I do think there is some room for improvement on the marines jumping animations. My main complaint is that it looks like the marine just picks his feet up and floats halfway across the room backwards while facing you. Even if marines could jump like Mario, it would still look more "realistic" than what we have going on now.
Pro tip - don't be an Ankle biting skulk. Look up and aim for the chest. If you aim at the rinse foot he might jump and make you miss entirely
If we want NS2 to be more newbie friendly without jeopardizing the depth and high skill ceiling this is exactly the sort of thing we should fix instead of just telling them to aim for the chest on a forum they won't read.
Marine jumping animations suddenly jerk the marine and especially the legs up. If you werent staring up at their crotch you'd have no idea where they went; they just went *poff* up and over you somewhere. It does not hurt the skill ceiling to fix this, it just raises the skill floor so that bad skulks don't get stomped quite so much, even if it still would be better to stare up at their crotch.
Another very important feature, which is now finally being worked on, is conveying at a glance to the player how much health and energy they have left instead of having a little meter that cannot be read without directly looking at it.
The apparently high amount of latency in the NS2 client-server architecture also seems to be worked on (experimental increased tick rates, performance improvements). I can't tell you how many times I've seen newbies (especially as lerks) sit there or bob up and down and take damage, thinking they'll be alrigth; dying without even trying to get away. It's not just once and then they learn their lesson, it's multiple times in a row.
NS1 conveyed this much better; if you took a big chunk of damage, such as from a shotty, you let out a special pain sound. The network performance past 2.0 was usually excellent. Health and energy were conveyed at a glance. None of these things hurt competitive players or lower the skill ceiling; they just mean new players won't have to learn through hours of painful experience that it's time to leave as alien when you still have most of your health left etc.
IronHorseDeveloper, QA Manager, Technical Support & contributorJoin Date: 2010-05-08Member: 71669Members, Super Administrators, Forum Admins, Forum Moderators, NS2 Developer, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Blue, Subnautica Playtester, Subnautica PT Lead, Pistachionauts
So I brought this up internally and it seems to be something that is a righteous pain in the butt to change, visually.
You'd have to manually adjust every animation for every weapon, for every model.
This is why if you look closely at the jump animations in the viewer you can spot inconsistencies in between the jump poses based on what weapon is in their hand.
The height is definitely ridiculous and isn't really needed, visually. (since you wouldn't want to change the actual collision height when jumping for railings etc)
So while I obviously agree with Soylent (seeing as how i've brought this up in the past before) I'll still look into an alternative solution, but again this isn't anything easy to solve unfortunately.
So I brought this up internally and it seems to be something that is a righteous pain in the butt to change, visually.
You'd have to manually adjust every animation for every weapon, for every model.
This is why if you look closely at the jump animations in the viewer you can spot inconsistencies in between the jump poses based on what weapon is in their hand.
The height is definitely ridiculous and isn't really needed, visually. (since you wouldn't want to change the actual collision height when jumping for railings etc)
So while I obviously agree with Soylent (seeing as how i've brought this up in the past before) I'll still look into an alternative solution, but again this isn't anything easy to solve unfortunately.
Great that you brought it up internally.
I understand it's not easy to change but i hope there will be a solution someday not too far in the future.
Another very important feature, which is now finally being worked on, is conveying at a glance to the player how much health and energy they have left instead of having a little meter that cannot be read without directly looking at it.
the alien vision card on the trello that you are talking about recently went missing into the archive section
...unless you are talking about ironhorses bigger hud
Another very important feature, which is now finally being worked on, is conveying at a glance to the player how much health and energy they have left instead of having a little meter that cannot be read without directly looking at it.
the alien vision card on the trello that you are talking about recently went missing into the archive section
...unless you are talking about ironhorses bigger hud
That's the NS1-style HUD option in NS2+, which has been available for a while, by the way.
IronHorseDeveloper, QA Manager, Technical Support & contributorJoin Date: 2010-05-08Member: 71669Members, Super Administrators, Forum Admins, Forum Moderators, NS2 Developer, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Blue, Subnautica Playtester, Subnautica PT Lead, Pistachionauts
edited January 2015
Yup, he's talking about the NS1 HUD Bars.
