Actionable feedback seems to've been coming in at a pretty diminishing rate lately in the EvenMatch thread, so perhaps offering a few thoughts here might balance things out. Seeing as commentary of a "bigger picture" scale (say, regarding balancing, innovation or other broader game design considerations) has on occasion produced unpredictable results before, I'll try to limit mine to more down-to-earth issues this time 'round.
- To get the obvious bit of snark out of the way first, "Helios" artillery, eh? Given the game's checkered past with custom content containing that particular term - and the person who chiefly had to deal with them, too - I gotta admit, this wasn't a vehicle naming choice I'd ever see coming from you
. Ah well, perhaps the ancient Sun god
was in line for a UT2004 rep makeover.
- Usually, quick vec customization through shifting of existing [stock] weapons around their seats is as simple and straightforward as one would imagine, but every so often the game will toss you a curve ball that requires some play testing in order to catch, such as with a usability problem. The Reverse SPMA driver's skymine weapon would seem to be such an exceptional case, as driving forward while firing it quickly proved a foolhardy proposition because the skymines fly almost as fast as the vec can move and, contrary to the passenger seat, setting them off
can, and will, damage the vehicle. Recommend a slight tweak, either in the direction of increasing the firing offset, or through bumping up the projectiles' speed a bit (vec does 840UU/sec on a flat, straight line and slightly faster downhill, while skymines fly at 900UU/sec).
- All 3 custom vehicles seem to share the same, translation-adjusted SPMA mesh. At first glance, pushing the x-axis' origin closer to the visible mass center of the vehicle seems like the sensible thing to do, but, for one thing, some brief stunt mutator spin jumps suggest the (X=100.0) might be a bit too much of an adjustment for the mesh (the rotation axis is now a bit off towards the passengers' cabin compared to the stock SPMA's cannon-proximal old weirdness), and, for another, this tweak necessitated repositioning all of the vecs' relative position-relevant attributes. This was likely a pretty tedious process, as exhibited by all 3 vecs' DamagedEffectOffset prop getting accidentally left unchanged and making the smoke/fire effects when the vecs are damaged appear to be coming out of
their front bumpers . Amusingly enough, when they do get destroyed, the fires will be positioned correctly within their stock wrecked meshes again.
Edit: This concludes the part of the post directly relevant to the 3 custom vehicles presented in this thread, so for anyone only interested in reviewing feedback on this package's contents, feel free to stop reading here. The remainder of this text, while still inevitably applicable to these SPMA variants, focuses on a breakdown of the stock SPMA's failings from a design and UX perspective, as well as on practical ways to improve upon it, and thereby any custom content derived from the subclassing of a hypothetically retooled version of it. It's some four times the size of the previous part of this post in length, so, in retrospect, a disclaimer seemed in order here to prevent any misconceptions. Well, here goes...
I'll close on a more general thought about the SPMA, brought on by all these 3 variants' disability to "shoot from the hip", so to speak, and instead necessitate camera deployment before they can lob their munitions - presumably a choice by design.
Look, we've all been playing this game practically from its release and we all pretty much know the SPMA has never been regarded as a winner, even among the bonus pack batch, by anyone knowing what they're talking about. Players rarely looked forward to using it when they'd come across one, and mappers even more rarely cared to add it to their maps as a result. IMO, all that can be traced back to Epic's hesitation to feature a functional
and efficient mobile artillery vehicle in their realtime, mechanized warfare simulation, a mean feat that many other devs were easily able to pull off in their own games, FPSes or otherwise, both before as well as after UT2004's time. Presumably, what with this being an FPS game, the devs figured that a "hard counters" paradigm, which one comes across in most RTSes and which makes fights between different types of vecs almost deterministic in their outcome, would be too hard a sell for a reflexes- and aim-focused player base like UT's that would likely demand any match-up between any two vecs to be possible to go either one's way as long as sufficient skill difference was involved.
