Feedback Underwater and Team Donate

[NodGuy]

I can't be the only one who thinks this is very uncomfortable to look at?

Is it possible to return it to what it was before, where it wasn't so intense?

 

Another suggestion: When I was playing Renegade earlier I used !td to donate credits to the team, I liked how it showed this:

Is it possible to a) make it so just typing !td donates all credits and b) tell us how much the individual gets in addition to how much in total? It's nice to know how much each team mate gets when I donate X amount.

Thanks for reading.

[Mojoman]

Yeah I really like that suggestion for the bot. It would help to know how much a !td actually helps the team. Hard to do math in the middle of a match haha.

 

As for the water thing, I don't really care much either way. If the w3d engine ever gets realistic water then that'll be the dream but that's not going to happen.

[NodGuy]

17 minutes ago, Mojoman said:

As for the water thing, I don't really care much either way. If the w3d engine ever gets realistic water then that'll be the dream but that's not going to happen.

I get that it's mean to be darker and harder for the submarines to see but after about fifteen seconds my eyes start to hurt. It's making me not want to purchase submarines because I don't want such discomfort when evading enemies.

[Mojoman]

I know what you mean, yeah. @Pushwall are we able to modify the water filter ourselves? Or would anti-cheat pick up on that?

[NodGuy]

Maybe the solution is to make underwater darker, not bluer and brighter? Then it would feel like you're underwater in a submarine and it's still as difficult to see as intended?

[Pushwall]

32 minutes ago, NodGuy said:

I can't be the only one who thinks this is very uncomfortable to look at?

Is it possible to return it to what it was before, where it wasn't so intense?

Define "before"? It hasn't been touched for all of Delta, why's it only an issue 17 months later?

 

[NodGuy]

I've only started being active again recently (couple months) and I've only been in submarines a few times. Finally decided to make a topic about it. 

Edited May 15, 2017 by NodGuy

[Pushwall]

If you mean compared to Beta... well...

The tint really doesn't look that different. Differences are likely due to rendering changes over the years and Pacific Threat having a different sky colour, and there's no "brightness" setting for the screen tint so idk how we deal with that.

[Pushwall]

As for team donate you'd have to ask @Silverlight.

[NodGuy]

11 hours ago, Pushwall said:

If you mean compared to Beta... well...

The tint really doesn't look that different. Differences are likely due to rendering changes over the years and Pacific Threat having a different sky colour, and there's no "brightness" setting for the screen tint so idk how we deal with that.

It's pretty different when I look at it, but it could just be my eyes. The left seems brighter and it also forces me to focus more to see where I'm going. For now I'll just submerge right before the screen changes, I know this doesn't grant me underwater protection but it's more difficult to see compared to fully surfaced.

@Silverlight, get in here!

[OrangeP47]

Yeah, things don't look quite that obnoxious whenever I dive.

[ChopBam]

Fine here too, for what it's worth. Perhaps your screen is calibrated a certain way?

[Raap]

Stuff like the water logic and appearance could be improved upon if there was a programming contributor with the required time and skill-set to take on the issue. 

[OWA]

16 hours ago, Raap said:

Stuff like the water logic and appearance could be improved upon if there was a programming contributor with the required time and skill-set to take on the issue. 

This would definitely be an improvement to the omgblue we have at the moment.

[Raptor29aa]

Sorry posted on wrong sub topic

Edited May 16, 2017 by Raptor29aa

[moonsense715]

I wonder if the shader effects can be applied on a plane in in front of the camera? That + the blueness fading in and out rather than being instant would help a lot already.

[Raap]

I remember @saberhawk experimenting with water effects some time ago, but I don't remember exactly the reasons for why he dropped it.

It's no simple subject though. You need to consider a large number of factors such as how it looks in relation to depths (you need more transparant edges compared to water that is further out), caustics simulation, wave and shore simulation, and a range of textures designed by someone with an understanding of how water actually looks - which is more challenging than you might realize. Then you've only done the water surface appearance and have yet to work on the gameplay logic and underwater logic as well as appearance. You also have to create a camera logic enhancement that enables plane clipping to draw a different surface on-screen in order to eliminate having a clear underwater view when clipping across the water plane (alternatively, create a way to make a camera-no-fly zone of sorts that pushes the camera up and down either fully submerged or surfaced). Finally, you have to consider expanding the physics to include an actual concept for water/swimming/drowning without it just being a damage script, and optionally you also have to consider infantry character swimming/drowning animations and behavior.

In other words, to get water done properly on W3D, you're looking at a lot of parts to achieve it.

For what it's worth, my 2 cents on this is that it would be a worthy addition to the W3D engine, since water is used in nearly all levels for all W3D projects.

