Weapon Standardization

This page is to outline standards for the effects, behaviours and nature of weapons in CA. All the visual aspects of weapons should reflect meaningful gameplay difference. This covers damages, accuracy, e-drain and all aspects of weapon behaviour, and conveying that information to the player through visualsin an intuitive and standardized fashion.

There needs to be consistency in order to make the game easy to understand. A weapon type should behave similar no matter whose shoulder its mounted on. IE You've got your unguided rockets, arcing missiles, tracking missiles, etc. Make tracking missiles be the weapon that targets land and air. Then I don't have to think about which unit can shoot where. I will know that Jethro, Defender and Samson all have "tracking missiles." Different ranges and damage maybe but the same behavior.

Licho's offtopic: check some interesting effects in other mods. Muzzle flash/effects in XTA, some missiles in XTA etc..

What should take energy to fire?
  • All Statics
  • Specific weapon types (IE heatray, beamlasers) on mobiles and statics
  • Specific weapon types on Statics
  • Arbitrarily chosen units (Non-standardized, lets make CA more confusing!)
  • All or most weapons, in varying degrees by weapontype

Marmoth: To add consistency, energy taking weapons should be the one that get through shields (perhaps specific weapons like bombs should get through too - but then reloading on pad could cost some energy too).

Evil4Zerggin: I'll look into enabling energy drain for laser bombers. I think attaching the energy drain to the fake bomb will work.

Special Damages

First attempt at standardizing special damages against subs, air is in r1550. A text file listing the changes is attached to this page.

Beams

  • Each type of beam has a common beamtime, reload time, and color (distinct from other types).
  • Weaponvelocity is proportional to range (for Core). Thus, range can be inferred from the length of the laser bolts (duration), and time-to-target is also the same.
  • Energy is proportional to damage.
  • A note on tags: beamTime affects beamlasers, duration affects beamWeapons.
  • Thickness standards:
    • coreThickness = sqrt(DPS) * 0.04, taking the highest DPS category.
    • thickness = sqrt(DPS)* 0.5.
    • laserFlareSize = sqrt(DPS)* 1.
    • Heat Rays, toAirWeapons, and weapons with beamttl are 0.5 times as thick.
    • beamttl, for weapons that have it, is 15 * sqrt(DPS) * 0.5. The alpha decays to 1% by the end of its lifetime.

CarRepairer: Suggestion: Rather than basing core thickness on DPS, possibly consider basing it on "damage per shot." Consider 2 lasers, equal in DPS, LaserA shoots once every second, LaserB fires 10 shots in one second. If both their thicknesses were equal, it would visually appear that the second is doing ten times the damage of the first. LaserA should have the greater thickness in this case regardless of their equal DPS.

Evil4Zerggin: I actually tried this at first, but this resulted in Core HLTs being rather fat; on the beamlaser side, if we kept the Arm LLT the same thickness but increased the Annihilator thickness to match its damage rather than its DPS, the beam would be over 40 wide, even accounting for the difference in beam times. However, most weapons of the same type/color have the same reload time (the major exceptions are scout lasers and tachyon beams; these may need looking at), so both methods are the same within the same color; using DPS simply means that color and thickness together indicate the damage per shot, rather than just thickness.

Saktoth: Perhaps sqrt(damage per shot)/3 + 1, or cube it, or something (Why did you use * 0.5 BTW, rather than /2?). So there is a strong base line (at least 1) but it still follows damage per shot. For Arm BeamLasers? though, the green beam is a different weapon type to the purple or blue one- the colour is reflecting the increased damage, and also that it is a pulse, rather than a stream.

Evil4Zerggin: I think I'll try out CarRepairer's suggestion of using logarithms; probably something like a log(damage + 1) + b or something.

  • Arm continuous beam.
    • Short range (< 450).
    • RGBColor 0 0.25 0
    • RGBColor2 0 0.5 0
    • ~10 shots per second. (Perhaps decrease this, so that it is not quite as good vs air?)

Saktoth: Im not a fan of Green on lasers. Its too... verdant. Red is a traditional laser colour, though i guess a lot of 'laser shows' are green...

Evil4Zerggin: The reasoning behind the color change was to base Arm laser color on frequency (and Core on color temperature; see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_temperature), so the weaker continuous lasers would have the lower frequency among Arm lasers. On the other hand, I do agree that blue looks aesthetically better on continuous lasers. In addition, human eyes are more sensitive to green than blue, so green lasers look brighter. I'll think on this. Edit: I see what you mean about "too verdant". I'll decrease the saturation somewhat.

