Anti-Air missiles - Page 4

Landtank · 2012-06-17, 09:55 PM

Originally Posted by Xyntech

You've completely ignored the part about using terrain for cover to break lockons and blow up locked on missiles. This is a big skill and planning factor, and is a lot more of a tradeoff than just being able to outmaneuver a locked on missile out in the open.

I don't want guns to be useless in a dogfight, but I'm already pretty certain that they won't be. Lock-ons take time, and skilled pilots will be able to escape lock-ons without much problem. Missiles will need to be impossible to outmaneuver in the open, or else they will be useless. Useless just like you fear guns will be.

Guns will dominate the sky in skilled dogfights. Between flares and diving behind obstacles, there will be few times that a skilled pilot will fall victim to a simple missile. Missiles will be more of an area denial, forcing pilots to take evasive action, at the cost of finding/diving for cover, not just pulling some fancy trick in the middle of the air.

Of course they could make missiles be overpowered, by it wasn't in the E3 footage. No reason to worry at the moment.

Indeed you are correct, I apologize for ignoring that.

Well what I was thinking about instead of typing was that when your in the northern area of Indar, where its relatively flat or desolate, what do you do then, or what if you are 300 meters in the air.

It would definitely be a balancing act to make missiles work right, I agree with most of your points, and it really comes down to seeing how it works in beta.. which needs to come soon..

Trafalgar · 2012-06-17, 10:04 PM

Originally Posted by Cuross

C) By luck you are able to double tap the shoulder button at exactly the precise moment to perform a barrel roll

Personally, I was (and am) assuming that if you wanted to do a barrel roll, you would actually have to do a barrel roll.

Blackwolf · 2012-06-17, 10:06 PM

Originally Posted by Landtank

Indeed you are correct, I apologize for ignoring that.

Well what I was thinking about instead of typing was that when your in the northern area of Indar, where its relatively flat or desolate, what do you do then, or what if you are 300 meters in the air.

It would definitely be a balancing act to make missiles work right, I agree with most of your points, and it really comes down to seeing how it works in beta.. which needs to come soon..

I can only base my guess on PS1, but being caught in the open meant your attacker had pretty much earned a free kill.

You can get lucky at altitude with AB but without AB the missile would quickly run you down. Typical strategy was to identify the direction the missile was coming from (shows up on the mini map), and AB in the opposite direction in order to break lock with range. Racing upwards towards flight ceiling while racing away improved your odds considerably since it got you out of the firing dome faster.

You just have to learn what maneuvers work. It's not like they won't exist at all. You aren't dead the moment you see "missile lock" flash on your screen. Just when you see "Wasp Missile Lock" because then there is almost no escape...

Cuross · 2012-06-17, 10:08 PM

Great discussion going on

@Xyntech:
I do agree that missiles are going to feel more like area denial and that their effectiveness will be severely limited by LOS and outmaneuvering through terrain. I do remember bugging out through forest and swamp plenty of times in PS1 just to avoid taking that last missile in the end. Your points are valid and I agree, the game could be left at that and I would still be satisfied, but just the ability to stay in the thick of it a moment longer because of that lucky roll would really give me a good amount of fun.

I haven't played BF3 either, so I have no idea what evasion in that game is like, either, but I'm expecting that from what we've seen, I agree with the others that it seems like flak and chainguns/purple pew pew lasers will be more effective at taking down aircraft. Flares and chaff will still be incredibly useful if you're completely out of options which will probably feel like most of the time against missiles.

In no way do I want missiles to become useless because some hotshot Aces know how to dodge them, but I'm just saying, if they can dodge one every now and again (like once every twenty or thirty attempts), it might make dogfighting a little more hectic.

Baneblade · 2012-06-17, 10:25 PM

Maybe try avoiding getting locked in the first place?

Trafalgar · 2012-06-17, 10:28 PM

I haven't played BF3 either. In Freelancer, there was one section of the game where there was a giant battle with capital ships from two sides shooting each other, and if I tried to fight like it instructed me to, I would get wtfpwned.

So I came up with the very simple tactic of going into an inside loop with my cruise drive enabled - and anything that tried to shoot at me missed completely, and missiles all lost lock and failed to hit me, not that they'd have any luck unless they were smart enough to figure out I was flying in a circle, fly to any point on the circle, and then blow up in front of my fighter when I came back around. (They lost lock immediately after being fired, which is rather peculiar considering I wasn't really flying out of range or behind them or anything)

In other games, that kind of thing doesn't always seem to work (one would hope not, since without a cruise drive or afterburners you can't go fast enough to lose lock on anything coming near you, and if they have a proximity fuse and large blast radius they could still be dangerous) but it is frequently possible to trick missiles using a well-timed immelman (optionally omitting the half roll at the end), ideally while using afterburners so it doesn't just hit you while you're doing it. That requires spotting the missile, flying away from it, and looking behind the airplane or spaceship to see the missile approaching, though. So that would require a "look behind/back" button, and some indicator what direction missiles are coming from.