Edited May 18, 2017 by Raap

[moonsense715]

ECW has a few of your water points sorted out. Swimming animations for instance that are different when diving deep compared to being on the surface.

[Raap]

I've never had the opportunity to look at other W3D projects so I didn't know.

That being said, swimming is also a gameplay design choice and I do not believe APB specifically even wants to have that. But slowly sinking and drowning, as well as slower movement on the underwater surface, along with all the expected visuals, would make more sense.

Right now for example when your Destroyer is, well, destroyed, your character ejects and starts falling through the "water" at top speed and clear view. It always triggers me when I see it. A band-aid solution might be to somehow freeze the camera in place when your ship/sub is destroyed while you're still in it, until you respawn. This would mask the fact your character is actually falling through the water.

Additionally, it could fix that "shoot the enemy while falling" issue if input is disabled via a scripted death similar to Demolition Truck logic. Same logic could then maybe be applied to aircraft if their death is caused by collision. 

Unfortunately I have no idea if any of that is easy to pull off. I'd wager a cinematic effect could be employed to freeze a camera (maybe allow rotation), but new scripts would have to handle everything else.

Edited May 18, 2017 by Raap

[Pushwall]

At one point a solution for water that I was hoping for was a "gravity multiplier zone" that would slow your falling when you entered water .Fall damage is based solely on distance between where you fell from and where you land rather than speed, and can be set on a per-map basis, so it wouldn't impact fall damage through water but this is why it's still able to be different for Lunar. This would have also allowed us to easily affect the gravity on every object for Lunar rather than tweaking gravity settings individually for every unit (which I didn't bother doing for vehicles). But sadly it couldn't be done.

[OrangeP47]

1 hour ago, Pushwall said:

so it wouldn't impact fall damage through water but this is why it's still able to be different for Lunar.

You know what Lunar needs? Water

/s

[Raap]

2 hours ago, Pushwall said:

At one point a solution for water that I was hoping for was a "gravity multiplier zone" that would slow your falling when you entered water .Fall damage is based solely on distance between where you fell from and where you land rather than speed, and can be set on a per-map basis, so it wouldn't impact fall damage through water but this is why it's still able to be different for Lunar. This would have also allowed us to easily affect the gravity on every object for Lunar rather than tweaking gravity settings individually for every unit (which I didn't bother doing for vehicles). But sadly it couldn't be done.

Couldn't be done with existing scripts, or couldn't be done without significant code changes? I think we're quite limited in terms of physics, unfortunately, as I could come up with a lot of interesting gameplay if I had the means to alter physics on demand. 

Speaking of falling, how about updating the falling and jumping animations to loop better? They are rather bad to look at, and it's especially noticeable on Paradox. Might be worthwhile since any future water changes will likely use those animations anyhow.

Still, @Pushwall consider applying Demolition Truck logic to kill passengers aboard naval units on their destruction to partially remedy some of the naval gameplay weirdness, even if that won't solve the appearance of the water.

Edited May 19, 2017 by Raap

[Pushwall]

14 minutes ago, Raap said:

Still, @Pushwall consider applying Demolition Truck logic to kill passengers aboard naval units on their destruction to partially remedy some of the naval gameplay weirdness, even if that won't solve the appearance of the water.

Problem is, on maps that aren't Hostile Waters, shorelines tend to be shallow enough that if you lose your boat near land you can salvage your infantry. Not to mention LSTs can die on land where everyone would definitely be safe. So a flat out demo-truck-style "if vehicle dies, all passengers die, no questions asked" is kinda bad.

However, there is script logic for a zone where, if a certain kind of vehicle is outside it, not only will all passengers die when it dies, but you also can't eject from the vehicle while outside this zone. Which means nobody will accidentally abandon their destroyers in the middle of nowhere (unless they suicide or quit). It also allows use of an animation to show if you're in this zone or not, which we could use to let LSTs open their ramps when near land (at the cost of their radar dish not spinning but whatever). This'll take a while to work out for boats though. Since some people seem to be confused on where to get out of the LST I think I'll just make only the forward ramp animate for this instance (while keeping the classic all-ramps animation for Seamist's cinematic LSTs).

[Chaos_Knight]

You know what I was thinking about a while back?

The idea occured to me once "crashing" aircraft were implemented. Is it possible to make a script that would turn destroyed aircraft/naval into a different vehicle rather than the "projectile"? So that people won't just "pop out" and fall to their doom long before even their vehicle does. And once "wreck's" velocity drops below certain point (aka when it landed on something) it quickly loses all HP and explodes dealing some damage to the driver and nearby objects susceptible to AOE. You can exit manually of course.

Now, as said here:

15 hours ago, moonsense715 said:

ECW has a few of your water points sorted out. Swimming animations for instance that are different when diving deep compared to being on the surface.

