Mc's, Dc's And Oc's!?

jamespsx · November 2003

ok here's the deal... as i dont have the internet at the moment i have a lot more time to relise and study the physics of ns... and iv noticed that if u put a OC near the 'energy resupply' zone of a MC, it will increase the rate of fire of the OC a bit... and (uncomfirmed) increase the rate of healing of the DC by a small fraction...

so can anyone confirm this or is my brain getting delayed messages again? <img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/biggrin.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='biggrin.gif'>

Stoneburg · November 2003

Was in testing but was removed. Don't know how you could have "noticed" it unless you willed it into happening. <img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/wow.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='wow.gif'>

jamespsx · November 2003

no im sure i was right, i even got a stopwatch out and timed it as it killed me as a marine... i then compared it and it was ever so slightly faster... still faster in my eyes... maybe it because i had to re-install ns to v1. whatever

Keyser · November 2003

No, movement chambers don't increase healing rate of DCs or the attack rate of OCs. I've noticed the rate in which an offense chamber fires is a bit random, sometimes it will shoot 3 spikes in quick succession, and sometimes it fires much slower. You might have gotten lucky and saw it fire quickly. But it's common knowledge that MCs do NOT increase the firing rate of OCs.

Wheeee · November 2003

</span><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> (Keyser59 @ Nov 20 2003, 03:38 PM)</td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'> No, movement chambers don't increase healing rate of DCs or the attack rate of OCs. I've noticed the rate in which an offense chamber fires is a bit random, sometimes it will shoot 3 spikes in quick succession, and sometimes it fires much slower. You might have gotten lucky and saw it fire quickly. But it's common knowledge that MCs do NOT increase the firing rate of OCs.  </td></tr></table><span class='postcolor'> 
Basically what I've noticed is that OC's have the same sort of rotation pattern as a marine turret, that is to say if it isn't "facing" you, it won't fire. So you can jump over an OC, and it won't fire at you again for a couple of seconds. if you're good enough, sometimes you can sit on top of an OC knifing it down without taking a single shot by strafing side to side on top of it.

However, if it's locked on to you it shoots at a constant rate.

Uzguz · November 2003

The MC boosting was left in the original 2.0 but must have been removed in future versions. However, it <i>did</i> survive pre-release testing. You can test it yourself if you haven't installed any server patches (and thus would host the original 2.0).

BugBrain · November 2003

Why was this taken out? I can't see this being overpowered. It certainly would not be worse than OC/DC combo, would it?

Doobie_Dan · November 2003

Maybe not, but imagine an OC/DC/MC combo... WoL's don't need to be that powerful.

Wheeee · November 2003

I think the MC boost to OC's would be a nice way to counter that stupid hop-up-and-down-to-avoid-OC-fire thing.

a_civilian · November 2003

</span><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> (Wheeee @ Nov 21 2003, 02:52 PM)</td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'>I think the MC boost to OC's would be a nice way to counter that stupid hop-up-and-down-to-avoid-OC-fire thing.</td></tr></table><span class='postcolor'>
Increased rate of fire wouldn't actually counter that tactic though. Although it <i>would</i> increase the offense chamber's effectiveness against jumping marines, it would increase by an equal factor its effectiveness against non-jumping marines.

Warrior · November 2003

MCs dont increase ROF, was removed before 2.0 was released to the public. Who cares if u can avoid OC fire by jumping, theres so many more ways to take them down by your self. Ocs are not to be used as the drop and forget defence. MCs increasing the ROF wouldnt make them more effective, the WOL would cost more and die the same speed. OCs are only useful for alerting the aliens.

a_civilian · November 2003

</span><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> (Warrior @ Nov 21 2003, 06:47 PM)</td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'>Who cares if u can avoid OC fire by jumping, theres so many more ways to take them down by your self.</td></tr></table><span class='postcolor'>
Jumping is by far the most effective of the methods, as I have explained <a href='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/index.php?act=ST&f=20&t=53905' target='_blank'>here</a>. It really is ridiculously effective.

Wheeee · November 2003

Well, if you sped up the rate of OC firing, it would have much more of an impact on the crouch-hopping marine than the non-crouch-hopping marine. The crouch-hopping marine would probably take several times the amount of damage he would have previously, whereas the non-dodging marine would only take the same damage in a slightly shorter amount of time.

a_civilian · November 2003

</span><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> (Wheeee @ Nov 21 2003, 09:55 PM)</td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'>Well, if you sped up the rate of OC firing, it would have much more of an impact on the crouch-hopping marine than the non-crouch-hopping marine. The crouch-hopping marine would probably take several times the amount of damage he would have previously, whereas the non-dodging marine would only take the same damage in a slightly shorter amount of time.</td></tr></table><span class='postcolor'>
Why is that? What led you to conclude that?

It seems to me that it would affect jumping and non-jumping marines equally. When a marine is crouch-jumping to dodge spikes from an offense chamber, there are two very short windows of vulnerability in which a spike fired by the offense chamber will hit the marine. One is when the marine is at the peak of his jump, and the other is when he's on the ground in between jumps. If, for instance, we double the offense chamber's rate of fire, then logically the number of spikes that are fired during the windows of vulnerability in any given amount of time will also double. Therefore, the offense chamber's overall effectiveness against crouch-jumping marines will double. Also, since a doubled rate of fire means twice as many spikes will be fired at the non-jumping marine in any given amount of time, twice as many spikes should hit him in that same amount of time. Thus, its overall effectiveness against non-jumping marines doubles as well. Because doubling its rate of fire will double the offense chamber's effectiveness against jumping marines and against non-jumping marines, it will affect both equally.