Probably can't spin around and shoot the missile while continuing to fly away from it in PS2, since these are airplanes and not space fighters with newtonian physics.

Xyntech · 2012-06-17, 10:37 PM

I wouldn't mind seeing something like afterburning straight towards a missile allowing you to get away from it, but consider the balancing act. A Reaver is slower and clunkier, while a Scythe can change directions very quickly. If it were possible for a Reaver to sometimes outmaneuver a missile lock, than it would likely be very easy for a Scythe to outmaneuver a missile like.

I certainly don't think the Scythe is in need of that kind of buff for the moment.

Obviously open terrain is going to make buggering out a little more difficult, but that's always the tradeoff. You need to be careful and stay mindful of your terrain. If you can outmaneuver a missile in open air, I think it will quickly render anti-air missiles useless.

It is certainly something that would be cool to see and do, but it doesn't seem like it would be very balanced to me. I don't want flares to be the only option in every situation, but if it's the only option in certain situations, I think it will be okay.

MrMorton · 2012-06-17, 11:18 PM

Originally Posted by Blackwolf

This is simplification. Bf3 had a max of how many players on a battlefield at any given time? How many would be firing off AA missiles at a time? Against how many aircraft? PS2 will have a very large quantity of players fighting at any given time. Means more projectiles to track and code to read.

Please stop comparing PS2 to BF3 or any other low player count game.

Never played BF3, so I don't care about it. I see the PS2 videos and I see air craft sinking while hovering, with obvious manual boosts upwards done by the players in order to maintain a hovering position. I also see complicated maneuvers like barrel rolls and inverted spins in PS2 so I know the flight mechanics are complex. But PS1 featured the same missiles and they were not hard to avoid despite zero flares/chafe.

Programming the physics behind projectiles complicates the server's task of keeping track of everything that happens in the battlefield. Which is why you likely won't see projectiles affected by wind, and it's just a math equation that tells the computer how far the bullet will drop over how long a distance in the air (based on gravity). A math equation that would be applied to almost all of the projectiles at the same degree as opposed to wind which might affect rounds at different angles and different direction based on the shooter and the direction he is aiming relative to the wind.

in this case the comparison can be made between the two games because the flight model is not impacted by the number of players on a server. The reason for this is because your concept of how the flight model would work is someone wrong.

Yes calculating wind would be more taxing that calculating bullet drop, but ONLY by 1 extra calculation where the angle between the wind and projectile would be calculated. That is not much more taxing on the system than bullet drop, and nothing in comparison to having realtime projectiles/hitboxes in the first place.

The missile flight model could be very simple, but still possible to evade.

for instance: the missile is following the aircraft, and will always stay on it no matter what. Then, you simply add a statement saying the total velocity of the projectile must equal a set number (Xvelocity+Yvelocity+Zvelocity=!=?, simple addition which is not taxing at all). Then a second statement that limits the acceleration in any of these directions (deltaX<?). Boom, dodgable missiles with 4 additional calculations per missile.

I realize it is more complicated to implement than that, but the impact on performance is still very low per missile.

Eyeklops · 2012-06-17, 11:18 PM

Originally Posted by Biohazard

I think that the angle the missile is at should make a huge difference. If someone gets a lock perpendicular to me, then I should just be able to turn into them to lose the lock. However if they are directly behind or in front of me than it should be much more difficult or impossible.

Can we upgrade the guidance for our missiles? Something along the lines of:

Heat seeking (No lock on warning, easily countered with flares)
Radar seeking(No lock on warning, can be countered by turning off radar or chaff)
Radar guided (Lock on warning, more difficult to counter, shorter lock time)
Laser guided (Lock on warning, can be countered by breaking visual contact with the shooter.)
Self correcting heat seeking (No lock on warning, difficult to counter while in sight of the shooter)
Semi-intelligent Dual guidance heat/radar seeking (The ultimate guided missle, is a fast kinetic kill vehicle as the guidence system took up the payload space; No lock on, cannot be countered with flares or chaff, can only be avoided if the pilot breaks visual contact with the missle for longer than 4 seconds)

It's the future, we can come up with some really cool weapon systems

I like all of these but the last one.