I brought up the idea 6 months ago with a crappy mockup, and then Rantology made a sexy version of it and Mendasp put it into NS2+
Now all that's needed is for it to be approved/official
Highly recommend you use it on any NS2+ servers and give feedback afterwards (I think the position of the bars need to be raised in height slightly)
the shader is active all the time regardless of the alien vision state, meaning the new information passed can be used to make the environment different colors or shapes as the alien gets more damaged, and more
I took a pic awhile back of a Marine crouch jumping at around shoulder level. On Earth's gravity 30cm is as high as most can jump when measuring, it feels a lot higher, but it's true.
IronHorseDeveloper, QA Manager, Technical Support & contributorJoin Date: 2010-05-08Member: 71669Members, Super Administrators, Forum Admins, Forum Moderators, NS2 Developer, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Blue, Subnautica Playtester, Subnautica PT Lead, Pistachionauts
@roxxkatt
Yea I knew about your request.
The explanation of why it was archived when I asked an engine developer :
Basically your method does have a performance loss that we are unwilling to accept.
Each time
shader:SetParameter()
is called, it forces a Lua->C->Lua instruction sequence. So, generally you would *not* want to be doing that every frame...PLUS...each one of those calls is going to have to do callbacks back into all the associated Lua (and possibly C code) in order to get the data for those 'SetParameter' calls. And to top that off... *all* of the changes are ran in the Alien:UpdateClientEffects() call....which is run every frame. So, the performance impact would scale upwards, and a player's system specs scales down.
It incurs a cost regardless of what a player's graphics settings are at. So, it'd be a badly designed performance hit and forced upon all players. Not a good scenario.
@IronHorse wouldnt the alien hud be making those exact same function calls every frame?
i did make a mod with the proposed changes, and ran them on the highest graphics settings, and did not experience any fps drop at all.
has this been tested?
also, it would be TRIVIAL to add a if(framecount++ < 10) {dothings(); framecount=0 } if people were concerned about performance
I confirm this change.
Try to jump in real life over the Dog, and jump again-again-and-again at some height!
Skulk with our LENGTH cannot bite jumped marine. (Try to attack Extractor from max-distance to get length value). So jump height is more than 1.5 meters?
it sounds like they wont make this change because the hitbox will remain the same, and only the leg animation needs to be changed, and changing that will somehow mess up the weapons animations as well, making it far too much work for them
I confirm this change.
Try to jump in real life over the Dog, and jump again-again-and-again at some height!
Skulk with our LENGTH cannot bite jumped marine. (Try to attack Extractor from max-distance to get length value). So jump height is more than 1.5 meters?
Dude skulks are like the size of a little terrier dog or a cat. I could jump over them repeatedly no problem. If you think a small dog could bite you at the apex of your jump, without jumping, I would imagine you have a poor judge of what kind of athletic ability even the most average human is capable of, let alone people specially trained for such a thing
Also I dunno where you got the 1.5 meter bite range from, it's nothing like that.
Marines now have zero gravity for a shot time (0.1 second) after each jump, so they can jump up with less force, but achieve the same speed.
(This simulates real life jumping physics, where legs exert force over a fraction of a second, until the feet left the ground, rather than being an instantaneous process.)
But are the feet still tucked in? And does this effect marines jumping onto crates and railings?
Yes the feet animations don't change. Marines can still jump onto crates perfectly, if not better than before. (As an unintended side effect in the mod code) You actually don't lose any height each jump (Oops), but theoretically, marines should take slightly longer to vanish from sight, and the animation looks a tiny bit more natural.
[Edit: never mind the no height loss from chain jumping comment. It is how it currently it works in the NS2.]
Could always just bring back glancing bites. I know it's not exactly the ideal solution, but at least that would lower the skill floor somewhat.
(which is the biggest problem with aliens in NS2 at the moment)
Could always just bring back glancing bites. I know it's not exactly the ideal solution, but at least that would lower the skill floor somewhat.
(which is the biggest problem with aliens in NS2 at the moment)
Yes this jumping is to me the worst fun killer. From platform 10cm high I can jump on another marines head and without crouch no less. I would prefer climb(marine can still get to tactical places with enough foresight) and realistic, well animated jump(still can evade to sides quickly). Or perhaps biting marine mid-air could cause fall on the nose, similar to stomp effect.
Second is marines seeming to aim elsewhere, where in fact they aim at you. And fades invincible as it is and now self-healing(two fades can kill whole team, repeatedly). And marine outrunning celerity skulk(unable to ambush from behind well). Ok it's not just two things bothering me.
