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"Most" desired feature for a next paid upgrade?


Grenny

Would you prefer new tanks or the option to fire personal weapons(esp AT weapons) with the next upgarde  

58 members have voted

  1. 1. Would you prefer new tanks or the option to fire personal weapons(esp AT weapons) with the next upgarde

    • I rather have a few more new tanks/IFV then more infantry options
      35
    • Yes, I'd skip on tank/IFv models in favour of having useable AT weapons ...and maybe rifles
      23


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31 minutes ago, Ssnake said:

It's not something that we'll touch with version 4.x

...Yes, I know the poll options I've made are a bit of a false dichotomy

 

But IMO there is currently a rather huge imbalance in gaming...for which I think better control over the grunts would be an equalizing factor.

And I know I'm too emotional here, but there have been many in game occasions where OPFOR simply drives a platoon of tanks directly trough the positions of an infantry platoon, and nothing happens but troops going to a kneel and then waiting for better weather.

 

Off course this is really a rather complex issue that will need a lot of work in the whole system.

- terrain detail for better cover and movement options

- fighting positions/trenches

- spotting routines of AI controlled units

- cammo and concealment(day sight, non TIS equiped units at least) (for example, camoflaged infantry(and vehicles for that matter) in front of a fitting backround should be harder to spot for AI too)

- mobility modelling in the forsted areas including restrictions in spotting and engaging targets

 

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On 3/5/2021 at 9:12 AM, Grenny said:

Adding barrel collision would be an option.

But my feeling is that this might be a bigger can of worms then I imagine...

yeah, wouldn't barrel collison be great.. i mean, it's 2021 after all.

but it's not possible with steel beasts. you need multiple things that steel beasts lack. 

basic physics, collision meshes for each vehicle, and some way for the AI to not break the guns. 

basic physics is a massive can of worms, that will inevitably break SB.  collision meshes for each vehicle is a huge undertaking. 

a stop gap solution tho.. 

You could fake it with a ray intersect test, where you set the rays length for each vehicle. 

then if the "barrel ray" intersects a building, one of two things could happend. 

 

for a player vehicle, you could damage the gun if it smacks into something, like a tree or building, if the velocity is high enough.

for lower velocity, and AI vehicles, it would be better to perhaps just stop the gun from moving. 

the way to do this would be to create a point at the point of intersection, then draw a line from the turret center to this intersection point. 

then set turret rotation to the direction of this line. rotating the turret the opposite direction of the direction that caused the intersection 

would "free" the turret movement, until the barrel again intersects something. 

this should work for everything. however since some buildings has imperfect collision meshes, you'd see some weird stuff like barrels being caught in the

area of roof overhang. 

 

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2 hours ago, dejawolf said:

yeah, wouldn't barrel collison be great.. i mean, it's 2021 after all.

but it's not possible with steel beasts. you need multiple things that steel beasts lack. 

basic physics, collision meshes for each vehicle, and some way for the AI to not break the guns. 

basic physics is a massive can of worms, that will inevitably break SB.  collision meshes for each vehicle is a huge undertaking. 

a stop gap solution tho.. 

You could fake it with a ray intersect test, where you set the rays length for each vehicle. 

then if the "barrel ray" intersects a building, one of two things could happend. 

 

for a player vehicle, you could damage the gun if it smacks into something, like a tree or building, if the velocity is high enough.

for lower velocity, and AI vehicles, it would be better to perhaps just stop the gun from moving. 

the way to do this would be to create a point at the point of intersection, then draw a line from the turret center to this intersection point. 

then set turret rotation to the direction of this line. rotating the turret the opposite direction of the direction that caused the intersection 

would "free" the turret movement, until the barrel again intersects something. 

this should work for everything. however since some buildings has imperfect collision meshes, you'd see some weird stuff like barrels being caught in the

area of roof overhang. 

 

 

Then do that all over again for the turret bustle (the bit at the rear of the turret) that in many cases overhangs too.

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On 3/1/2021 at 10:23 PM, Ssnake said:

I'm not sure what this is about, TBH. The smallest coin of this game is the weapons team/half squad, and the training audience as far as SB Pro as a training tool is concerned are junior leaders of any army branch as well as AFV crews. From that follows that if we can't get the infantry AI good enough to handle itself reasonably well all by its own, we have to provide the means to a player in the infantry squad leader position to resolve possible deficits in  areas such as target prioritization personally where needed.

 

Since I took control of development we added a ton of infantry related improvements, starting with the F1 view unified command interface for mech platoons. Please compare infantry AI between version 3.0 and 4.2 and tell me with a straight face that there are no improvements. Some here make it seem as if we're neglecting infantry when in fact since 2015 I've invested about 20% of our development effort to pathfinding alone.