There's already a script for swimming. Naturally we don't want people to just cross the water Battlefield-style, so why not combine that with infantry damage zones? Say, 50% of current damage per second on the surface and full once submerged.
Also no shooting while swimming obviously, but you should still be able to board stuff (rescue chinook/LST anyone? XD).

Then let's combine it with the idea above.

So when ship/sub gets destroyed, it turns into invincible sinking version of itself. Player can then choose to bail out outright and swim on the surface and lose less HP/s (but be open to enemy fire or simply getting ran over by the nearby navy) or wait out and end up safer underwater but with much higher HP/s loss.

Aircraft in meanwhile will also benefit from this in a way since it would allow for a parachute logic substitude (just sit in there while your heli goes down). If drivers of certain vehicles need to die, you can always add demo truck script to the "crashing" version. The only downside to this is making aircraft explode when they hit water surface rather than sea bottom but I guess making "wreck" take damage from "swimming" zones could solve that.

[Pushwall]

46 minutes ago, Chaos_Knight said:

The idea occured to me once "crashing" aircraft were implemented. Is it possible to make a script that would turn destroyed aircraft/naval into a different vehicle rather than the "projectile"? So that people won't just "pop out" and fall to their doom long before even their vehicle does.

Crashland logic works for aircraft because they don't care about their gravity setting unless their engine's disabled, and they don't need different collision settings when falling. Boats, however, need to be a separate object so that they can:

1. fall through the water
2. fall slowly without also having the following side effects on living boats:

• making their handling way, way more slippery than even the initial release of Delta where it was intentionally slippery.
• slowing their acceleration to a crawl
• making them get knocked into the stratosphere if something bumps them.

And anyone who was around to test the "old" Chronotank script back at BHP might have an idea about how irritating the workarounds are for taking a vehicle that is currently occupied and replacing it with a separate vehicle preset for different physics, while still retaining the occupants.

I'll see about replacing the helis' "projectile" death logic with crashland logic. Hopefully it won't look much worse. Something to note is it has a slight unintended nerf to AA defenses in that AIs continue to treat a crashlanding unit as a valid target - and in fact a preferred target since it has 1 HP (you might have seen this on Lunar Paradox), and also a nerf to Volkov since everyone else can also survive a helicopter crash (unless the crash explosion is instakill), and a nerf to Chinooks in that even if you manage to reach the enemy base, you'd better be able to get everyone away from the Chinook before it blows and heavily damages/kills everyone...

[Raap]

I wouldn't risk touching the aircraft death logic, it looks and functions just fine as it is. The pilot "auto-ejects" and falls to his much intended death.

It's only naval vehicles where the complications exist.

Regarding Demolition Truck passenger killing logic for naval vehicles, if your ship is blown up near a shore or 200 meters out into sea, it shouldn't matter since you're on the vessel at the time of destruction, making you "go down with the ship". Fair point on Naval Transports that reached land however (although, why stay inside the transport when you reached land and are under attack?).

Edited May 19, 2017 by Raap

[Pushwall]

14 minutes ago, Raap said:

(although, why stay inside the transport when you reached land and are under attack?).

You're still not close enough to your target and want protection from flamethrowers/stray bullets for as long as possible or are waiting for engy to clear mines? Or, in a scenario where the enemy naval factory is gone, you want your LST to die in the attack so that the enemy doesn't take it?

[Chaos_Knight]

7 minutes ago, Raap said:

(although, why stay inside the transport when you reached land and are under attack?).

Well, you may still get destroyed just as you reach the shore really. Plus what Pushwall said about mines. Actually, can't Soviet LST actually die to the AT mine placed on the shore?

35 minutes ago, Pushwall said:

Crashland logic works for aircraft because they don't care about their gravity setting unless their engine's disabled, and they don't need different collision settings when falling. Boats, however, need to be a separate object so that they can: <snip>

Hm, I see. Well, I think I'll create a new topic for aircraft crash logic so that we won't litter this one with off-topic discussion.
Done. Here - 

 

[Pushwall]

48 minutes ago, Chaos_Knight said:

Actually, can't Soviet LST actually die to the AT mine placed on the shore?

Indeed it can. Which if LSTs killed all passengers unconditionally, would mean one AT mine kills up to 6 non-T units instantly whereas AP mine can only snag one P at a time if they exit one at a time. Seems... not right.

[Pushwall]

Another fun thing I found while messing with the "safety zone" script for boats is that if you somehow manage to eject from a vehicle that's using this logic when you can't actually eject (such as by quitting the game or suiciding) the vehicle blows up anyway and kills all its occupants. Which I suppose slightly turns down the grief-o-meter and solves the potential problem of what happens if someone quits the game and tries to strand everyone in an unpiloted LST in the middle of nowhere...