Pushwall

Would you trade that for the old stairs that were easier to fall from because they were narrower and just as easy to get stuck on because their railings were badly done?

...why?

So that homing LAW kill at 3:40? Your reticle wasn't even on him when you fired. The likelihood of that is about the same as if you were to make a jump shot against someone with the non-tracking LAW.

Changed Status to Fixed

Fixed for next release

I blame whatever Gamma-era dev told BattleLaf "hey, we need unit ready announcements for the Yak and MiG just in case we get the means to implement them in 8 years' time, but don't worry about doing any Airfield attack announcements, it's not like these units will need a building to be purchased from and to land at." I'll look into improving it but ultimately anything new like the airfield has to be a splice job unless someone comes and redoes all the EVA work. (And first I'd prefer to hear new radio commands.)

The only thing we could feasibly do this for is the SAM Site. W3D projectiles don't care about how much something is trying to retreat from them; their maximum range is always the same, no question. If the destroyer's missiles had enough range to chase MiGs to the edge of the earth, they'd also be able to fire base-to-base and hit buildings (though sometimes they'll just go drunk once they exceed the target box range). AI-controlled stuff is different though as they will only attempt to fire at things that are within the range that their script tells them to fire at, which doesn't have to be the same as their projectile range. What's actually going to happen though is the Destroyer's missiles will get a simple velocity boost. You're not going to be outrunning many 200m/s rockets in a 50m/s plane.

A casting time makes it exceedingly difficult to place C4 on vehicles though, which is the main concern that I've seen about it.

On top of this, back when the "devils tongue" Chrono Tank was being devised, that's when C4 had a whopping 1 second delay - since that's how long it would take at maximum for the infantry death to kick in. Ever since that chrono tank concept got canned, the C4's delay has been brought down to only 0.25 seconds - so still enough to mitigate ammo bugs but not so much that it becomes impossible to stick C4 on moving vehicles. I may drop it to 0.1 seconds or something like that too, but it may throw off some people who are used to the 0.25 delay. No, and frankly that's another thing that at the time I would have considered impossible. Romanov wouldn't have been around ingame to notice it either and he originally set minimap stuff up with Apocalypse Rising in mind.

Even with the new chrono logic we still kind of need a delay on C4s for reasons completely unconnected to the new chrono tank. Firing a weapon and selecting something on the sidebar are both assigned to the same mouse button, which means if the C4 has no firing delay then you can refill an empty C4 and throw it at the same time, which kinda gets the client confused - you'll still have C4 ammo, but if you actually try to use this C4 ammo, nothing will happen. Which is pretty shitty when you've had to do so much just to get into the enemy base safely to plant that C4 that you thought you had. It's happened to me many, many times in Gamma. As for how the old "devil's tongue" chrono tank could create C4 abuse which also encouraged me to add the delay: you could move it through ore silos, tesla coils, etc. but if your "phased out" time limit expired and you were in a position where you couldn't phase back in (i.e. moving through a unit or ore silo etc), your chrono tank took gradual damage. If you got your chrono tank killed by doing this, your infantry would also die, but they'd stay alive just long enough to be able to throw a no-delay C4. Which could be undisarmable if planted inside a silo/coil. In hindsight, the delayed infantry death of the old chrono tank just seems to be lax coding on the part of the old coder, as the code for planes and "open water" naval units seems to be pretty watertight in making sure that the infantry pilots of those die before they can fire their weapon.

Someone hasn't played enough Lunar Paradox.

From that video: The guy behind this MiG was not part of the APB dev team. That Zama, from its lighting level, is clearly not official - it's purely a modded version to test the MiG on his end. So what was stopping us from including his MiG? Well, we never had access to his files, and he never gave them to us. It's pretty hard for us to include something in the official game if we don't have the files for it, see? It also doesn't help that it had no textures and could still strafe sideways/backwards like a VTOL and not at all like a plane. Once again, nothing to do with "it was too OP". I can't claim to know exactly why he ended up dropping this, but the most likely possiblity is that, just like the "old Yak" dev team, he gave up in the face of the challenge of making it act less like a VTOL. Also, 2015 is not "the renalert times". 2005 is "the renalert times".