 

Given that the lowest command level of Steel Beasts Pro is the squad/team leader level I have always maintained that, eventually, I'd like to see all squad heavy weapons available for direct human access. ATGMs first, then MGs and 40mm AGL; what's now left to do are RPGs (working on it, as a prominent poster in this thread bloody well knows).

It's not quite so easy to implement because of limitations in the legacy code, like, RPGs not actually having any ballistic behavior at all for starters. So we need to address that first, and that's rocket science, literally.

 

What Steel Beasts Pro not is, is being a first person shooter, and I'm against turning into one because of the highly unfavorable effort-to-reward ratio. Also, we're having a bit more on our hands than to focus the team's attention exclusively on a single issue. You know that I hate discussing our development plans because they are subject to change, but I can't say that I'm particularly motivated by the bad vibes that some here seem to like to project. If you want to focus on the negative, I can't stop you. But at the least I'd like to see some recognition that infantry has received a vastly disproportionate amount of attention compared to what our army customers use SB Pro for. Maybe we're not making progress fast enough for your tastes, but at least there's a clearly recognizable direction of our development and it'd be nice if that was recognized, at least on occasion.

I appreciate this. I have followed SB for more than a decade and the improvements to infantry combat are massive. I wrote an article about it in Eurogamer 10 years ago where I discussed the infantry problem at length, but playing SB today, it has largely been adressed. Well done!

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6 hours ago, ChrisWerb said:

Most desired (and hopefully simple to implement) single feature would simply be to be able to specify more than one type of AT weapon per squad/section and to specify how many each soldier gets rather than having just the squad leader shoot. 

It's not the same, but you can split a squad and assign different AT weapons for each section.

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8 hours ago, stormrider_sp said:

It's not the same, but you can split a squad and assign different AT weapons for each section

I was about to suggest something similar.

 

Adding vehicle a two teams that are splitted However... Downside is that such splitted team no longer works nicely with vehicle.   Also, splitting AFV team isn't possible so it would need to have them attached manually to vehicle after deleting existing teams.

 

And as said..  it causes a lot of problems in how to control infantry later on. As bottom left corner icons no longer work as intended.  Commanding from Map works just fine though. 

 

But with that.. you can have two AT weapons within one team. And split team to two .. giving potentially more firepower...  Without this you can have only 1 team weapon and with this cheat you can have two .  But  As said  it causes a lot of problems and i do not recommend it.  On contrary.. i recommend avoiding doing what i just told, as theres too many problems especially if attached to vehicle. And infantry as i understand wasn't meant to work like that in Steelbeast. 

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3 hours ago, Lumituisku said:

I was about to suggest something similar.

 

Adding vehicle a two teams that are splitted However... Downside is that such splitted team no longer works nicely with vehicle.   Also, splitting AFV team isn't possible so it would need to have them attached manually to vehicle after deleting existing teams.

 

And as said..  it causes a lot of problems in how to control infantry later on. As bottom left corner icons no longer work as intended.  Commanding from Map works just fine though. 

 

But with that.. you can have two AT weapons within one team. And split team to two .. giving potentially more firepower...  Without this you can have only 1 team weapon and with this cheat you can have two .  But  As said  it causes a lot of problems and i do not recommend it.  On contrary.. i recommend avoiding doing what i just told, as theres too many problems especially if attached to vehicle. And infantry as i understand wasn't meant to work like that in Steelbeast. 

What you can do also, although not perfect and quite cumbersome, is to delete all infantry assigned to a vehicle and add a new single full group to each. Then split this group into 2 or more and reset one or more of them to, say, a missile team. Once in-game, you can re-attach this missile team to his once parent rifle team or whatever infantry type it was.

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7 hours ago, Lumituisku said:

But with that.. you can have two AT weapons within one team. And split team to two .. giving potentially more firepower...  Without this you can have only 1 team weapon and with this cheat you can have two .  But  As said  it causes a lot of problems and i do not recommend it.  On contrary.. i recommend avoiding doing what i just told, as theres too many problems especially if attached to vehicle. And infantry as i understand wasn't meant to work like that in Steelbeast. 

 

Of course you then get a very customised Infantry team.

 

Forget about scouting, clearing ground, defending, etc. if all you have are ATGM teams and no rifles, MGs, GLAs, etc.

 

But if you just want a specialised grouping for one job ...

 

Edited by Gibsonm
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Late in the game for demands maybe but.... I wouldn't mind a couple of things. Hopefully simple. 
In a battle position to have one to three markers so that your tank can move in a hull down position and move to the next eliminating the need to readjust.
Being able to speed up time in certain repairs like tracks if another unit came to help that are not engineers.  Yeah I know , inspired by war thunder ...
For those with dual screen, would like the map displayed on the second screen without having to use two accounts when playing online.
Other than that , a bit more improved AI and that can be a large demand . 

