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The one problem is the throttle bar--breaking it into zones along the keypads doesn't really work, so the only option is for pushing forward to be accelerating, while pulling back slows you down. Otherwise, good but complicated.
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Holy shit.
I need this game yesterday.
A poet. Should have sent a poet.
FYI: Image above links to my webcomic, and is (mostly) SFW. Steam ID: Obos Vent: Obos
Well, I'm sure there's a good reason to have them. Rain, or something. And at least they're including other variants.
What's wrong with covering your missile racks? Keeps the dust and bugs out. Also maybe small-arms fire.
And it keeps in the Tradition!
There are women present!
FYI: Image above links to my webcomic, and is (mostly) SFW. Steam ID: Obos Vent: Obos
GOG: hellisforheroes
Tumblr: BrainSpoon
Need more concept artists for Mechs! The engine looks great from those stills, it'd be nice to see more action videos though
Do not question the design of this glorious beast!
You're all running around, being great, then get tagged by some little dinky Raven carrying a NARC system. Then you see a pair of Catapaults on a ridge, blast doors swinging open as they see the easy meat.
GAME OVER, MAN. GAME OVER.
I've got an urge to somehow attach several toggle switches to my keyboard.
Contact! One medium, location G5, heading south-east... ID Centurion, target acquired, ready one *flick* ready two *flick* Firing *SHOOMSHOOMSHOMSHOMSHOMOMOM*... Direct hit! Target down, well done Lance 2
SO much joy to be had, all the joy
GOG: hellisforheroes
Tumblr: BrainSpoon
Missile Cover May
FYI: Image above links to my webcomic, and is (mostly) SFW. Steam ID: Obos Vent: Obos
ALLOFMYMONEY.JPG
Also that last picture is SO getting used as desktop wallpaper.
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But the arty and smaller mechs? Those are my
wheelhousecockpit. Frothing desire has been activated, the only cure is yelling "Woop Woop Woop!" and running my mech behind a mountain to hide from a metal killing behemoth twice my size that I just managed to piss off.They looked stupid back in MechCommander promotional art. They still look stupid. It's that simple.
It also drops more questions than it answers.
"Are they hydraulic? Or do the missiles just 'push' them out of the way, because let's face it, people in this universe are that stupid."
"So why don't any other missile racks or gun arrays have covers? Are they somehow immune to everything the Catapult isn't?"
"Can they break off in combat? And what if they jam, seeing how they look about as durable as windshield wipers. Does that missile pod disable, do they pop off, or do you just have a catastrophic weapons explosion?"
In other words--they're stupid. Fuck tradition.
Someone has put waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy too much thought into why they hate something in a game.
TO be fair, from an outside perspective, there is a lot of silly fluff in BattleTech. From a mechwarrior standpoint, a series that bills itself as a mech simulator, thinking about these things is part of the fun.
It'd be like if microsoft flight simulator just added extra wings on the 747 because it "looked cool."
FYI: Image above links to my webcomic, and is (mostly) SFW. Steam ID: Obos Vent: Obos
Perhaps, on the G940, you do. The price you pay for awesome force feedback.
It took me all of 30 seconds to come up with threeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee reasons. Your time must be valuable as hell.
Also, I think you've missed a good 60% of what's discussed in this thread. Maybe 70%.
EDIT: Also, @TeeMan I cannot imagine they would ever make such a feature manually controlled, as that would lead to 1) either the missiles smashing and maybe exploding against the panels or 2) a "WARMP" alarm tone telling you you couldn't fire, both of which players would hate. It'd be like actually giving you the option to switch the safeties on individual weapons on and off.
It would demonstrate why those covers are so stupid, which is another reason they'd be automatic.
And I thought I was finicky about that stuff.
Here's an explanation that might satisfy. They're armored covers. So some pipsqueak with a small laser or machine gun doesn't take out half your ammo with a lucky shot. Also there is no reason they can't have explosive bolts on them to fire if they happened to get jammed. That's pretty standard on most military equipment with critical hatches.
I think I've seen Timber Wolf/Mad Cat artwork with the same covers (very cringeworthy), but that's about it. If it's more common in the universe, I'd buy it as an up-armoring feature, but frankly, it seems as much a liability as anything else. Consider: they're armored plates. Okay. So they take fire the missile racks themselves would otherwise take, fine. What happens when enough fire hits them to damage them but not totally break them off?
Your explosive bolts come into play, but given how well things work in BT, you're left with the hilarious thought of how many MechWarriors ejected/died when their Catapult exploded an LRM20 barrage (or two) a few meters from their cockpit.
It's the same reason you don't see Mechs with retractable armored windshields, I'd say. An obvious advantage outweighed by the less obvious, much more numerous disadvantages. Still, we're talking about a BT universe that championed fingers on Mechs that couldn't pick up weapons. And this.
My initial impression was going to be that it would work like MW4 - you would have a set of energy, missile, and ballistic hardpoints, and you can go buck wild sticking weapons in hardpoints up to your tonnage limit. But some of the dev Q&A answers have me confused:
This makes it sound like you could only replace those beam weapons with another beam weapon regardless of slot size. So you could replace those 3 PPC's with 3 Large Lasers, but not add additional weapons to those areas even if you had hardpoint space.
This one seems to say the same thing, that you are allowed only 2 energy weapons in your arm, even if you had enough hardpoint space for 3 medium lasers.
Anyone have a good idea on how it will work?
Don't mix up hardpoints and critical slots. Hardpoints define how many weapons you can mount, and of what types. Critical slots restrict the overall bulk of weapons/equipment you can load in a given location.
So yes, in the latter example, if you have only 2 energy hardpoints on your arm, you can't mount any more lasers than that, even if you have the slots for them. But as the dev points out there, you can still swap in bigger/more powerful energy weapons (assuming there are enough slots) as long as you don't mount more than 2 of them.
Basically I think the hardpoints are intended to represent the 'Mech's baseline internal infrastructure for weapons - mounting hardware, wiring, fire-control equipment, ammo feed lines, coolant lines, all that stuff which kind of ramifies throughout the chassis and can't simply be re-worked by popping open an access hatch on one arm or torso segment. Then the critical slots simply represent the amount of room inside a location. If there's enough room you can bolt a bigger gun onto an existing mount, but adding a whole new mount and all the crap that goes with it is outside the scope of customizing your 'Mech (at least if it's not an OmniMech I guess).
That reasoning kind of breaks down when you consider that you can put heat sinks and so forth all over the damn place (unless they've said otherwise?), but eh, it's sufficient justification for me - and it helps prevent boating, which is obviously the main design consideration for doing it this way. And a laudable goal in my opinion!