Hello,

Over the past few weeks, I've been playing more and more and have noticed some issues that I have yet to see be brought up in the forums.

1. Fighting Behind Buildings - This issue is really important because it effects gameplay so much. The issue is when fighting behind buildings (when your character or your target is occluded), your cursor has to be dead on with the target or else your aiming is off because the game thinks you're aiming on top of the building. The general solution to this is to introduce a free-rotational camera but as this is not ideal, we must think of another solution. The general consensus is to introduce a slight aim helper when aiming behind buildings like a sticky aim or something. I know this may not be the best idea so please discuss below. Original post here http://www.modulaatio.com/runningwithrifles/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=544&p=3325&hilit=occlusion#p3325.

2. Silent Arty - This is simply the hiding of artillery calling from the other team. I'm fairly sure when soldiers call artillery on each other, the bombee does not know about it until it is too late. Perhaps a sound effect of sorts to give a slight warning about incoming artillery (whistles). Also, perhaps a more realistic rendition of artillery where the shells fall at different times rather than all at once?

3. M24-A2 Inaccuracy - While the M24 is supposed to be able to hit pretty much any stationary target if you are stationary, I've noticed a few cases where the accuracy completely fails. The biggest issue for me is when the target is prone and on level ground with you. I can understand missing SOME of the shots but I have yet to be able to peg a prone soldier with the sniper ever. The second biggest issue for me are people that are standing behind a waist high wall. Given that about a third of their body is exposed, I should be able to line a up a clean shot. However, the shot is always luck and will hit about 10% of the time. Now note that when all of these shots are taken, I am stationary, usually crouched or prone, and the line of sight indicator is green and hovers over the target.


Feel free to discuss any of the issues I have listed above.


ComJak

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For 1, I wouldn't actually call it aim helper what I'm going to try next, which is tweaking the logic about deciding if the player intended to shoot on the roof or on the ground/wall behind it when not aiming at a soldier. Now it always defaults to roof as that is what the ray from the cursor will hit first, which is very bad in cases where you can't even shoot at that particular position on the roof. I actually expect it to help a lot.

2, there could be ways to check if the strike requesting soldier is not in any enemy soldier's line of sight and perhaps use that to decide whether the strike request is shown to everyone, but I kind of like it the way it is. The enemy anyway can't know where exactly the shells are dropping, the requester might've anticipated where the enemies will evade after they get to see the strike request. I guess the strike would become too much of a sure hit if this would be changed, but obviously I can't tell for sure.

About strike times, the current mortar strike is supposed to be a single round from 8-mortar group, they launch their shells roughly at the same time, hence they drop almost the same time. Basically, it could be possible to order e.g. a 3-round strike, with 24 shells, where the first round would hit the target almost at the same time, while the rest of the shells would come down as soon as each mortar gets their shells delivered, causing more variation in times.

That's a lot of shells though.. how to balance it? The current rate of strikes you get seems pretty ok, it's not too rare but not too frequent either.

Is 3 based on online or offline gaming? In online you might not get what you see. Also, prone seems to be only 93% accurate, not 100%. If you're shooting from far off, your spread is obviously higher. By the sound of frustration, I take it you're shooting quite close by even?

I'm not sure if this should really affect this issue, but it's dealing with stuff near it so I'm going to explain what's happening when aiming at a soldier target. If you aim directly on the soldier, so that any of his "bones" is under your crosshair, a bone becomes the shooting target. So, if you aim at head, you try to shoot at his head position, if you aim at foot, you try to shoot at foot level position. If your crosshair doesn't hit a specific bone, but your targeting is close enough to hit a bounding box around the target, your aim gets a little help and you basically target the soldier's center then. The little aiming visual helper should reflect this logic. The positions are taken from the soldier's current state, so whether the enemy is standing or prone, it should work.

Another thing that came to my mind is ballistics. A shot bullet drops height by gravity, but the line of sight helper doesn't take that into account and neither does the firing soldier.

EDIT: FALSE INFO: Also, there might be a bug somewhere, as didn't someone say that if you set the weapon muzzle velocity to something enormously huge, the bullets get fired up to the sky?

Hello pasik,

Your solution to 1 sounds quite reasonable to me. I'm interested to see how well it works.

About 2, the line of sight checker would also be quite welcome as you could have teammates relay the incoming artillery down the line as they would in real life if that happened. I just never seem to hit any human players with my arty because once they see the calling of the arty, they run all over the place to hide. What about any AI players in the line of sight of the arty caller says something like "INCOMING!" while human players see the same chat box as now. About the arty timing, I guess I was just thinking about old world war 2 methods of bombing something where arty strikes come in at random intervals rather than all at the same instance. I actually have no idea what modern artillery is capable of .

3 is based on both online and offline gaming. I've taken these shots from about half the screen length away (super close in battle standards) and had the same results. However, given that the bullet always falls short and you said that bullet drop is actually implemented (I had no idea), this seems to make sense when analyzing the aiming stuff you talked about. I think there still needs to be a solution to this because sniping a prone, immobile target should be fairly easy with a good sniper rifle and good position. (I'm talking mostly about AI mg)


ComJak

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I think the ballistics feature isn't awfully important nowadays as the bullets have different lethality and decay factors, so I might as well remove it or reduce the gravitational impact on bullets a great deal.

Or if that doesn't fit, it won't be awfully difficult to predict the ballistic curve so that the bullet would be fired a little upwards to fall on the intended target.

RWR mortar support is obviously a highly simplified model of mortar support in general. I'm sure in real life even the mortar strikes would have longer duration, longer area and more shells. One thing I learned during my military service 10 years ago, was that a strike should start with a synchronized shot from all the mortars in the "group", continue individually with the rest of the shots shooting as soon as possible, and end the strike with another synchronized last shots, if they would be using more shells than what it takes to shoot the first round. Of course there are all sorts of variations with this stuff for what you are trying to achieve with the strike.

Also, part of the job are the fire observation tasks where you need to have someone seeing the strikes, at least if you don't have other modern equipment telling the facts. You'd start by requesting one round, call in corrections for it, and then request fire for effect, as an example.

Artillery as such is another topic from mortars really. With artillery my guess is we'd be talking about 100m x 100m areas minimum, that's roughly 2x2 blocks in the RWR map grid, with a huge amount of shells falling on enemies for like at least a minute. You could take a whole base with one that kind of strike in RWR - I don't immediately see where you'd need that kind of power in RWR while keeping it balanced.

:O you don't see how I could use the power of exterminating a whole 2x2 grid?! blasphemy haha

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ComJak's house... stay out of it