Am I missing something?

Wheeee · November 2003

yeah. Fractional increases in OC firing rate screw up your timing. Especially if the speed increased cumulatively with different MC's. To the non-dodging marine, he'll take 100% of the hits anyway. But if you don't time your jumping right, you start taking more like 40-50% of the shots as opposed to like 10%.

a_civilian · November 2003

Timing? I was not aware that any timing was necessary. I have never timed my jumps. I have always jumped as soon as I hit the ground, and the tactic has worked fine for me. I don't believe timing is needed.

Wheeee · November 2003

right, and if you keep doing that the increased rate of fire of the OC will cause it to hit you more.
See it this way.
</span><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>CODE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='CODE'>
what happens now:
_____--> _____---->
OC ---- you(jumping) OC __ OC ---- you
|| || ---__ you ||
-->
what happens when the OC starts firing faster:
____---> ____---->
OC --- you (jumping) OC ______ OC ------ you
|| || you (hit) ||

</td></tr></table><span class='postcolor'>
See what I mean? Right now you can dodge the OC things because your jump timing coincides with the timing of the OC firing. You're only vulnerable at the top of your jump and at the bottom. This time probably on the whole makes up around a third of the time you spend in the air, but right now the OC firing rate makes it so that it targets you only while you are on the rising or falling part of jumping with a slow rate of change ("acquisition time" if you will). If you were to increase the firing rate by a non-integral amount, the rate of acquisition becomes much quicker.
Think about it this way, your jumping is kind of like a sinusoidal carrier wave. The OC firing rate is like a square wave/pulse interference with your signal (and we want this signal to destructively interfere with the carrier -> analog to the spike hitting you). Right now, the interference isn't too bad because it comes at places where it constructively interferes with the carrier (we don't care about amplitude right now, we're just sending binary digital signal), and the interference frequency matches the carrier's fairly well. Since we always have both signals start out in phase with each other, it takes a long time for the interfering pulses to actually destructively interfere with our carrier wave (an analogy to how it takes a long for the OC to track you at the top or bottom of your jump and actually hit you).
Now, since our interference frequency matches our carrier frequency well, you could ask why we don't just phase-delay the interference signal. The problem is, you can delay the carrier frequency at will too, and then we're just back at square one (i.e., if we could delay the OC firing by a quarter of a jump, most of the OC spikes will hit you. however, this doesn't happen because the second the OC "sees" you, it starts firing, and you can start jumping whenever you want so the OC will never be able to track you).
However, if we were to change the interference signal to have a different frequency (such that the period is not an integral submultiple or a scalar multiple of the carrier), we will be able to interfere much more with the carrier than currently. Although this isn't an ideal situation (ideally we would take real-time samples of the signal and adaptively modulate our interference signal, but we can't do that here). This is the best we can do, and we can do it so well because we can't low-pass filter the interference. (basically this means that although we should have the OC AI have a "memory" of how we move and adapt its firing pattern to that, it's hard to code so we have to disregard it. The next best option is to make it fire randomly or at a frequency that is different than you are able to jump).

Anyway, too much studying electrical engineering is getting to my head.
I don't really have any math to back me up since I don't have the OC tracking equations (although it's probably something along the lines of delta-x = v(current)*(distance-from OC/speed of spike) + x(current), delta-y = v(current) * (distance-from-OC/speed of spike) + y(current).

I can easily seeing this sort of "jamming" making the OC able to hit you every 1 in 5 or 1 in 6 spikes instead of every 1 in 10 or 12, just with a minor increase in OC fire rate (like, 10-25%). That's a 200% increase in damage you take while jumping, and while you're like "yeah, it's still only 1 spike every five shots," it's quite a big difference from the guy who doesn't dodge, who only gets 10-25% more damage.

a_civilian · November 2003

I'm not so sure that's true, that the rate of jump and the rate of fire are nearly equivalent, and that the windows of vulnerability are actually quite large. If it were true, then if one spike were to hit a crouch-jumping marine, many subsequent spikes would also hit, assuming that the marine continues to jump, because the rate of fire would now coincide with one of the windows of vulnerability. I have not observed that to be true. When I am using the tactic against a single offense chamber, a single spike will occasionally hit me, but even if I continue jumping without interruption, no subsequent spikes will hit.

A_Rabid_Squirrel · November 2003

What if the projectile speed was increased? I'm not sure if the NS 2.xx OC's are like the NS 1.04 lerk spikes (instant hit weapons with non-instant graphics) or if the spike is a projectile. If they are actual projectiles, increasing the speed that they travel would mean less time for the spike to reach the marine, and less of an arc to be covered the hopping marine. The overall damage against a stationary marine is unchanged, but marines crouch hopping would be able to avoid fewer spikes. If OC's are hitscan weapons increasing the tracking speed would allow more accurate shot placement.

d0omie · December 2003

This isn't the "OCs are less accurate if you are moving quickly" script is it? When you jump you are moving fast...?

Mc's, Dc's And Oc's!?

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