Any thoughts on rewarding suppression?

[AtheistIII]

Yes, exactly. Thinking about it further, when you're hit (not grazed), you should also get a bit of the 'slow death' animation without the fading to black as well for a few seconds, but then recover.

Sounds good, but you should be able to go prone, otherwise you will be dead anyways

 

[PhoenixDragon]

Do you know if TWI is aware of / working on this?

It's been brought up plenty of times on the forums. So, probably not.

If they don't feel like fixing it, is it something that could be adjusted by a mutator so that suppression and bullet snaps occur whenever a round passes by or impacts terrain within 1m of a player?

It worked fine in Antilag. Their implementation of client-side hit detection introduced a number of bugs in that method, such as the suppression bug, and how bullets "fizzle" in mid-air when the player dies. It would, presumably, be no harder to implement than it was in Antilag, possibly easier.

As an amusing note, the original radius for suppression was 3m. At the same time that they "buffed" suppression up to a ridiculous 9m, they also introduced their client-side method with multiple bugs, such as making that newly-buffed suppression not work in many cases. I can only imagine how annoying it would be (And not in a good way) if it both works reliably and has the buffed radius.

Honestly, if they ever fixed the bug with their memory manager that caused issues for Antilag, we'd be better off using it still, over TWI's client-side code.

 

[Rabid Penguin]

Here is how I believe suppression should work (in my personal opinion).

Firstly, the way your avatar flinches when under fire needs to be more realistic - instead of moving your point of aim randomly, your soldier should flinch, causing his weapon to drop slightly, and then return to nearby the original point of aim. I believe this is closer to how a person would actually respond, it still makes it harder to return fire, but would just be better.

Secondly they should take the suppression radius back to 3m (9m is way too much), and there should also be different levels of suppression, for example:

Light suppression: rounds passing/impacting between 2m - 3m away
Effect: avatar flinches slightly

Medium suppression: rounds passing/impacting between 1m - 2m away
Effect: avatar flinches more, slightly ducking their entire body instinctively

Strong suppression: rounds passing/impacting under 1m away
Effect: player flinches significantly, instincively ducking and drawing their arms/weapon close to their body, or flattening themselves to the ground if prone, or to cover if in cover. Avatar refuses to peek/aim out of cover, but will blind fire.

Thirdly, and I can't stress this enough, suppression is ONLY caused by INCOMING FIRE, never by outgoing fire....

 

[PhoenixDragon]

Strong suppression: rounds passing/impacting under 1m away
Effect: player flinches significantly, instincively ducking and drawing their arms/weapon close to their body, or flattening themselves to the ground if prone, or to cover if in cover. Avatar refuses to peek/aim out of cover, but will blind fire.

I would be strongly against a system that forced you to go prone or stay in cover. It's not just game-y, it would often produce very unrealistic results. Imagine being shot at and missed while running across a 3m gap, and suddenly you're prone in the middle of the open area rather than taking another half-second to get behind cover. Or shooting around a corner, someone missing you, and suddenly you can't step back and run away behind the thick stone wall because you drop prone when you leave cover, despite being completely safe from any enemy fire back there. You shouldn't be forced to go prone or stay locked in cover because someone missed you. You should be encouraged to make yourself safe because you know you'll die if you expose yourself, and that it would be a bad thing to do so.

And having flinching very unpredictable is realistic. On a braced weapon, it'd be more likely to "flinch" the aim-point away from the object you're bracing on (Usually upward) than it would be for the aim-point to drop. Random is good enough, particularly since it's supposed to inconvenience you. The automatic return is unnecessary, though, it's already easy enough to reacquire your target just a moment after the shot.

 

[Rabid Penguin]

PhoenixDragon, you misunderstood me... I never said you'd automatically go prone in the middle of a field. What I was intending to say is that under strong suppression you would flatten yourself closer to the ground if you were already prone, and cling to cover if you were already in cover.

