Ssnake

Time acceleration doesn't help. Of course, then it'll take a lot longer...

Well, that was one of the better photos I took on a training day to which I was invited after leaving the army, so we took what we could get while, remember, we didn't have any kind of development budget whatsoever. Everything was paid for by private money. We formed companies only years later. In retrospect it was pretty crazy. But hey, it worked, so...

We're better than I thought, it seems.

Well, it was literally a "no budget" production. Then we advanced to a "shoestring budget", which was already a considerable improvement. These days we have about seven programmers working, three full-time artists, paid beta testers, and more. So I'd consider us as "still lean" but otherwise sufficiently funded for sustained operations. All this thanks to organic growth, and that thanks to your continued support. Yes, it is true that there once was a texture for, I believe, an Unimog truck (or a MAN KAT I, not sure which). It was planned to go into the final update but the artist couldn't finish certain model changes due to a wild story involving him helping out a neighbor moving house, a non-trivial amount of narcotics hidden in the furniture, a police raid on the moving van, extended pre-trial detention, ... at some point I gave up trying to keep tabs on what was going on. Another artist dropped out to become a professional spammer, yet another artist told other wild stories that I don't want to rehash. Let's just say that not every artist made it into the team. But, at least the Unimog eventually made it into SB Pro still (well, the ambulance variant is still pending).

No. There were of course of lot of ideas what else could be done, and much of that went later into SB Pro, but the biggest change that happened between the first demo version (or maybe even shortly before it) and the 1.0 release was the total make-over of the sounds. Neither Al nor I had realized how much of, literally, a game changer good sounds were until Volcano came along and showed us what was possible, and I think that the initial reactions from critics and players alike demonstrated that people took notice.

Right-click unit ... Options ... Status ... Blind (or impotent, if you like them to shoot back but do no harm)

Any specific reason why you removed the ammo from the Armatas, rather than simply setting them to Blind status?

No.

With brass casings, I suppose this is the equivalent to lap loading taken to the extreme, but it's not inherently unsafe. The advantage is that you don't have to unload the gun if the commander has a change of mind or the target disappears. That would strike me as the one significant advantage. It may also be a reflection on legal regulations in the Argentine Army. Maybe there is a general directive that the gun must not be loaded at any time except immediately before firing; in that case, that's what such a regulation will get you. Or unloading guns is forbidden, or made very uncomfortable ("to unload the gun, request form sheet 1893-C/2(III) in triplicate from range control, fill it out using CAPITALIZED LETTERS, and hand the white copy to range control, the pink one to ammunition handling, keep the green for your records, and file a gun unloading report no later than 0800 the next day with written testimony of the turret crew and their next of kin").

I don't remember anything specific, certainly not an unreleased expansion. Remember, up to 2009 Steel Beasts was the product of but a single programmer, and we had about only one or two artists at any given time, Volcano for sound, and then me for customer relations/tech support/beta testing etc.; imagine a lot of 16 hour days for a lot of people for quite some time. If we had had the time and energy to prepare an expansion, we would have released it. Almost nothing was ever wasted during that time. The exception are the menu backgrounds that I added to the video. We ultimately rejected them because they turned out to be too inflexible for a changed manu structure (note the "Map Editor" entry in the wrong font and without the embossing effect), or because there was no coherence in the art style (camo pattern for the main menu, render shots for some elements, a simulated CRT for the options, ...)

Verschleppen could also be translated as "dragging one's feet" or "delaying a process" (Verschleppungstaktik is even a viable legal strategy that was mastered by Big Tobacco as the most prominent case), but in this case it refers to the lateral vector component caused by one's own vehicle movement while firing the gun ... and the compensation thereof.

My 141% where honestly earned with random chance overlapping a dead and a live target, not by deliberately lining up a dozen vehicles behind each other, or using 3P or KETF rounds. I'm not going to risk the legend, however. It would probably require a lot of retries (although I'm confident that I could still do it, given the right circumstances.

I summarize this under "Backsteering" (negative feedback loop) even though that's slightly imprecise as the backsteering does a bit more than this; Verschleppungskorrektur alone is more like "lateral inertia vector compensation". (...and for once, German needs only 24 characters to describe a thing while the shorter English needs 35 - hah!)

Okay, I took what I could from what you sent and made that report #8074.

From what I'm seeing in the video, the lead isn't technically "acting up" but behaving as designed; maybe that design is slightly wrong if the M1A2 SEP received a fire control system upgrade to include the equivalent of backsteering (as your email suggests), but given a 1.5 seconds sampling duration, stopping the vehicle from full speed within that sample duration must deliver the kind of deviations observed (except maybe that one freak shot in the middle of the video). Say you have a sample rate of 5Hz, a sample duration of 1.5 seconds, you'll get 8 samples where the own vehicle speed enters the ballistic computations like this (I'm going by reducing energy from the moving vehicle at a constant rate, not velocity), Sample 1: 40.0 kph Sample 2: 37.4 kph Sample 3: 34.6 kph Sample 4: 31.6 kph Sample 5: 28.3 kph Sample 6: 24.4 kph Sample 7: 20.0 kph Sample 8: 14.1 kph Sample 9: 0.0 kph Average of samples 1...8 = 230.4 : 8 = 28.8 kph. This assumes the own platform comes to a full stop just before the 9th sample displaces Sample 1 in the calculation of the moving average) when you fire. Even with backsteering added to increase overall precision, as long as you build a moving average of 1.5 seconds there will always be a 1.5 seconds delay before the moving average is clear of non-zero velocity movement (and thus of turret angular motion to compensate for it since, technically, we're measuring samples of the turret turn rate here; I used velocities for simplicity, just to illustrate the principle). With samples 10+ all being zero, of course the calculated average quickly drops off to 23.8 kph, 19.1, 14.8, 10.9, 7.3, 4.3, 1.8, 0, 0, 0, ... Now, if the sample duration were not to be 1.5 seconds, or if the vehicle velocity isn't part of a moving average calculation, the picture changes of course. That's why I'm asking for such details.