Why don't we use Gaussian distribution for weapon dispersion.

[PIE_OF_DOOM]

One thing I notice when shooting AMC, beams, or dumb fire missiles is that they only go strait. This ironically makes aiming difficult and easy at the same time. When a weapon is fired normally there is a Dispersion that fits to a Gaussian curve for other games that have a third or first person view. The further the target the larger the Dispersion.

In starmade there is no dispersion and so the only way you get the feeling of a dispersion is to have a block array of weapons. My stranded for rapid AMC is a small cross or cube array. Now if all weapons had a Gaussian Dispersion I would only use one barrel as at least I'm not always going to miss in the same spot but instead hit many spots more random spots on the ship.

Gaussian Dispersion would also solve the problems with the predictable AMC/missile combo and allow it to act like a more realistic shoot gun.

Now to calculate it you would need the max Dispersion at the weapons max range and the Dispersion at some other range(maybe at 100m, 200m and so forth). From there we can draw a line on a graph and determain the Dispersion at any range for that weapon. I would have all weapons including missiles follow the Dispersion on launch and combos that have the beam as a secondary would have a smaller dispersion. This can be calculated in real time as seen in most other shooters so it shouldn't be too hard to add. The zero point for distance for the dispersion would be the gun itself where your accuracy would be 100%.

The Dispersion would also have a inherit effect on AI accuracy such that we may not need to make the AI it self less accurate because the weapon is where the accuracy comes from. This would also have the effect of trying to doge more useful as even the shooter won't know exactly where the shoot will be.

I'm not suggesting this because I think that its to easy to hit thing but more on its to predictable where your shots will go and it kinda kills the idea of aim. It would be alot easier to aim in a general area with a shoot gun or a machine gun with Gaussian Dispersion then it is currently.(It feels like I'm shooting a raped fire Halo sniper at a fly at the moment unless I use multiple barrels.)

If anyone has the actual equations to add and or images to show my point I would be happy.

I mostly got this Idea when reading on how accuracy works on world of warships.

If anyone else has any good Ideas to add to this leave a post. I'm open to improvements.

 

[Winterhome]

No thanks.

Players who can hit targets at long ranges with cannons reliably would be unreasonably dragged down to be on par with everyone else.

 

[PIE_OF_DOOM]

No thanks.

Players who can hit targets at long ranges with cannons reliably would be unreasonably dragged down to be on par with everyone else.

Most sniper cannons would have a vary tight spread. Any ship you would likely be able to hit with current system you will hit most of the time with this one. The difference in spread is mostly so that when we do hit the ship its not in the exact same spot on the ship all the time. Fast shooting guns would of coarse be a bit less accurate but in this case it would make it more likely you will at lest land some hits agents small targets and agents large ones the dispersion would be less then the size the ship.

 

[Winterhome]

Most sniper cannons would have a vary tight spread. Any ship you would likely be able to hit with current system you will hit most of the time with this one. The difference in spread is mostly so that when we do hit the ship its not in the exact same spot on the ship all the time. Fast shooting guns would of coarse be a bit less accurate but in this case it would make it more likely you will at lest land some hits agents small targets and agents large ones the dispersion would be less then the size the ship.

Nobody in their right mind uses sniper cannons. They always have been and always will be crap until they get a default zoom feature, target lead indication, and a high blast radius - all at the same time.

If you can't manually hit a target and manually spread out your impacts by shaking your mouse around, that's your problem, not mine.

 

[PIE_OF_DOOM]

Yes I can move my mouse around but that kinda defeats the point about accuracy. Also my idea would help solve the problems with shot gun AMC and maybe reduce the dependence on cannon arrays. Also this could be a changeable setting so if you really don't like it then you can change the max dispersion to 0 and have the current system. This would add more dynamics to the game and there would be no harm in having a changeable setting.

 

[Winterhome]

There are reasons why shotguns do not have random spread as it is, code related and lag related, to my understanding. Shotguns could be helped if they were given a narrower spread and an even scatter of projectiles rather than the vague attempt at randomization we have right now, and it wouldn't even be a problematic cause of lag.

People have reasons for using scatter cannons that have nothing to do with "being more likely to hit the target". Scatter cannons are by default weaker against even lightly armored ships than cannons with low numbers of outputs, and if you're able to hit with a hundred outputs, you can hit with one just as easily unless for some bizarre reason you've opted to spread your weapons outputs out by over a hundred meters in each direction.

 

[PIE_OF_DOOM]

There are reasons why shotguns do not have random spread as it is, code related and lag related, to my understanding. Shotguns could be helped if they were given a narrower spread and an even scatter of projectiles rather than the vague attempt at randomization we have right now, and it wouldn't even be a problematic cause of lag.

People have reasons for using scatter cannons that have nothing to do with "being more likely to hit the target". Scatter cannons are by default weaker against even lightly armored ships than cannons with low numbers of outputs, and if you're able to hit with a hundred outputs, you can hit with one just as easily unless for some bizarre reason you've opted to spread your weapons outputs out by over a hundred meters in each direction.