Also, if you flinch while holding a gun, your natural reaction would cause the butt of the weapon to drop and the muzzle to rise, and then return back to near-original position after you recovered. (at least that's what I naturally did that time someone had an AD on the firing range right next to me)

 

[Proud_God]

Proud God, you misunderstood me...

Contrary to popular believe, I am not Phoenix Dragon! (although someone else on this forums might be )

 

[Rabid Penguin]

Contrary to popular believe, I am not Phoenix Dragon! (although someone else on this forums might be )

Edited! Sorry man, I just woke up

 

[PhoenixDragon]

I never said you'd automatically go prone in the middle of a field. What I was intending to say is that under strong suppression you would flatten yourself closer to the ground if you were already prone, and cling to cover if you were already in cover.

And that has the downside of penalizing people who use the cover system, who are suddenly locked behind cover and unable to expose/aim, while someone else in the same situation, but not using the cover system, could still peek out and aim.

And by "cling to cover," do you mean they'd be locked in cover? If yes, that still prevents them from dropping back and running away behind that safe, thick stone wall where nobody can shoot them. If no, they can just drop out of cover and use the lean keys to entirely bypass the "cling to cover" penalty.

Also, if you flinch while holding a gun, your natural reaction would cause the butt of the weapon to drop and the muzzle to rise, and then return back to near-original position after you recovered.

That's one potential direction to flinch, and amusingly, the opposite direction of what you proposed in your previous post. It's also about as likely that someone might pull the muzzle down in a ducking reflex, or to the side. It likely depends on both the situation and the individual shooter. I've seen people flinch in many different directions.

Returning back toward the original position seems like something the individual player should do on their own, rather than being automatic, considering how small the aim-kick is. Unless you mean to greatly exaggerate the immediate kick, and then automatically recover back to a value close to what we have now, which might work. In general, though, I'd say that's something the player should do, rather than being handled automatically.

 

[Rabid Penguin]

Unless you mean to greatly exaggerate the immediate kick, and then automatically recover back to a value close to what we have now, which might work.

Yes, that's it exactly.

I guess what I'm trying to propose is to make actions that would be autonomic in real life, automatic in game, if that makes sense. For example, if you would have an instinctive, reflexive reaction to something IRL (something your body does without a conscious command), then your avatar should also do that in game.

Also, regarding weapon movement - I'm not contradicting myself - just explaining badly the first time Sorry, I"m really bad at explaining my ideas - they make perfect sense in my head, and I find it really hard to explain things from a point of view of someone who doesn't just know what i'm talking about.. (I really suck at teaching people things, for this reason).

Okay, here goes a better explanation of my cover idea:

1. If you are within a few feet of a coverable object then you will automatically go into cover mode if not already

2. you will not be able to peek/aim out of cover until suppression effect wears off, however you can blind fire. Bear in mind this only occurs in strong suppression, which means bullets are landing or passing very close to you and would likely hit you if you did stick your head out.

3. I also would say that you would ONLY 'cling' to impenetrable cover - to make sure you dont end up getting stuck to a wooden fence and then get shot through it. If it's not possible for it to distinguish between penetrable/impenetrable cover, then scrap the whole idea.

The idea behind this is simulating a fear response - instinctively jerking your head/body back faster than you'd be able to do it consciously

 

[PhoenixDragon]

1. If you are within a few feet of a coverable object then you will automatically go into cover mode if not already

Urgh. No. Very much no. That makes it even worse. Imagine running up to a corner, when an enemy peeks out behind you and starts shooting. Suddenly you're pulled into cover and locked there, fully exposed to the enemy that's shooting at you, and because you're locked into cover you have no way to get to safety. This is bad.

And if it sucks you into cover, you still have the issue of being unable to run away from cover, even if you're escaping through an area that is completely safe.

3. I also would say that you would ONLY 'cling' to impenetrable cover - to make sure you dont end up getting stuck to a wooden fence and then get shot through it. If it's not possible for it to distinguish between penetrable/impenetrable cover, then scrap the whole idea.