Synapse · 2012-06-18, 12:43 AM

Balancing missiles vs pilot skill leaves out one crucial part of the environment. We need to be expecting spam, lots of spam. a dozen people easily in any battlefield just spammng missiles into the air all the time. It's relatively safe, its easy, its fire and forget, you better believe EVERYONE who doesnt feel like shooting will do it.

Shooting missiles is ridiculously easy and low risk. You need to balance pilot skill vs the number of missiles they will be seeing. I would expect 1-2 missiles to be easy to dodge but to make it survivable in an airspace over a real battle you'll need to expect 20-30 active launchers potentially in the area, with the pilot tracking and trying to avoid 10+ missiles, even very simple things to evade become intensely hard.

We shouldnt forget the number of missiles that will be out there. Balancing missiles in a low player count environment could lead to large battles just being a death zone for all air vehicles.

Trafalgar · 2012-06-18, 12:46 AM

What about using ECM to jam/disable missiles' targeting?

Novacane · 2012-06-18, 01:04 AM

ECM I can see being very viable to introduce since it would probably fit into the cert system well. Have different levels increase the difficulty of obtaining a lock from AA.

Also, Flares and Chaff are not, by any means, I win buttons. If you deploy them too early, they might disperse enough for the missile to regain a lock before it detonates or runs out of fuel. Deploy them too late and the shrapnel from the explosion may hit you. They are also limited to how much fit in the launchers. That picture of the C-130 is probably a good chunk of its total flares right there. In real aircraft, they have a computer that you can program to disperse countermeasures in patterns to counter the specific threat that is in the area.

Eclipse · 2012-06-18, 02:28 AM

I wish I could remember exactly where I saw it, but I was watching the stream of e3 day 2 with TotalBiscuit, (which has now disappeared again ARGLEBLARGLE RAGE) and somewhere past the half-way mark they showed a mosquito hunting a reaver, and the mossy fired a homing missile at long range. I watched as the reaver pulled a tight turn, then started a vertical climb, making the missile follow. At the peak, he seemed to cut his engines and flip over backwards, dropping down into a dive. I thought this looked absolutely awesome, and I was sure that would be enough to lose the missile, since the thing missed by a mile after the backflip... but the damn thing whipped right back around and followed the reaver into the dive, hitting it at about the same time as the -second- missile fired by the mossy, blowing it out of the sky.

Personally i think that such skillful and -awesome- looking aerial maneuvers should be enough to make a missile break lock, but the darn things seem to be very good at their job right about now.

If I could find the stream video again I could find exactly where it was (and check to see I'm just not imagining things) but I thought I should mention it since it seemed pertinent to this topic.

Cuross · 2012-06-18, 02:38 AM

Originally Posted by Eclipse

I wish I could remember exactly where I saw it, but I was watching the stream of e3 day 2 with TotalBiscuit, (which has now disappeared again ARGLEBLARGLE RAGE) and somewhere past the half-way mark they showed a mosquito hunting a reaver, and the mossy fired a homing missile at long range. I watched as the reaver pulled a tight turn, then started a vertical climb, making the missile follow. At the peak, he seemed to cut his engines and flip over backwards, dropping down into a dive. I thought this looked absolutely awesome, and I was sure that would be enough to lose the missile, since the thing missed by a mile after the backflip... but the damn thing whipped right back around and followed the reaver into the dive, hitting it at about the same time as the -second- missile fired by the mossy, blowing it out of the sky.

Personally i think that such skillful and -awesome- looking aerial maneuvers should be enough to make a missile break lock, but the darn things seem to be very good at their job right about now.

If I could find the stream video again I could find exactly where it was (and check to see I'm just not imagining things) but I thought I should mention it since it seemed pertinent to this topic.

That is exactly what I was wondering could happen. And that's exactly what I was worried would happen, haha. In any case, that kind of maneuver is tough on timing and I'm surprised anyone might have even been able to get that far ahead of a missile, especially in a Reaver. Will they change it to lose lock in and after Beta? Maybe. If it's not changed in game, will it bother all the pilots? Only a little, but not enough to stop flying :P

Trafalgar · 2012-06-18, 04:38 AM

Originally Posted by Eclipse

I wish I could remember exactly where I saw it, but I was watching the stream of e3 day 2 with TotalBiscuit, (which has now disappeared again ARGLEBLARGLE RAGE)

This is why I saved a copy of it, so I'd still be able to watch it in case it disappeared.

(Oh, and missiles with the tenacity of a Terminator are a bit disturbing.)