What do we want? Thread - BattleTech Fan Game Developers

A good idea is for the team to discuss what each of us wants to see in this game;Discuss good points you found in previous games and bad points from previous games.For me, I'll obviously start with Mech3 and Pirate's Moon.My biggest positives about Mech3 and PM: Mech movement animation...I felt no other games have captured the true look and feel of how a 'Mech would actually look when it moves as well as Mech3 and PM. I feel they struck the proper balance between "Giant robot" and "living being" and "walking tank". In contrast, Mech 4, IMO, made the mechs move like animals. I believe this is the single most important aspect of creating a true battlemech cockpit simulation game.The second most important aspect, IMO, is destructible terrain. EVERYTHING should be destroyable, even hardened bunkers. Obviously, this means ALOT of different sets of destruction animation sequences, and ALOT of work, but perhaps once a basic foundation is laid then each world created, having the same properties and building tools, will get easier to construct.Something I have observed in both MWLL and MWO which to me is a failure, is that 'Mechs do not contact the terrain properly. When they climb a hill it's like they're not adjusting to the terrain but they're still climbing anyway....like they float for a half step to the next level. When they walk across flatter land it still looks like they're gliding. In Mech3 a mechs pelvis adjusts, guided by a virtual "gyro", to the changes in terrain. Mechs cannot climb certain steep angles. Certain sized trees stop mechs and in some cases destroy your mech. The virtual gyro also allows for torso movement during walking/running, which is natural when you consider the machine is a giant walking tank...it's going to look like it's heavy when it walks. Go back and play Mech3 and watch the Madcat and Sunder as they walk, you will see exactly what I'm talking about. I feel that these aspects need to be ironed out before all others, because once this foundation is done, the rest of the details can follow and the game will already look and feel like it should.

I agree with what you are saying about the animations, Mech3 and Mech4 had the best ones by far. The feet conforming to the ground and such uses a technique in animation called "IK" or Inverse Kinematics. It takes quite a bit of work to set up for animators, but its do-able.

Destructible objects and such is very important to me as well, another good example is crushing a car under your mech's feet; there is truly no better feeling than hearing the metal and glass bend and break.

For me, I would say the biggest thing is VERY detailed cockpits and a bright GUI, just like how MWO looked back in closed beta. The screens worked and displayed helpful information, and the cockpit had so many buttons and such that it felt very real. Another big thing for me is making the menu/mechlab where you actually walk around in it instead of just a screen. Also, when you climb into a mech to start a mission, you are still in first person watching your pilot climb into the mech and get situated.

I remember a very very long time ago during a multiplayer session of mech3....the first time I ever truly appreciated the simulation aspect, the "immersion" feel that up to that point I had taken for granted as had probably most players. I was piloting a Madcat, and I was completely focused on a "circle of death" battle I was a part of...it was just me and my opponent, and that was all that was on my mind. Of course, I knew that other players were battling on other areas of the map, but naturally I was focused on surviving while trying to kill my opponent. Suddenly I heard and saw LRMs flying above the "head" of my madcat and to the left....and for some reason I chose to look up and watch them as they flew past me and hit the cliffs as I was performing a circle maneuver. Obviously another opponent from "outside" my current battle area was coming to help my opponent from down range. I remembered hearing the LRMs as they were far away..then getting closer, and the sight of them flying past me from behind just gave me pause. Suddenly, for the first time, I truly appreciated what made the game great. It was the perception of not only having targets in your sights and firing weapons and piloting a giant machine...but it was about perceiving all the other things going on around you as you battled. Sounds matter. Sights matter. Different weapons make different sounds depending on what they hit. Some weapons make slightly different sounds than their similar "cousins"....LRMs sound and act visually different than SRMs...AC's and UAC's impacting have different sounds depending on what they're hitting and so forth. Mech3's missiles made craters...but I think ballistics should as well. In MWO, do the PPC's light up objects/ground near where they're being fired from? Do the lasers? All these aspects and more are equally important in making up the "whole" that becomes the simulation.

Another thing, I really want o have GOOD vr support. So we can actually feel like we are in the game. I currently don't have an Oculus headset, I am waiting for the last Dev kit to get it. Once I get health and weapons to a point I'm happy with, I might look into getting a VR Dev kit.

Virtual reality? interesting

Yeah, always wanted to have a Mechwarrior VR game. Obviously PGI is not going to make it, and even if they do it will most likely be so unoptimized that it will be unplayable.

So I'm planning on a PC upgrade soon. What would be the minimum cpu I would need for this project, and I'm planning on using windows 7 64 bit.

Hmm. I would say try to get at least an i3 processor, i5 if you are willing to spend a bit more.

I should be able to work a bit more soon, I want to get the weapons working next, and then I will work on a reticule system like MWO.

Have you ever played MechWarrior 3? I'm curious because I'm not sure what the MWO reticule does exactly. 'Mech3 had a reticule that could be used in "feelook" mode, where it could be toggled to move free of the torso, or you could immediately toggle back to being linked to torso movement.Also, if you were able to get Mech3 working you could install my "weapons module" which would give you an idea of sound effects I've done and we could get started collaborating on those.

