Turrets: Vastly Improved, but Still Need Work

[Sanderson]

Thanks for the positive response everyone - Just wanted to post again and comment on a few points:


Not fully no, we tried things in that direction (not using a true PID method but a quicker & dirtier way of avoiding overshoot) in a set of very unscientific and subjective tests it "felt weird". The method we ended up going for is one I was more confident would work in the ways we wanted while being controllable (and more understandable) by design. If I were building one of these things in real life I'd definitely have gone with a similar approach to what you suggest, and if there was time available to try again I'm sure it could also be made to work in the game.

It turned out to be a knotty problem either way though, sadly hindsight only works after the fact... Pesky reality with its "rules" .

And yes the current method does simulate the weapon not being sure where to aim rather than not being able to keep up. Which is a little questionable, but not the worst piece of handwaving in games.


Most RTS games and similar higher-level things do exactly that. But in this genre but you'd lose a lot of the emergent effects that come with simulating things more accurately: the chance to hit being affects by the targets' size, shape, speed, range, facing (note how much smaller target an eagle is face on to you than from above), cover, etc... you could of course go back and add multipliers for each of those factors, but in the end it's not all that much simpler than just using physics. And you'd still have to work out where to put the impact effects & shots that missed to stop them going through things.


The only current option is via the functions panel to flip them back to fixed-forward weapons (currently no keybind for that but it has been requested before).


For performance reasons you'd want to use the ship's bounding shape of convex hull - generating a uniform random point in a complex mesh is not a cheap operation.
If you went this approach you'd still have to make that target random walk around inside the volume so that it moves smoothly for continuous beam & rapid fire weapons. The nuances are different but should work and be doing a similar job to the harmonic wobble of the weapon direction, but would be more expensive to calculate - and when there can be quite a large number of turrets/gimbals in a scene speed is a concern!


I like to call it the process of adding "Plausible stupidity" . Luckily we do have the advantage of deciding which bits of physics we'd rather just ignore, it's very interesting from my side to talk to people building the real thing as well - I had an fascinating chat with a relative who worked on missile guidance recently.


Right - I'm off to my weekend , Fly Dangerously commanders!

Thank you for the reply and great explanation, it's greatly appreciated.

 

[Poy]

I can chime in here (Much of the turret/weapon functionality ends up being my playground).

Kind of unrelated to the topic but, how about setting fixed weapon convergence in the stations ? That would solve a lot of problems regarding ships with odd hardpoints placement.

 

[Frenotx]

Added a mock-up to the OP

Here's a little mock-up I put together of the proposed turret algorithm. Feel free to tweak the values, and see how the turret reacts. Note that it only will work right in firefox and chrome: http://visikcorp.com/TurretHTML5/Tur...nstration.html

 

[Captain Hammer]

what this needs is Sensor augmentation so we actually have a reason to upgrade sensors rather than just install D for mass saving.

Better sensors == less drift/wobble and more on target to actually hit the ship.

I agree with this statement

 

[Kyuubey]

without some kind of confusion mechanic the turrets are utterly lethal

You're trading dps for accuracy, far from lethal.

 

[Jacob Marshall]

...Blimey...

Now that was a really good post; very much appreciated.

 

[Frenotx]

I agree with this statement

The devs that the amount of wobble is already as low as they're comfortable putting it. Making the sensors affect the wobbliness would just mean that with a rated sensors, weapons would behave as they do. With anything less, the wobble would be even worse.

You're trading dps for accuracy, far from lethal.

Even if a weapon has very low DPS, it's not a good idea to make it perfectly accurate. All that does is lead to fights basically having a "time limit". Let's say a turret has perfect accuracy, but only has 10 dps. Any ship you fight will be essentially, assuming you do nothing else besides use that turret, forced to leave or die in [their ship's health] / 10 seconds. In addition to the time limit effect, a turret with perfect accuracy essentially completely removes both the attacker's and defender's skill from the equation.

 

[Cmdr Lassan]

It has been said before but thank you Mark for not only taking your time to answer thorougly on the first few questions but even on the questions which resulted afterwards. Strong move.
I know "we" people on the forum are a tiny part of the Elite Universe, so making your surely scarce time schedule free for us is very, very much appreciated

 

[Mysteron]

Yes indeed they mostly work fine but there are times when they will still waver about all over the place even when there is a slow moving close target easily in range. The turrets weakness is its beam strength, this should be enough, the occasional spasms are extremely frustrating but I'm sure FD will fix in time as they always have done. The game for me reamins a thrilling and beautiful open world triumph...

 

[Frenotx]

Seeing as several more turret-reliant ships have recently been added to the game, it seems like a good time to bring this discussion back up.

 

[Dbrn47]

Seeing as several more turret-reliant ships have recently been added to the game, it seems like a good time to bring this discussion back up.

All I can say for sure is that every time you bring up turrets in a build discussion, people cringe and tell you how terrible they are.

 

[Zeta Legion]

All I can say for sure is that every time you bring up turrets in a build discussion, people cringe and tell you how terrible they are.

That's because turrets still suck through a straw.

The game is balanced around dogfighting combat, other combat configurations are simply left by the wayside.

 

[Poy]

I still miss when turrets were unaffected by chaff.

Now THAT gave them a big use (and made the Clipper PvP viable since half the damn playerbase seems to use alternated chaffing !)

 

[Zeta Legion]

I suppose I should make a more constructive post:

For turrets in their current form to be any good (laser turrets specifically, other turret types like cannons have additional problems) the ship in question needs to be specifically designed with turrets in mind.

