animation for the Delta feels 10x more alive)
One wonders how you missed the sentence immediately before your quote that says exactly what I did, "The ship doesn't move an inch or even heel from a broadside." "Recoil slide" refers to motion of part of the recoil absorption mechanism inside the turret, which is not visible outside the ship.
I always thought the way turrets were controlled in sup com was brilliant. First time i saw it when i was just a wee one it blew my mind (sup come was also the first real game i modded). For those of you who never did any modding: each weapon had its normal weapon statistics like muzzle velocity, fire effect, damage and projectile. They also had a barrel bone, a turret bone, etc. You allocate these, the recoil amount and it just points them in the right direction to get the shot to land on its target. There were various variables for units that had to turn to fire or if their turret turn was allocated to the waist of the unit like a bot that could be set if needs be. This left most units with just a walk animation for their legs and the rest of the movements were just generated by turret controls.