Anyway, that map is certainly a lot easier to decipher than the overhead Mammoth screenshots. Something I was considering doing, especially if I get around to using overhead map logic for more stuff, was dividing the overhead map into landmarked segments for the sake of encouraging better chat callouts, like so (except obviously with much, much smaller text). Seems pretty hard to pull off while continuing to let the map itself be readable though, may be better to find some way to get radio commands or something to report what "sector" you're in via script zones

Just because there was a video of a unit being tested 10 years ago, does not mean the unit was ready to go public 10 years ago. Especially when the video doesn't show all the things the unit is supposed to be capable of. You didn't see the Yak ever firing its weapon in any of those old videos, did you? From what I've heard, one of the ancient methods the old devs tried to use to get the Yak to "fly" was by making it a ground vehicle with extremely long suspension and giving it a harmless weapon that produces negative recoil when fired - which would constantly propel the Yak forward in whatever direction it was being pointed. I am sure that's what's going on in this video as well as the other old Yak videos - you can hear the sound of tank treads all the time (so it's a ground vehicle and its "wheels" are still touching the ground), the propeller isn't spinning (so it isn't an aircraft), and they never show its gun being fired (so most likely its "gun" is being used for its propulsion). These videos were made purely to show off what looks like convincing plane flight, but wouldn't actually work in a true game environment because it wouldn't be able to actually kill anything since it wouldn't be possible for it to have an actual weapon in this configuration. (Plus the whole "wheels kicking up dust and making squeaky tread sounds at the ground far below" thing would get grating pretty fast, and recoil-based propulsion probably wouldn't look pretty for a client with a laggy connection to a server.) So no, it's not a "they thought it was too OP" thing, it's a "they hadn't yet found a way to get it to fly and shoot at the same time" thing. I've browsed the preset databases of various versions of the game and none of the pre-Delta ones that I've found contained any trace of the Yak, so the old devs must have given up pretty quickly on trying to implement it.

I guess you are out of the loop if you never reacted like this to the Yak. Not really, I just do the balance and ask the scripts team to make me something that works, I wouldn't know how it works A little history though? Around mid 2016, we received the assets for the Yak and Airfield (I think Generalcamo found them for us?), and I just lamented that we probably would never have the means to properly implement them anyway and so just left them on the sidelines, only reaching for the Yak again when Lunar Paradox was underway so that people could use a unit that was effectively the Gamma Hind but with an asset unused in the base game. But around the time I released Lunar Paradox (April 2017), I also saw Jerad adding some scripts (most likely intended for ECW) to the scripts project to trigger events if a unit's speed/velocity crosses a certain threshold. That got me thinking, and so 2 months later, you all got the lame duck Yak that was just a VTOL that died if you didn't try to fly it like a plane, and was a fantastic unit in the hands of someone who knew what they were doing, but was a complete turnoff for newbies. It wasn't until a year later - this June - that Romanov stepped up amidst my occasional lamentations about "what if we could have cruise control" and, out of nowhere, delivered us cruise control With a bit of brainstorming the cruise control concept evolved to also prevent planes from ascending like a VTOL while on the runway, prevent planes strafing sideways like a VTOL, and ensure a smooth transition in control schemes between taxi mode and cruise mode - all combining to give us planes that are forced to fly (somewhat) like a plane. With the removal of all the methods of killing yourself that shouldn't really exist, they are now significantly newbie-proofed, even more so now that the Yak has been shrunk down to its real-world size, making it harder to crash. A few weeks ago, Coolrock hooked me up with Sir Phoenix's MiG model, and here we are. Of course, ever since the Yak first made it in, the MiG had always been on my radar - we just didn't have the proper assets for it. And until Siege was cleared for planes, we didn't have a map for it either (Guard Duty isn't the appropriate tech level). There was a placeholder model sitting around in case I ever had the spare time to properly prototype out the unit behaviour (which I never did) - and some astute people may have seen that placeholder in certain videos posted by modders - but a placeholder just wouldn't cut it for a public release of course. The MiG is a little bigger than the Yak, but you can still fit two side by side on the Airfield, so runway traffic is still significantly reduced compared to the days of jumbo Yaks. About the only future refinement to planes I could hope for is having them pitch appropriately when climbing and diving, instead of staying completely level at all times, but they work well enough without that - it'd be more of an aesthetic refinement than anything.