Third is not registering hits and writing "invalid collision rep" in console. That is due to be fixed next patch, it seems. yaaay
If they would fix that and released it as Natural Selection 3, I would be perfectly happy
Second is marines seeming to aim elsewhere, where in fact they aim at you. And fades invincible as it is and now self-healing(two fades can kill whole team, repeatedly). And marine outrunning celerity skulk(unable to ambush from behind well). Ok it's not just two things bothering me.
Marines can't 'outrun' celerity skulks even if they're ground skulking.
However, I have found that because of the existence of marine sprint, that it's comparatively more difficult to ambush in ns1 (as opposed to ns2). The window of opportunity is a lot lower such that if you pounce down even slightly too late, you end up playing catchup with the marine down the hallway - then he hears you jumping towards him trying to close the distance and it's a dead giveaway. I have suggested making non-chained jumps wall->wall jumps silent to increase the speed/options in which a skulk can silently make an approach, but it's always been met with fairly strong opposition.
I have been killed chasing or being chased by marine too many times to believe that, but I guess the numbers on wiki are clear. Also I don't know if you noticed, jumping down from ceiling actually slows you down too to make matters worse. I guess I can still parasite them so at least some win. For what I think, no obscure sound mechanics should be needed. Marine that does not check his surrounding and walks around alone should be dinner. Fast food to be exact. Also making katchup FROM him.
I took a pic awhile back of a Marine crouch jumping at around shoulder level. On Earth's gravity 30cm is as high as most can jump when measuring, it feels a lot higher, but it's true.
30 cm? nope. Unless I was a god in my second year in high school... 30.5 inches. But that's only for vertical jumps. I'd assume a space marine would be shooting nanites in his butt to achieve max potential.
Anyway, just watch where they jump n try to not be directly in front of them. Jump as unpredictably as the marine... strafe jump.. get around them... just try to bite the marine, not nibble on his toes.
I took a pic awhile back of a Marine crouch jumping at around shoulder level. On Earth's gravity 30cm is as high as most can jump when measuring, it feels a lot higher, but it's true.
30 cm? nope. Unless I was a god in my second year in high school... 30.5 inches. But that's only for vertical jumps. I'd assume a space marine would be shooting nanites in his butt to achieve max potential.
Anyway, just watch where they jump n try to not be directly in front of them. Jump as unpredictably as the marine... strafe jump.. get around them... just try to bite the marine, not nibble on his toes.
I had the worst vertical jump in my class. It was 11 inches, which so happens to be 27 cm.
Comments
Bionic leg implants brah
I was hit by a moment of nostalgia. Anyone around here remembering this gem?
If we want NS2 to be more newbie friendly without jeopardizing the depth and high skill ceiling this is exactly the sort of thing we should fix instead of just telling them to aim for the chest on a forum they won't read.
Marine jumping animations suddenly jerk the marine and especially the legs up. If you werent staring up at their crotch you'd have no idea where they went; they just went *poff* up and over you somewhere. It does not hurt the skill ceiling to fix this, it just raises the skill floor so that bad skulks don't get stomped quite so much, even if it still would be better to stare up at their crotch.
Another very important feature, which is now finally being worked on, is conveying at a glance to the player how much health and energy they have left instead of having a little meter that cannot be read without directly looking at it.
The apparently high amount of latency in the NS2 client-server architecture also seems to be worked on (experimental increased tick rates, performance improvements). I can't tell you how many times I've seen newbies (especially as lerks) sit there or bob up and down and take damage, thinking they'll be alrigth; dying without even trying to get away. It's not just once and then they learn their lesson, it's multiple times in a row.
NS1 conveyed this much better; if you took a big chunk of damage, such as from a shotty, you let out a special pain sound. The network performance past 2.0 was usually excellent. Health and energy were conveyed at a glance. None of these things hurt competitive players or lower the skill ceiling; they just mean new players won't have to learn through hours of painful experience that it's time to leave as alien when you still have most of your health left etc.
You'd have to manually adjust every animation for every weapon, for every model.
This is why if you look closely at the jump animations in the viewer you can spot inconsistencies in between the jump poses based on what weapon is in their hand.
The height is definitely ridiculous and isn't really needed, visually. (since you wouldn't want to change the actual collision height when jumping for railings etc)
So while I obviously agree with Soylent (seeing as how i've brought this up in the past before) I'll still look into an alternative solution, but again this isn't anything easy to solve unfortunately.