Yes, I did play MechWarrior 3. The Mechwarrior 3 reticule was good, and I liked the free look mode, but MWO's is way better. The thing with the reticule in MWO is that the arms and torso have separate crosshairs. I can't really explain through text, but this video is a good example of it;

In this part of the video, you can see how there is a circle crosshair and a normal crosshair, the circle crosshair is a separate one for the arms and the normal one is for the torso. The torso lags behind while the arms are able to move faster, giving arm mounted weapons a huge advantage to hitting moving targets. Another thing is that you can engage free look by holding down ctrl, effectively being just like MW3's system, but with the arm crosshair separate.

Sadly I cannot get Mechwarrior 3 working on my current PC, because when I do I have the physics bugs, mostly due to having to run in software mode because in hardware mode I get extreme screen tearing and other horrible artifacts.

Having a separate reticule for arms because the torso doesn't move as fast is nearly brilliant because it creates a reason to mount weapons in arms rather than hoarding all your weapons in the torsos...the reason I say nearly brilliant is because well, freelook pretty much does the same thing....although in Mech3 I guess the torso moved almost as fast so the advantage got nullified.

Something I've wanted to see in a 'mech game: being able to toggle between single-shot and burst-fire modes for Autocannons...

I did a lot of research on it during my working on the mech3 weapons module, and there are so many different opinions about how autocannons work that you just have to take a certain amount of creative license, but I did see something written in canon about toggling between the two modes. Burst fire would be similar to what the 'mech3 autocannons did, single-fire would be just what it says, 1 shot at a time. A single shot of an AC5 would be 5 points damage, a burst-fire shot would be 5 times however many (probably 5) shells are in the burst...the disadvantage obviously being running out of ammo quicker, and more frequent jamming, and heat buildup, as well as not all the rounds hitting the target. Perhaps in burst fire mode you could make the "aiming" of the weapon more unstable under the premise that firing a burst of shells causes turbulence within the weapon...and there's your creative license.

I'd also love to see the different types of AC's specialty ammunitions.

I would say that he thing with ACs and their firing is that single shot is the only one a regular autocannon has, reason being that UACs were made to have double tap fire. If we go back and look at the Battletech board game, an AC only fires one shot that does all the damage the weapon does if it hits. UAC's were made to be the sort of burst fire weapon, and double tapping with them already does have a higher jam rate then normal.

But the only difference between AC's and UAC's...other than various ammunition types/sizes, is that UAC's have double the rate of fire, not double-tap, but a shot every .5 seconds as opposed to 1 second for the AC's....twice the rate of fire. The "double-tap" was a definition first used in Mech4 Vengeance, and from what I've seen that proves false, however, it was within their purview to use that particular creative license. The most consistent, basic element of the definitions of the two types is "twice the rate of fire" for the UAC's. Either one can fire in burst mode from what I've gleaned from researching canon and weeding through myriads of opinions of forum posters who have read the lore in the battletech books. But, what it comes down to, as the point I was trying to make, is that there comes a point where creative license has to step in with regard to the mechanics of the guns in a video game. Many of these forum posters will say that single-shot mode was how early AC's fired and that later all autocannons began to shoot a "burst", which counted as the full damage potential of a single AC shot.

I chose to do them as single-shots in the mech3 weapons module because in the old days in multiplayer UAC's got used all the time, and AC's never. So what I wanted to do was create reasons to use AC's...more pluses and minuses, so the subtle differences I came up with were as follows: Single-fire mode eliminated the "gyro" effect prevalent in multiplayer and which contributed to making AC's useless, so it put them on a level playing field; I gave AC's just a hair more range than UAC's; I gave AC's slightly more velocity than UAC's...this gave them a plus that competes with the "double fire rate" of UAC's...and it makes sense that this would be the natural result of making a weapon fire at a faster rate...you would lose some performance and accuracy from the weapon in order to do so; I gave the AC's slightly more impact force..another choice for the player to think about. So, all in all these naturally superior attributes of traditional AC's were something that needed to be sacrificed a little bit in order to make UAC's. The funny thing is, since mech3 is such a dead game I seriously doubt anyone will ever truly appreciate the consideration I gave these two weapons.

Machine guns are a whole other ball of wax! Again, I went to the forums and got tons of opinions about ranges. I've spoken to veterans about ranges. What it boils down to is the "200 meter" range in Battletech can be viewed as an "accuracy standard"...so the range could be up to 600 meters but accuracy begins to fall off at 200 to 300. Also, 200 rounds per ton? crazy. I've read opinions that a machine gun "round" in battletech consists of a "burst" of many rounds...so it could mean 5 rounds times 200, maybe even 10 rounds, which would actually mean 2000 rounds of ammo per ton. When I decided on bursts of 5 times 200 for 1000 rounds per ton for the mech3 module, and increased the fire rate and velocity, the damage value had to come way down or the weapon just became insane. I brought the damage down to where the amount of hits/work you had to do firing a machine gun at a mech to get results made sense. So, taking down a mech with machine guns ends up being like chopping down a tree...the creative license made the right sense.