Dev Blogs II Discussion

well it doesn't matter if it uses 8 figures after the decimal point or adds 8 before it, either way you get the same "accuracy".

I too thought the weapon looked like something out of PVK II, and I origionally thought it looked out of place. i mean... a shotgun with a bayonette?

that's not to say that the model isn't VERY impressive and well done, possibly the best model empires has. I wouldn't really be troubled if it was in the mod.


just some balancing discussion:

the shotgun is going to be difficult to get right. lets put it next to the SMG: at close range the SMG can put a man down in about half a second, right?

so lets say that at close range we want the shotgun to be at least as effective as that, given that it's going to suck at long range.

that means either 2 moderate (70?) damage shots, in half a second, which means that it will fire about the same rate as a combat/assault/auto (whatever you want to call it) shotgun, OR it can instead kill a person instantly with a close range shot, because then it wouldn't matter that it took a second to load between shots.

the problem with the latter solution is that it'll bring back "hopping around a corner and blasting an enemy", which most vets will remember was massively irritating with the scout rifle. this could be somewhat fixed by massively decreasing the accuracy (meaning increasing the area where the effective crosshair could be on the screen, nothing to do with precision aka bullet spread) when players jump. so when they jump and shoot, the actual shot could be aimed anywhere in a large circle around where your onscreen crosshair points.

you also want to consider the role of the bayonette. just getting from "half a second kill range" to "melee range" takes more than half a second... so it'll always be faster to kill an enemy by shooting, even if the melee was an instant kill. I imagine the main role is to allow the user to continue fighting at close range after he is out of shells, or to take down the first enemy of a few that the user has ambushed to conserve ammo for taking down the remaining foes. either way, I think that giving it an instant kill would be fair.

 

All weapons are being rebalanced, so it's not necessary to have SMGs be that powerful.

 

be sure to check rpg dmg twice before release.

 

Shaddup lol :p

 

there isn't really anything wrong with the SMG power though... ammirite?

 

Assuming you're rebalancing the SMGs to be less powerful, could you perhaps make it so that they just do less damage rather than be less accurate? An AR should be more accurate and damaging than a SMG because it uses bigger bullets and has a longer barrel, but would perhaps have more recoil and be less good on the move. An SMG would be more controllable and easier to use while moving, but be less good at range and do less damage per shot. A shotgun would be lethal up close and do a lot of damage with each shot, but would rapidly lose effectiveness at a distance.

So you get an AR being the long range, SMG being mid-range, and shotgun being close range. ARs are precise and require you to be stationary to use properly, SMGs can be used while moving but also benefit from staying still, shotguns are the most mobile weapons. The spectrum of weaponry you get with this is a good thing I think.

For my money, making any machinegun-like weapon suck as a result of accuracy is probably going to annoy the players, a shotgun you expect to be a bit inaccurate over distances, but the amount of shot means you probably will hit your target, just not do much damage. Having a machinegun that you actually can't hit anything with however is just not fun, it feels like the weapon is useless.

So I'd take power loss over accuracy loss please.

I don't think with the current weaponry there is, no.

But if you're going to put shotguns in, then as you pointed out you would need to rebalance the SMGs to fill a slightly different role. At the moment there are only two roles, long range and short range, but with a shotgun you'd have three, so you bump the SMGs into the mid-range role.

 

The realism suggested in this thread is not going to make a difference, but i think you're better off reducing the fire rate, atm they all seem like machine guns firing so fast that they would jam fast with today's tech.

 

I think this thread should be cleaned up a bit. A lot of this discussion has nothing to do with the dev blog.

 

it seems fairly constructive, though i'll concede certainly tangental. I wouldn't say that this shotgun stuff should be deleted.

 

I was really tempted just to delete Broccoli's post with a reason saying "Cleaned", but, noone else could see it, so, I'll refrain.

 

^_^ kylegar needs to talk more often.

at any rate, it'd be fun to see what happens with the shotgun when you stack accuracy bonuses.

 

Mootant has changed some things so ironsights are customizable in the scripts, so the shotty will be as (in)accurate as the balancing wants it. :p

 

I have to say I really like those models, even though I've seen them before.

What I never quite got clear however is what use they serve in empires? Is the eventual goal to include versions of the vehicles they represent? I also think the overall style of each is much better than the current style, the current style of both sides feels outdated, like how the models in HL1 feel outdated, not just because the HL1 models are low poly but they have that old fashioned game feel about them, the empires models have sort of the same feel even though they have much better textures and polycounts.

I think it's because they use a lot of flat surfaces, the high res models there have a much more modern feel because they pick out more details with polygons, like the plates of armor over the BE tank treads and the wheels inside the NF tracks, more overlapping geometry basically, so the model parallaxes with itself when you move around it. If the empires models did that in a few more places it'd help.

 

That post is evil, EVIL. Thinking about what that would bring to empires and how much diversity there'd be in combat makes me...*drool*. Posting that when we know it's miles away is evil dammit!

 

Whoa, does the super tank involve uber-pewpew guns?

 

Who decided it was a good idea for you to talk?

 

That post needs to be nominated for post of the year.

 

what does LOD mean (its in the latest post, to do with models)

 

If you look it up, like I did, You'll find out it means level of detaill. So basically, when an object is further away, a less simple version of it is drawn, but because it is far away, you can't see the difference.

 

It's most noticable on the vehicle factories.