The probable conclusion of the above reasoning by the devs was that the inherent advantages an artillery-type vehicle could leverage against common infantry (bombarding any exposed target across significant range with practical impunity through vision by proxy) were deemed to be too unfair to leave unaddressed, and thus obstacles by way of
bureaucracy numerous intermediate steps started to be placed throughout its operation to stifle its efficiency - so many, in the end, that they effectively made the vehicle pointless to use. To wit, one can find as many as 7 points where the SPMA's efficiency got diluted compared to most other ONS non-super vecs:
- must sacrifice mobility to shoot its proper munitions,
- must go through the intermediate step of setting up (and maintaining) a live skycam to target, which can be easily shot down and whose earthbound crosshairs need to be [re]positioned via the movement keys instead of the mouse,
- said skycam allows incoming AVRiLs to reroute back to the vehicle itself
- must offer any target textual warning of an incoming barrage
in advance (a standard that makes little sense outside of heat/radar-based missile detection systems, especially for infantry),
- cannot deliver a focused blast and has to spread its damage across multiple sub-munitions, which increase targets' survival chances,
- effective consequences to target(s) are almost evenly split between health reduction and momentum transfer
- must deal with kickback after each barrage, affecting its ability to deliver accurate subsequent strikes on the same target.
It's almost like the damn thing was designed by the Artillery Victims' Reparations Committee!
Meanwhile, and because good design ideas are like strong seeds in that eventually they find a way to take roots, the concept of a vehicle shooting projectiles across a [mid-range] parabolic trajectory to deliver damage over a sizable radius (essentially, an artillery unit) was recycled and resurfaced in the PPC and the bio tank independently, both of which are pretty popular vec choices in a number of maps, as well as viable combatants that can meaningfully influence matches' outcomes under a number of circumstances - unlike the SPMA. Reason for this difference is simple: while one can easily argue that both vehicles' balancing still leaves something to be desired when facing them on foot or in lesser stock vecs, both custom vecs are not burdened by so many restrictions, and so can actually be put to some good use.
Since both those alternative artillery implementation examples fall well within the "overpowered" side of the balancing spectrum as a result of the more ...liberal manner in which their creators tried to boost their usefulness (i.e., by messing with their armour, speed, projectile range and/or damage properties), one could surmise that other ways to improve the appeal of a hypothetical custom artillery-type vec in ONS, without turning them into the unstoppable monsters Epic always feared they'd prove to be, might be found simply by alleviating some of the hassle introduced by the aforementioned restrictions, and it's there where I'd like to turn to in the final and, hopefully, more practical part of this rant.
Doing away with the immobility factor looks like a non-starter for this thread, as it seems to've been intentionally ingrained in all 3 of these SPMA variants by way of the artillery turrets having been assigned to each vec's passenger seat (but also because it's pretty much an expected and accepted tradeoff staple of any artillery vec, along with cardboard-grade armour), so let's skip that. Swapping the sub-munitions with a singe projectile that causes a more focused blast is also a pretty easy thing to do (and implemented already in both custom vec examples discussed above), which would also cause much more grief to any such artillery vec's victims, so best leave that as an obvious implementation subject that merits little theoretical analysis. The text warning is just silly and would likely be among the first "features" to be be done away with, I reckon, should any competent creator try their hand at making a decent SPMA variant, as Wormbo's aiming for here. Ditto for the momentum kickback, which has always come across as pretty much the most on-the-nose weight added on the SPMA's back. This just leaves us with the skycam trio of hurdles, which is where I've long felt like the age-old introductory infomercial plea perfectly encapsulates the current situation: there
has to be a better way!
Now, I got the vague notion that some of what I'm about to say here I might've mentioned elsewhere before in this msg. board, so if that is indeed the case, apologies for any repetition; even so, this part is meant to provide a more detailed take on an alternative, skycam-free approach to SPMA targeting functionality, hopefully making it more useful over any previous attempt.