Still missing the point that this can be a config value. I tested the cannon shot gun and atm there is NO randomization. The shots always go at the same angle away from the barrel. Also my normal cannon array size for a large ship is something like 5 outputs because there is absolutely no spread. With the spread you would more likely do more damage then just a single line into a ship and be more likely to get some hits agents a bunch of small ships by just aiming at them from a distance. And lets say you do decide to do an array then at least you don't get a completely unnatural checkerboard pattern in the other ship but instead have a proper hole. Also as for lag, many games use a Gaussian Dispersion to simulate accuracy and some of these games don't have the advantage of a block grid. To say that there would be more lag due to this is like saying theirs a large difference in lag between a 5 block ship and a 6 block ship. If there is any increases in lag it would be vary small and likely this system would decrease it in some cases.

 

[Lecic]

"There are some suggestions that are so bad on a core level, that you just need to say "no.""

this system would decrease it in some cases.

And it would go about doing that... how, exactly?

 

[PIE_OF_DOOM]

"There are some suggestions that are so bad on a core level, that you just need to say "no.""

Can you explain more plez because I'm not suggesting a horrible dispersion and I don't got the equations or graphs to properly show what I mean. I'm looking mostly for a config for it so we could have accuracy matter more. The config dose not have to be used by default unless the devs think they have really good settings for it.

 

[Crashmaster]

...its to predictable where your shots will go and it kinda kills the idea of aim. It would be alot easier to aim in a general area with a shoot gun or a machine gun with Gaussian Dispersion then it is currently...

Your thesis is flawed;
1. the purpose of aim is predicting where your shots will go
2. it is not easier to aim a less accurate weapon, you are confusing easier with lowered expectations

 

[Lecic]

Can you explain more plez because I'm not suggesting a horrible dispersion and I don't got the equations or graphs to properly show what I mean. I'm looking mostly for a config for it so we could have accuracy matter more. The config dose not have to be used by default unless the devs think they have really good settings for it.

Making the weapons less accurate does not improve accuracy. The entire concept of this suggestion is flawed at a core level.

 

[PIE_OF_DOOM]

Your thesis is flawed;
1. the purpose of aim is predicting where your shots will go
2. it is not easier to aim a less accurate weapon, you are confusing easier with lowered expectations

Sorry I kinda suck at explaining. I mostly want people to consider the Idea of a dispersion but I may not have presented it well. That dose not mean the idea is bad but that I just suck at English. I'm mostly under the bit of it feels unrealistic to have pixel like accuracy.

If you want more info on it plez look up Gaussian Dispersion as I can't really describe it well.

 

[Lecic]

it feels unrealistic

This is not a realistic game.

 

[PIE_OF_DOOM]

Making the weapons less accurate does not improve accuracy. The entire concept of this suggestion is flawed at a core level.

Ok if you ever played Halo the sniper in it is really accurate. This is to the point that you will often miss just because it is to liner. If there was more dispersion then you would likely hit something more often rather then miss by a inch.
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This is not a realistic game.

So why can't this be something that's in the config where you can turn it on or off.

 

[Winterhome]

from the sounds of it he's trying to apply hitscan logic to projectile weapons in a space game - and hitscan logic flat out doesn't work when there aren't boundaries and skyboxes at a set distance to bounce line of sight checks off of

either that or the bullets fucking curve mid flight

I've worked with random projectile dispersion before, and believe me, it makes for a HUGE amount of extra lag. You're pulling three random numbers, multiplying them by a given value, and adding them to the projectile for every single projectile fired. That generally more than doubles or triples the amount of code involved, depending on how projectile spawning is handled.

 

[Crashmaster]

Hmm, can you think of a technical, realistic reason why magnetically accelerated anti-matter would randomly diverge a detectable amount from it's course in a vacuum?

 

[Winterhome]

Hmm, can you think of a technical, realistic reason why magnetically accelerated anti-matter would randomly diverge a detectable amount from it's course in a vacuum?

it wouldn't

it would gradually annihilate as it encounters particles in the cosmic medium and dissipate in a small radiation burst after destabilizing too much

 

[PIE_OF_DOOM]

Hmm, can you think of a technical, realistic reason why magnetically accelerated anti-matter would randomly diverge a detectable amount from it's course in a vacuum?

Imperfections in the gun. Quantum fluctuation in the magnetic fields. Collations with virtual partials.

 

[Crashmaster]

Gun imperfections perhaps, but at our current technology of linear acceleration, even for such mundane tasks as healthcare, accuracy is already sub-millimeter.

 

[PIE_OF_DOOM]

Gun imperfections perhaps, but at our current technology of linear acceleration, even for such mundane tasks as healthcare, accuracy is already sub-millimeter.

Sub-millimeter makes a difference in the large scale of space. Ok maybe a better way to look at what I'm saying is to have a max dispersion at a max distance. Then a Gaussian Dispersion is used to get the grouping of the shots at that distance. When the cannon fires it go's in a strait line to the point on the Dispersion at max distance. So Dispersion would be nil at close range where at max distance it is still likely under 20 blocks. Now this max distance I'm thinking of is like 5000 so 20 blocks aint much and you are more likely to get the lucky hit on a small ship at that range with fast shooting AMC. And again this could be a server config so it CAN BE TURNED OFF. By default I'm thinking of a vary small dispersion to avoid to much of a hit to accuracy.