| HOW DO VEHICLE RIDERS WORK? |
| Written by DOC |
| Tuesday, 15 December 2009 11:39 |
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A question from Gigerman, Barracks lurker: "I'm familiar enough with game-programming to know some of the "illusion" work that typically occurs in situations like this. When I, as a spawned infantryman, "ride" a rideable vehicle (FREX a truck), what exactly happens behind-the-scenes/under-the-hood to make it work? That is, what happens to the infantry avatar I was using, and where does the new vehicle-based avatar come from?" Ultimately, I hope the answer will provide some clues to the following questions: (a) Can the "capacity" of these vehicles be set to "realistic" limits? (b) Could a similar treatment be used for towed guns? (c) Can it be made possible to "shoot" or otherwise "operate" from this position? (d) If so, could AI AA/ATG or Tail Gun positions be given a similar treatment, to make them "man-able"?  DOC: Nothing happens to your infantry avatar, you don’t leave the game world and neither does it. All we do is allow it to attach to a specific point built into the art of the vehicle model when it is created and compiled. You can’t move because the game engine can’t do that with any degree of acceptable standards of play if movement were enabled. We experimented with that but it was awful. In order to “stick” with any degree of reliability you must not be able to move. Yeah, it sucks but we can’t help that right now.
a. The “capacity” of riders is totally dependent on included ride points for a vehicle, tanks and AFVs have limited ride points compared to trucks and transport planes because they aren’t “transports” like trucks and transport aircraft are. “Realistic” is often a perception that is impacted one way or another by code limitations in addition to game play considerations. Often we have to employ hugely abstracted differentials to create an effect or a gameplay choice that isn’t set according to “realism” in precise measure, but to create “realism” in terms of employment restrictions. Like trucks and transport aircraft not having the load limits for infantry like the AFVs do. They actually have to be handled quite differently in code, too. b. Restricting the number of towed guns a puller can pull is in no way related to ride point restrictions for infantry. Once cannot be used to control the other. If we were to start all over again we would probably do it quite differently. c. Being able to shoot from an attached ride point or a hitched tow point is not feasible at this time. In some respects it never should be (towed guns for example) and while we have experimented with infantry movement/firing while riding a truck it doesn’t work at all well with the current game engine. Maybe we’ll return to this at some point in the future but at the present time it’s a non starter. d. “Mannable” gun positions that a player not a part of the original crew can “jump into” are of interest to us and will probably appear at some point, but there’s actually quite a bit of base work to do before we could even attempt to make the current game engine do this. |