Breaking it down, [true] "artillery mode" targeting for the SPMA (as in, not shooting from the hip) consists of 3 gameplay components for the user: the skycam, with all its positional and maintenance finicking, the targeting st.mesh crosshairs on the ground (already greatly improved by Wormbo in terms of aiming with the mouse, and world geometry normal-based reorientation), and the trajectory path visualization that Wormbo has also helpfully added to the mix. The latter two need not change as their contributions are purely beneficial to the player's efforts, so what would only need be substituted to improve the last dodgy part of the SPMA experience is a way to provide the same level (or similar) of positioning and viewing granularity that the skycam offers, but without all the extra baggage this separate actor burdens players with. After having mulled it over for quite awhile, the best solution I've settled to involves a simple reversal of the standard third person adjustable camera distance built into the game's vehicle class, that could be toggled through a simple alt-fire.
Put simply, a typical usage scenario of this proposal would include a player sitting in this modified SPMA and being in control of the artillery turret as usual, either driving around or stationary as a passenger (as in ReverseSPMA designs). As previously, they'd be able to modify their vehiclecam's distance by scrolling up or down their mouse wheel and look around wherever they'd want by moving the mouse around, but as soon as they'd alt-fire, the camera would lunge a bit forward and would now be able to move back n' forth via the same mouse scrolling mechanic, still looking around wherever the player would like, but on a linear path/track
ahead and above of the vehicle as defined by the turret's orientation at the alt-fire moment, and in (much) wider steps up to a maximum range of, say, some 6000UUs. For comparison, some tests I ran, firing at a ~45° angle and deploying at the skycam's highest point, produced a distance of 8000-8400UUs, while the vehiclecam's distance behind the vec can vary between 200 and 1500UUs and shift between 13 steps. Aside from the, let's call it, targetcam's track of movement (although no longer a separate actor), the same rules that exist for the third person vehiclecam would apply to this one too in terms of not allowing world geometry or other actors to get between it and the vehicle, and so forcing it to move to the side of any such interfering obstacles that's closest to the vehicle. Aim while in targetcam mode would be performed simply by looking around with the mouse, and, beyond that, the relevant part of the current, Wormbo-improved skycam code would still handle the placing of the targeting st.mesh reticle wherever on the world the targetcam would be aiming, the drawing of the projectile's derived parabolic trajectory as well as the proper colouring of both based on the validity of the target area as before. Lastly, should the player in targetcam mode not like the current linear track their targetcam's movement is locked at, all they'd need to do is quickly alt-fire to return to vehiclecam/shoot-from-the-hip mode, look towards a more desirable direction with their artillery turret and alt-fire again - quick, intuitive and effective. For a (hopefully) more representative way to convey all this, here's an illustration of the concept:
- Operation #BringDownSkycam!
- alternate_spma_targeting_idea_by_peg.png (41.33 KiB) Viewed 14719 times
Aaaand that's all there is to it.
You know, as a player still active in and familiar with the ONS gametype, it just strikes me as such a damn shame that every other vehicle in the same bonus pack as the SPMA - namely the Cicada and the Paladin, as well as many of each of their custom variants - have managed to find a unique and useful enough role to fill in the wider vehicular bestiary, and a (more or less) faithful audience to boot because of that. Yet the SPMA and nearly every concept derived from its seemingly accursed class hierarchy continue to flounder, frustrate players and contribute little to nothing in terms of gameplay diversity, all because of their progenitor's flawed "legacy" and by-design bad genes. Hell, even when Wormbo pointed his dev expertise at tackling this, I found it quite telling that the end result of his attempts still left the (revised) SPMA's human controllers disadvantaged compared to their AI counterparts (helped by WVArtilleryTurretSupport), albeit less than before thanks to his aiming refinements.
To be perfectly honest, I still don't know that this vehicle is truly redeemable, or whether after putting even more work into it people might actually find it useful enough to start picking more frequently. What I do know though is that with this pack of 3 variants released and making SPMA-related discussions topical again, if there's a chance to give one final, serious push towards respectability for this crummy, old Big Bertha on wheels, this might as well be it. I've said my (ludicrously long) piece, but I'd invite anyone else interested in working towards that same goal to share any other improvement ideas or approaches they might have now and see if all together we can't push this all the way to the finish line, something Epic opted out of all those years ago. So... whacha got?