I understand it's not easy to change but i hope there will be a solution someday not too far in the future.
the alien vision card on the trello that you are talking about recently went missing into the archive section
...unless you are talking about ironhorses bigger hud
I brought up the idea 6 months ago with a crappy mockup, and then Rantology made a sexy version of it and Mendasp put it into NS2+
Now all that's needed is for it to be approved/official
Highly recommend you use it on any NS2+ servers and give feedback afterwards (I think the position of the bars need to be raised in height slightly)
the shader is active all the time regardless of the alien vision state, meaning the new information passed can be used to make the environment different colors or shapes as the alien gets more damaged, and more
this means the entire screen can be a hud
heres an example of one possibility:
the code is 100% finished with no performance loss and i dont know what it means when the item gets moved from "needs approval" to the archive
....and looking again i think you knew about this already =p
Yea I knew about your request.
The explanation of why it was archived when I asked an engine developer :
Basically your method does have a performance loss that we are unwilling to accept.
Each time is called, it forces a Lua->C->Lua instruction sequence. So, generally you would *not* want to be doing that every frame...PLUS...each one of those calls is going to have to do callbacks back into all the associated Lua (and possibly C code) in order to get the data for those 'SetParameter' calls. And to top that off... *all* of the changes are ran in the Alien:UpdateClientEffects() call....which is run every frame. So, the performance impact would scale upwards, and a player's system specs scales down.
It incurs a cost regardless of what a player's graphics settings are at. So, it'd be a badly designed performance hit and forced upon all players. Not a good scenario.
i did make a mod with the proposed changes, and ran them on the highest graphics settings, and did not experience any fps drop at all.
has this been tested?
also, it would be TRIVIAL to add a if(framecount++ < 10) {dothings(); framecount=0 } if people were concerned about performance
Really easy thing to do....look at this TSF marine training between two rounds !
Try to jump in real life over the Dog, and jump again-again-and-again at some height!
Skulk with our LENGTH cannot bite jumped marine. (Try to attack Extractor from max-distance to get length value). So jump height is more than 1.5 meters?
Dude skulks are like the size of a little terrier dog or a cat. I could jump over them repeatedly no problem. If you think a small dog could bite you at the apex of your jump, without jumping, I would imagine you have a poor judge of what kind of athletic ability even the most average human is capable of, let alone people specially trained for such a thing
Also I dunno where you got the 1.5 meter bite range from, it's nothing like that.
Code here: http://pastebin.com/FQL1b04u
Mod on Steam Workshop : http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=391124609
Marines now have zero gravity for a shot time (0.1 second) after each jump, so they can jump up with less force, but achieve the same speed.
(This simulates real life jumping physics, where legs exert force over a fraction of a second, until the feet left the ground, rather than being an instantaneous process.)
[Edit: never mind the no height loss from chain jumping comment. It is how it currently it works in the NS2.]
(which is the biggest problem with aliens in NS2 at the moment)
Please no
Sometimes, lowering the skill floor makes it harder for skill to rise.
Second is marines seeming to aim elsewhere, where in fact they aim at you. And fades invincible as it is and now self-healing(two fades can kill whole team, repeatedly). And marine outrunning celerity skulk(unable to ambush from behind well). Ok it's not just two things bothering me.
Third is not registering hits and writing "invalid collision rep" in console. That is due to be fixed next patch, it seems. yaaay
If they would fix that and released it as Natural Selection 3, I would be perfectly happy
Marines can't 'outrun' celerity skulks even if they're ground skulking.
However, I have found that because of the existence of marine sprint, that it's comparatively more difficult to ambush in ns1 (as opposed to ns2). The window of opportunity is a lot lower such that if you pounce down even slightly too late, you end up playing catchup with the marine down the hallway - then he hears you jumping towards him trying to close the distance and it's a dead giveaway. I have suggested making non-chained jumps wall->wall jumps silent to increase the speed/options in which a skulk can silently make an approach, but it's always been met with fairly strong opposition.
30 cm? nope. Unless I was a god in my second year in high school... 30.5 inches. But that's only for vertical jumps. I'd assume a space marine would be shooting nanites in his butt to achieve max potential.
Anyway, just watch where they jump n try to not be directly in front of them. Jump as unpredictably as the marine... strafe jump.. get around them... just try to bite the marine, not nibble on his toes.