As I mentioned in my previous post every ship in the game this is any good at combat is designed for forward-facing firepower. Using turrets on these ships is pointless, because the marginal gains in uptime are counteracted by the massive loss in DPS caused by turrets. This is only compounded by the fact that a turreted weapon takes a disproportionate amount of energy to fire for the damage done compared to other weapon types. They also reduce player involvement in combat.

For a ship to get more or equal use out of turrets compared to another ship in the same class (say, Anaconda Vs. Mystery Ship) that ship would have to have at least some weapons that are physically incapable of aiming forward or otherwise have prohibitively bad convergence even for gimbal mounted weapons. Another solution would be to give this ship extremely poor maneuverability forcing turret use. This ship would also need a vastly superior capacitor to make up for the lack of damage dealt by the weapons in question as well as more hardpoints to provide adequate coverage.

Currently a ship is only 'turret friendly' because it is fixed-gimbal unfriendly, like the T-9 or Cutter. These ships are extremely bad at combat compared to their contemporaries as a result.

Turrets also really should get a damage buff, and turreted Cannons and Multicannons should get an accuracy improvement or the only ones anyone will ever use are laser turrets.

 

[Frenotx]

I suppose I should make a more constructive post:

For turrets in their current form to be any good (laser turrets specifically, other turret types like cannons have additional problems) the ship in question needs to be specifically designed with turrets in mind.

As I mentioned in my previous post every ship in the game this is any good at combat is designed for forward-facing firepower. Using turrets on these ships is pointless, because the marginal gains in uptime are counteracted by the massive loss in DPS caused by turrets. This is only compounded by the fact that a turreted weapon takes a disproportionate amount of energy to fire for the damage done compared to other weapon types. They also reduce player involvement in combat.

For a ship to get more or equal use out of turrets compared to another ship in the same class (say, Anaconda Vs. Mystery Ship) that ship would have to have at least some weapons that are physically incapable of aiming forward or otherwise have prohibitively bad convergence even for gimbal mounted weapons. Another solution would be to give this ship extremely poor maneuverability forcing turret use. This ship would also need a vastly superior capacitor to make up for the lack of damage dealt by the weapons in question as well as more hardpoints to provide adequate coverage.

Currently a ship is only 'turret friendly' because it is fixed-gimbal unfriendly, like the T-9 or Cutter. These ships are extremely bad at combat compared to their contemporaries as a result.

Turrets also really should get a damage buff, and turreted Cannons and Multicannons should get an accuracy improvement or the only ones anyone will ever use are laser turrets.

Even with a ship designed from the ground up to use turrets, fighting with turrets would be an inefficient and frustrating experience. Until they are only affected by the targets relative angular velocity / acceleration (instead of also being affected the target's absolute acceleration), turrets will remain extremely unreliable. Also, the fact that turrets can only aim 5 degrees down would put a serious damper on a turret boat being effective.

 

[IceFire122]

Even with a ship designed from the ground up to use turrets, fighting with turrets would be an inefficient and frustrating experience. Until they are only affected by the targets relative angular velocity / acceleration (instead of also being affected the target's absolute acceleration), turrets will remain extremely unreliable. Also, the fact that turrets can only aim 5 degrees down would put a serious damper on a turret boat being effective.

I actually found use for turrets with their current implementation:
Following a suggestion, I use two beam turrets in my Python's medium slots. All those pesky front NPCs, who try to avoid my front, will get fried quickly, while I try to turn towards them.
Yes, turrets miss and are easily confused by chaff. But, they can kill small ships faster than I turn around or at least melt their shields away. I switch the turrets off, once shields are down or I face my target to have more energy for my main guns. No more need to fly backwards, if your target is more agile than me.

I continued to use the turrets on suitable located (top/side) medium slots of other ships, IF the ship has a high number of hard points (Python, Conda, ...).

 

[Yodafone]

Extremely informative

 

[Troa Barton]

It's threads like this that make me remember why I hate it when people say they will address things eventually.
after a year turrets still suck.
they even "addressed it" and they still suck.
If there's one thing I hate about frontier its that they take little issues for granted.
just fix it already..

 

[Brimstone]

It's threads like this that make me remember why I hate it when people say they will address things eventually.
after a year turrets still suck.
they even "addressed it" and they still suck.
If there's one thing I hate about frontier its that they take little issues for granted.
just fix it already..

Hopefully that 'fix' will be coming in the way of the 'multicrew' expansion, probably adapting the 'SRV turret mechanic' so that you have one player acting as pilot, and another manning the turrets. I only hope that you can control more than one turret at a time, like controlling one turret while having the others 'slaved' to where ever you target it, and being able to control the convergence.

 

[Troa Barton]

Hopefully that 'fix' will be coming in the way of the 'multicrew' expansion, probably adapting the 'SRV turret mechanic' so that you have one player acting as pilot, and another manning the turrets. I only hope that you can control more than one turret at a time, like controlling one turret while having the others 'slaved' to where ever you target it, and being able to control the convergence.

I always stay on the side of caution when I feel the call of the hype train on a new patch.
after the mining update, wings, power play, and the ships update I've found nothing but disappointment.
mining is still a bottom feeder profession
wings does not provoke me to play with other commanders, it hurts more than it helps..
power play is a gigantic waste of time for the most part.
the ships update gave us an ok viper, a question mark for the keelback, the asp scout which I like, a slow cobra, the corvette that can't jump, and a new trader but otherwise useless imperial crapper, I mean cutter.

i don't want to get on the hype train for fear that it's next stop may be my last.

the cutter is buckling the legs of a camel who's back has seen better days, I find solace in expecting very little out of frontier.