  • Arm rapid-fire laser.
    • Anti-air.
    • Beamtime 0.01.
    • Energy to fire = damage / 10.
    • RGBColor 0 1 1 (teal).
    • Beamttl for awesome fading beam effect.
    • 10 shots per second.
  • Arm high-energy laser.
    • Beamtime 0.6.
    • Energy to fire = damage / 3.
    • RGBColor 0.25 0.25 1 (blue)?
    • 1 shot per 4.5 seconds.
  • Core red beamweapon (Machinegun? Tracer fire? Gauss Rifle? Mass Driver? Its not a laser...)
    • Duration 0.02.
    • No energy to fire (except statics).
    • RGBColor 1 0 0 (red).
    • 5 shots per second per firing point.
    • Weaponvelocity = range * 4 (unless anti-air).
  • Core heavy beamweapon (functional difference?)
    • Duration 0.03.
    • Energy to fire = damage / 10 (shouldnt this be on llts/other statics then?)
    • RGBColor 1 0.25 0 (orange)
    • 5 shots per second per firing point.
    • Weaponvelocity = range * 4.
  • Core high-energy beamweapon
    • Duration 0.05.
    • Burst fire; burst length 0.2.
    • Energy to fire = damage / 3.
    • RGBColor 1 1 0 (yellow)
    • 1 shot per 4.5 seconds.
    • Weaponvelocity = range * 4.
  • Core heat ray.
    • Damage falloff over range (dynDamageExp 1),
    • Accuracy 512.
    • Duration 0.3.
    • Energy to fire = damage / 10.
    • RGBColor and RGBColor2 based on color temperature
    • ~10 shots per second per set of firing points (if you have 2 widely spaced firing points, use the projectiles tag for more beams)
    • Weaponvelocity = range * 2.

Saktoth: Why are all these weapon velocities a factor of range? That seems a really strange thing to do.

Evil4Zerggin: For equal time to target.

Saktoth: I dont know why that would be desirable...?

Evil4Zerggin: ~Equal accuracy within weapon type, length of beam is proportional to range. Although I suppose it's not a strong reason. Is there a reason to do otherwise?

  • Tachyon accelerators
    • Beamtime 1.0.
    • Energy to fire = damage / 2.
    • 1 shot per 6-20 seconds.
    • RGBColor 0.3 0 1 (Arm, violet), 0.5 0.5 1 (Core, blue).

Saktoth: Does core still use this? Should they? Needs non-nonsense name.

Evil4Zerggin: I'd support replacing it if a suitable replacement could be found. We could always go with the classic "ion cannon".

Saktoth: Rockets or plasma or whatever- doesnt really matter. What uses it, krog and DDM? Also, how is this functionally different from arm high-energy beamlasers?

  • Lightning (Damage)
    • RGBColor 0 0 1 (blue with a white core?)
    • Energy to fire = high? (would make sense)
  • Lightning (EMP)
    • RGBColor 1 1 0 (yellow)
      • We happy with this new effect?:

  • Energy to fire = high? (would make sense)

Plasma

  • "Max gravity" means weaponvelocity2 / range. This is the maximum gravity at which the weapon can strike out to its maximum range horizontally. See Ballistics for details.
  • Plasma.
    • Default color.
    • Max gravity >= 150.
    • Other stats variable.
  • Arm EMG.
    • >= 512 accuracy/sprayangle.
    • RGBColor 1 0.95 0.4 (pale yellow)
    • 6-10 shots per second.
    • Weaponvelocity? High. Saktoth: Ive always hated this colour. It should match with the muzzle flare, IE orange, IMO. Evil4Zerggin: I suspect the original idea was to distinguish it from normal plasma. I'm not particularly attached to the current color, but I would like it to be different than regular plasma. Saktoth: We could use ceg to give it a sparkly effect or something totally different, see Evo's cegs. In OTA it flashed yellow/red and had spikes if i recall correctly. Evil4Zerggin: Since Quantum indirectly introduced me to color maps, I'm going to try a color map based on color temperature. Saktoth: Really not digging the colour maps, i think we should convert this to an invisible beamweapon with a cegtag. EMG would lose its extreme height bonus then though, and stop shooting through wrecks- is that desirable? Otherwise perhaps plasma with a ceg.
  • Core riot.
    • High splash.
    • Lineofsight.
    • Different color? More reddish?
    • Reloadtime ~2s.
    • Weaponvelocity? High.
  • Arm gauss.
    • Lacks splash (areaOfEffect 16).
    • Line of sight.
    • Visual tags:
      • Alphadecay 0.12.
      • cegTag gauss_tag_l, gauss_tag_m, or gauss_tag_h (for light, medium, and heavy).
      • explosiongenerator custom:flash_teal7 (may try to make a better effect).
      • RGBcolor 0.5 1 1 (pale teal).
      • Separation 0.5.
      • Size 0.8.
      • SizeDecay -0.1.
      • Stages 32.
    • Max gravity 900-1000.

Self-Propelled

  • Rockets
    • Unguided
    • Slow (Speed can vary, for gameplay reasons).
    • Black trail? Shorter trail? Short, particle-based trail?
    • Larger model?
  • Missiles
    • Guided (guidance can vary, for gameplay reasons.
    • Hits air.
    • Engine FX?

Evil4Zerggin: White trails for missiles, black trails for rockets?

jK: i would like to see this effect, but you can't change the size of the flare of missles atm

  • Wobble Rockets
    • Blackdawn/Catapault style.
    • Delicious 'crunch' on impact
    • Awesome orange explosion
    • Unique model (pod-like appearance?)
  • Cruise (vlaunch) Missiles
    • Go up?
    • Even larger model!
  • Torpedoes
  • Depth Charges

Attachments