Discussion Point: Fission Engine

2.5RC1 has been released for awhile now (and the updated fission script before that) so lets talk about it. Whats its strengths/weaknesses? What do you love/hate? When do you use it? How logical of a concept is it that the faster you drive the faster it cools? etc.


Played a game of duststorm with it last night and noticed a few things myself, firstly its become sooo slow. Secondly that if you overheat (or get close to overheating) theres pretty much no chance of movement for 3-4 seconds. Combine this with the fact that a lot of less experienced players dont know its the opposite of all other engines (moving cools and staying still doesnt) and you have an extremely niche engine.

On the other hand, 3 phase is fast, has good cooling and a sensible overheat penalty.

Am I the only one that thinks that fission in its current form needs a massive change?

 

We might also want to start out with actually stating the different effects in the vehicle factory menu.

 

This is pretty much what I think.
It also what I though originally as well.
Gimmicks are more of an annoyance than fresh air.

One thing I noticed is that hit reg seems way better for vehicle mgs, so now std mgs just fuck you up like its 50 cal. That and the fact that CG now has a really bad particle, the bullets are so big you can't really tell if you are hitting anything.

 

ACE is bad for the same reason why sights are bad. Empires, being a high damage game, your primary way of not dying is not getting hit. Mobility and evasion are god. Tanks also have the plate system, which makes mobility and turning around vital. ACE makes it all go to shit.

 

Fission could be quicker. I preferred it when you really had to be going full pelt with it but could basically fire constantly. Driving fission with DU, even on an open map was difficult. Or making "dive bombing" runs through an area, it is something you would rarely think to do with any other engine.

ACE isn't hard to drive with - if you remind people how to use it then people rarely overheat in dumb places. I think the diversity in the engines is worth keeping and pushing as far as possible.

As for things being intuitive - no-one here can comment any longer on what is/isn't intuitive really because our frame of reference is so coloured. Regardless I don't things need to be that intuitive, if things are displayed in obvious ways then it doesn't take long for people to get it.

I would look to arcadey mech games like armored core for some inspiration with heat management, might want to consider damage hull damage - or disabling/jamming a weapon if it is fired during over heat. Also more visual / audible queues. Stuff like increasing the hue of the screen would be much better than the horrible little thing we have now tucked at the bottom of the screen. Or add the heat level to the reticule so it is at least easy to see.

 

I think fission and advanced coolant need a change, at the very least their special 'ability' could just be toned down a little.

eg: Coolant not cooling whilst moving could be changed to just not cooling very well whilst moving.
Fission not cooling whilst stationary changed to not cooling very well whilst stationary.

Also make the status effects of engines shown on the HUD in some way to make it obvious that the engine special buff/debuff is in effect.
So for example it could show the speed increase you are gaining from gas turbine as you loose armour.
A red temperature icon whilst moving with adv coolant and a blue temperature icon whilst stationary and vice-versa for fission.

Maybe something similar could be done for some types of armour as well such as showing the angle modifier when getting hit when using reflective so people know they are angling the armour correctly.

 

Sounds like the way forward!

 

I think you can pivot your tank and still reap the benefits of ACE, you just can't press the W key.

The problem with ACE & fission is that no one knows how they work.

Candles painstakingly explained it to me (God bless him).

• Coolant cools well when you aren't pressing the W key and cools poorly when you're pressing the W key. It has nothing to do with vehicle speed.
  
• Fission cools poorly when you are pressing the W key. It starts to cool better when you press the W key and gets better & better as you speed up.

I think this is an inconsistent & exploit-y mechanic. Fission should work exactly opposite to Coolant. Good cooling while W key is held, bad cooling when W key isn't held. Simple, elegant, clean.

 

Yeah I'm not perfectly happy with MGs.

I think the new source engine particle editor is incompatible with old files though, so it might be a bit of effort to remake all the tracers. I might do it soonish.

I'm not happy with infantry tracers either, I like how they look from first person but when you see other infantry shooting you ask yourself why infantry are using 45mm tracer cannon shells.

 

Honestly, I could still be wrong on how vehicle cooling works. That shit's wack'd.

 

1) But thats pretty freaking obvious. You just have to pay attention to the heat bar. Considering the giant diffrence between moving/not moving for both of the engines, its pretty easy to figure out, except for the moving faster bit with fission which, if true, is barely noticable. I knew about the pivot but that doesnt really help narrow the gap.

2)I agree that its gimmicky, but Id rather have it the other way around, actual speed determining your heat exchange. You could still go pretty slow with ace, but without actual, finger hating, tapping, and still have good cooling. Basing it around pressing W is what seems really bad for me.

 

Afaik it's just 100% while pressing/not pressing W in the case of both engines respectively. I'd love to tie it to actual speed but there's no support for that.

As A-z-K said, the engines have always been the most lacklustre research area, so trying to introduce some mechanics to them is pretty important. Sadly, there isn't a particularly intuitive way to actually display this to the player, so I've been relying on ingame server-based tooltips (which aren't working due to Sourcemod not working) and word of mouth.

I won't remove the function, but if people want to design me 2 similar functions that can be shown intuitively, with what's available, I'm more than happy to go down that road and replace them. I'm just not going back to 5 engines that are all 95% identical to eachother with a few very small changed statistics.

 

My main problem with fission is that if you oveheat even slightly then you are dead. When stalled (at the minute), 100% throttle takes AGES to cool you. Is there any way of reducing that time?

 

You could probably allow ~10% throttle during overheat (biodiesel has 100%), which would get it out of "idle" mode and maybe speed up the wait time.

Of course, I honestly don't understand how overheat works. It's like if you hit 100 heat, then it adds like ten heat and weapons are disabled until it gets back below 100. Or maybe there's just a flat timer. Idk.