It's possible, but it is neither trivial, nor thorough. Determining if it's impenetrable would require doing a full penetration trace, and to get a thorough answer, you'd have to do it in multiple places to increase the chances that you're actually covered. To get enough to be fully robust, you'd have to do a lot of traces. Even once you've done that, it'll only matter if your cover actually protects you from the angle the enemy is at (Run the full set of traces for every enemy in vicinity if you want to be sure of that), and it will only be checking for a generic penetration value, rather than what the enemy is actually using (Unless you want to both assume the player knows exactly what weapon every shooting enemy has, and you're willing to make it even more computationally expensive to check this for every enemy weapon).

Or you could rely on the player making that judgment himself.

So, technically possible. Realistically pointless, as it's either too simplistic to work well, or too computationally intensive to be worth the questionable results.

 

[Rabid Penguin]

Alright fine, you're probably right. You didn't have to make me feel like a failure though...

 

[Mekhazzio]

Contrary to popular believe, I am not Phoenix Dragon! (although someone else on this forums might be )

We get that a lot

 

[LugNut]

While I agree it'd be nice to have your character react in a more natural way, instead of it seeming you're about to have a seizure, how about simply ducking? Seems like the first thing most people would do when under fire, reduce their silhouette, crouch, go prone, hug the earth etc.

I hate the cover system as it is, it gets me killed all the time. Sucking me and my weapon around, I find it really annoying.

 

[Golf33]

I find the aim jerking to be a pretty good abstraction for flinching, so I don't mind at all.

I really think if TWI fixed the suppression traces so it always triggered on close-passing fire, and cut back the radius to somewhere between 1 and 3m, we'd be fine.

I really miss the anti-lag mutator. It was a brilliant piece of work that fixed all the penetration and suppression bugs and even added a whole additional layer of authenticity by modelling ricochets, velocity loss and angle change on penetration.

If only TWI had just fixed the memory manager and used anti-lag in its entirety...

Maybe they just couldn't fix the memory manager problem?

 

[Fulgenzio]

Even though it's not a comment on HOW should suppression work, I'd really like to see a reward in-game. Watching mechanics slightly change with people being forced to have more often the eventuality of going out of ammo with all the suppression they did would be great.

 

[Mekhazzio]

If only TWI had just fixed the memory manager and used anti-lag in its entirety...

This is straying a bit off-topic, but that's what discussion fora are for, so hey. The devil of it all is that I think the memory problem was related to cross-package asset use, and would've probably cured itself had it just been baked into the game. In any event, thanks to all the custom maps showing up, the package system has gotten a lot of improvement since then, so it may well not be a concern anymore.

Anyway, there's some legitimate software design reasons not to just absorb the mutator. They wanted to keep server-side hit detection available as an option, and my setup would've needed some editing to accommodate that. Putting both systems side by side would be an awful idea, as it's a terrible practice to have completely separate code paths duplicating the same tasks (RO2's codebase has way too much of this already...), and then, of course, there's naturally going to be strong reluctance to replace a heavily tested core system (wall penetration) with something completely new when there's no very compelling reason to do so. (I only did that because it was much quicker and easier to just replace the system rather than try to hook into the existing one...it's that tangled. I wasn't expecting TWI to ever consider CSHD for the base game, given how very strongly they've posted against the concept in the past, so compatibility with the existing code was not on my priority list at all.)

I've posted the Antilag source before, and if anyone wants to try to get it updated or expand upon it, they'd have my blessing. I'd been vaguely intending to roll it into some other design stuff for a big mechanics overhaul mod, but I'll never get around to that project while the ranking system's in the game; such a drastic mutator would never get whitelisted, and thus would never get played, so there's no reason to bother. And now Planetside 2 is out, anyway

 

[Proud_God]

So basically a lesson learned for TWI: spend more time on code quality/ review/ expandibility for your next game