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2 hours ago, Zaphod said:

Being able to speed up time in certain repairs like tracks if another unit came to help that are not engineers.

 

I'd probably suggest that relying on people who blow stuff up is not the ideal way to reduce repair time. :)

 

Mechanics (REME, RAEME, RCEME, etc), yes, Military Engineers (RE, RAE, RCE), no.

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10 hours ago, stormrider_sp said:

What you can do also, although not perfect and quite cumbersome, is to delete all infantry assigned to a vehicle and add a new single full group to each. Then split this group into 2 or more and reset one or more of them to, say, a missile team. Once in-game, you can re-attach this missile team to his once parent rifle team or whatever infantry type it was.

 

6 hours ago, Ssnake said:

I'm relatively confident you can do that even in the Mission Editor already, (and to save the result as a new force template, so you don't have to go through the motions again and again).

 

All this is what I actually meant.   And I stick to what I said.   Deleting old AFV teams A and B, and replacing those with teams that can be splitted  causes lot of funny commanding problems. Especially if commanding from unit icons.  Also selecting section of splitted team is difficult and guiding for example fires as PLT leader no longer works.    Though, things should work just fine from map.   

 

And that way you get Riffle team to carry  2 antitank weapons instead of on and have second team carry their light machinegun or something of sort.   

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The ability to control a tube launched AT missile like the AT-10/11 even the Bastion.

The soviets poured a lot of resources in to there development .

The AI is pretty lethal and accurate in game. 

But i wonder how a human player under the heat of battle would fair

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7 minutes ago, Ssnake said:

Given the wide variety of suggestions in here, I suppose we could merge it with the general wishlist thread.

Well, the original purpose of the thread is done.

With a majority of votes cast in favour of vehicles instead of improving the infantry.

As this discussion is moving more into the vehicle features and general wishlist direction, I think we can close this one down IOT avoid multiple "wishlist" threads

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5 hours ago, Grenny said:

With a majority of votes cast in favour of vehicles instead of improving the infantry.

Eh. It was a non-binding poll from "not eSim Games" with a meagre 14 vote lead. We'd be foolish to mistake that as a strong popular mandate for concentrating on vehicles alone.

 

eSim Games will continue to work on what's necessary.

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1 hour ago, Ssnake said:

Eh. It was a non-binding poll from "not eSim Games" with a meagre 14 vote lead. We'd be foolish to mistake that as a strong popular mandate for concentrating on vehicles alone.

 

eSim Games will continue to work on what's necessary.

🖖

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On 5/1/2021 at 9:24 PM, Ssnake said:

Eh. It was a non-binding poll from "not eSim Games" with a meagre 14 vote lead. We'd be foolish to mistake that as a strong popular mandate for concentrating on vehicles alone.

 

eSim Games will continue to work on what's necessary.

 

It's a bit more nuanced than that though, isn't it? Basically you have two kinds of work, or rather two kinds of deliverables - what the customer wants (or you think they or other customers will want) and the "labour of love" things that are created by devs in their own time plus volunteers. Any request for the former is pointless unless the request aligns with customer requests or your perception of your market's needs/desires. The latter is down to the good will of those concerned, but I suspect they will (quite rightly!) prioritise their own wish lists. Therefore I have no expectation that things I ask for will happen, but I am delighted when they do (APDS-T for the Luchs and BONUS/SMArt 155 rounds for example).

Edited by ChrisWerb
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On 3/5/2021 at 9:59 AM, Grenny said:

...Yes, I know the poll options I've made are a bit of a false dichotomy

 

But IMO there is currently a rather huge imbalance in gaming...for which I think better control over the grunts would be an equalizing factor.

And I know I'm too emotional here, but there have been many in game occasions where OPFOR simply drives a platoon of tanks directly trough the positions of an infantry platoon, and nothing happens but troops going to a kneel and then waiting for better weather.

 

Off course this is really a rather complex issue that will need a lot of work in the whole system.

- terrain detail for better cover and movement options

- fighting positions/trenches

- spotting routines of AI controlled units

- cammo and concealment(day sight, non TIS equiped units at least) (for example, camoflaged infantry(and vehicles for that matter) in front of a fitting backround should be harder to spot for AI too)

- mobility modelling in the forsted areas including restrictions in spotting and engaging targets

 

All of this really. Friends will know that I'm pretty much obsessed with the Swiss military 1946-89 and the Swiss were very infantry-centric in their approach to spatial defence. It would work so much better with all of the upgrades Grenny suggests. At the moment infantry are essentially often highly visible static targets for AFV gunners. Also the ability for infantry to displace under cover between alternate fighting positions and to lay mines in game and fell trees across tracks etc. would be great. I can't say that without thanking the devs for the great improvements already made. They're much appreciated!

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