Da Ghoul2 Blade Collision Thread

[razorace]

I'm going to be working on the blade collisions for a while so I'll try to keep all the data in one place.

 

Spent day testing the ideal settings for the best blade impacts.

 

I've been playing with the server frame rate (sv_fps) and the attack saber trace Box size (g_sabertracebox) and some internals.

 

All testing was done with all the animations running at half speed with a quick hack. As such, the saber are more accurate but there's some animation glitches to the quick hack to slow down the saber swings. I'll fix this later.

 

So far, it's very playable at the standard fps and trace box size (with g_saberghoul2collisions which x3's the box size).

 

However, if you turn down the trace box size at 20 fps, you start having a bad amount of body passthru due to the slower server fps.

 

You can compensate for this by boosting the server fps. Thise does increase the CPU usage but I personally have seen any noticable fps lose in the game. There are advantages and disadvantages to this. I'm not sure about all the impacts of boosting the server fps but I do know the following:

 

1. Smoother/More Ghoul2 Model Updates - better weapon and saber hit detection (especailly the saber detection)

 

2. Isn't nessicarily stable - I haven't had many problems with it (when I'm not doing something weird). There's some commands that will crash the game. For example, the saber testline debugger stuff WILL crash the game very quickly unless you make the g_testline duration to the time difference between frames. (otherwise you're spawning test line entities faster than you're creating them and the game crashes.

 

3. Saber Damage seems to increase. In reality it isn't, but since your saber is updating more often it's spending more time inside of your foes' bodies instead of skipping thru. There's a time on the saber damage to prevent a data overload so there is a top limit to the fps <-> saber damage.

 

4. Bots "click" fasters in saber locks. They'll kick your butt if you got the fps set higher.

 

Basically, the saber system is playable on all the different settings if you tune your settings right. I'm on a dial up so I can't really test the network useage for the increased server fps. The final solution will probably be to let these opinions be up to the host. Power systems will probably want the higher settings while lower end systems can use the lower settings. Either way, you still get much more accuracy out of the new system.

 

The highest end setting you'll probably need is fps 60 with a saber trace box of .3. That's basically a fps of what you're seeing on the screen. With g_saberghoul2collisions on, this results realistic impacts with attack blades the same size as the actual blade.

 

Oh yeah, it should be noted that it's very hard to judge distances with the saber blade. It will often seem like a passthru when you actually missed the target. During testing, I've constantly missed the target by inches.

[razorace]

Well, I figured out the problem for the body passthrus. The attack blade server side is desyncing a bit. I'll try to figure it out tomorrow.

 

Razor Ace