Not really. See these snippets? They're taken at the exact same "top" angle, I just panned the camera to the right for the right one. You cannot stitch these due to the way the camera works - unless you want the silo (or whatever objects happen to be at the seams of any given stitched overhead map) to be a perspective nightmare. And even if we stitch maps together, you're never going to get the finished product to line up properly on the teleport dialog so that where you end up teleporting actually matches up with where you click. We simply can't do it any way other than what Romanov suggested: one screenshot taken using top view - which also conveniently centres your camera precisely over the map origin.

This'll have to wait until whatever undefined point in the future where everyone is running resolutions taller than 2048 pixels.

Just scroll the map. It's kind of unfortunate that it has to be that way but I can only make dds files with power-of-2 sizes. 512x map? No scrolling necessary but you'll have a hard time seeing stuff and getting your mouse to land on the small ok zones, and a lot of space in the window will be wasted. 2048x map? High fidelity, sure, but enjoy being forced to scroll a lot more. Also this isn't even possible unless someone gives me the means to capture a 2048 pixel tall Mammoth window. 1024x? Good enough fidelity and only requires scrolling in very niche circumstances. Alternatively, I'd be able to fit the airfield onto the overhead map with no scrolling necessary if I move the entire gameplay area about 100-150 metres west to get the out of bounds moat off the overhead map. Notice how the overhead map is centered around the game map's origin point? That's right, levels have to be recentred around the centre of the play area just to get the overhead map to provide the appropriate coverage. But there are a million and one problems with this. Every single editor object (building controllers, waypaths, etc) also has to be shifted the same distance. VIS, pathfinding and culling will completely break and need redoing. Fortunately the only map I ever had to recentre for this Coastal Influence and it wasn't such a big deal because CI is a much simpler map with a much smaller amount of editor objects and doesn't perform terribly without VIS, and the only issue is that for the past month the war factory spawns have been completely broken (but they'll be fixed next build).

Changed Status to Fixed

Hey good timing, I'm in the middle of tweaking Siege right now so I'll have this fixed right away. Ackchyually it's one of the rarely seen, rarely used small evergreens and not a stump

HW has had enough tries in the rotation that I don't think you can call a potential future one "second" anymore.

done Also nothing is stopping you from playing when your rank is locked.

What exactly do people do while they wait for the update to finish downloading and installing? How do you NEXT NEXT NEXT when it takes 5 minutes of waiting for that to become an option? I know for a fact that some people are very impatient about the launcher update process, and I have witnessed someone on stream sit and stare at the progress bars seemingly agitated at how slow they are instead of passing the time by getting on the forum and reading the changelog (or you know, doing anything else but just staring) - why? Who knows, maybe they didn't know the changelog was on the forums. Why not put it, or a link to it, right there in the update window to make sure that those slow launcher updates fly by But once you're ingame, you're too busy playing the game to sit around reading walls of text. So I have my doubts that adding yet another wall of text ingame will be a good solution, the ones already there don't seem to be very popular anyway.

But how will I distinguish this M113 chassis with a big bulky turret from the other M113 chassis with a big bulky turret (phase tank)? And how will the AA gun not look out of place on top of the APC? How is replacing the slow bullet hose with a hitscan splash weapon supposed to steer it away from its "bad history of killwhoring"? It will clearly cause it to double down on that history. I guess something I can do is give the plane hitbox a special material (we still have a few spares kicking around) that has a low % chance to produce the AA gun flak cloud effect when shot by APC bullets. Let's not forget that bullets in general are effective against Yaks due to their lack of armour. The difference in damage between a rifle soldier and an APC is much smaller against a Yak than it is against a Hind. The other reason you want an APC for Yaks is that they have mammoth armour, while Rangers have a special "weaker than light" armour that mostly exists to let them get eviscerated by Yaks while making sure other light vehicles like light tanks don't exactly wipe instantly.