MechWarrior 2: Resource Forum

Well, I can guarantee that video we saw was not 'entirely' in game. I watched it at least a dozen times, and although it uses in game models, and was probably rendered through their engine, it has definitely had post processing work done on it. My guess is this is a demo to show off some of what the final game could be, in hopes of attracting a publisher, and building hype.

Heres some of the red flags that come up in my mind:
- A the polished quality for a game only 1 year in production is amazing, not undoable, but highly unlikely
- A refined UI system like this is usually the last thing to go in
- Opaque full screen smoke/fog during the atlas reveal would drop the framefrate to an unplayable level, especially if they are using deferred rendering

For example, here is a commercial I worked on for the last TR game. It too was 'in game' footage. Everything but the FX were the actual in game assets, rendered in our engine. Our proccess was to crank the quality/resolution to the point where we had about 1fps, capture the sequence (with zdepth maps) and pass that off to maya where all the fx were done. Once all the layers were rendered out it was composited and colour corrected on an inferno.

http://mikeoliver.ca/temp/Tr8Trailer_sm.mov - 80mb

So in conclusion, Im still very excited, Im sure the game will be fantastic, but take these videos with a grain of salt. There is still a lot of smoke and mirrors happening at this stage.

Cheers
Mike

skyros wrote:take these videos with a grain of salt.

Very interesting. Thanks for posting this. You may be right that this wasn't entirely ingame footage. Simple distance-based, look-up-tabled smoke and nebula are easy to do, but they were showing animated volumetric effects. On the other hand, efforts are underway to bring real time raytracing to the masses, and I've heard that a cluster of PCs might just be capable of rendering this stuff in real time, provided that the smoke clouds are precomputed. Some stuff they showed could be taken from one of their Transformers games.

I also wonder if they're going for a MechAssault action game or MechWarrior sim. Both could reasonably fit into a single engine. Bethesda left a single element of round-based combat in their Fallout 3 game, the Vault-assisted targetting system.

Well for starters they used the Unreal-3 engine, which shaves off alot of time on having to build a game engine from ground up. However this dose raise some questions and concerns with me since the Unreal-3 engine is nothing like MW2 MW3 or even ..... MW4. However i belive with the right modifacations you could turn that game engine into a nice MechWarrior gaming experance equvalent to the past.

I belive that we could render such smoke effects with the more modern videocards, especially with the new SLI and Cross-Fire setups. So if one had enough money to spend on a set of these cards it would possibly work. If we take a look at Doom3 which is real works the crap out of your video cards with the lighting effects (Doom3 was designed to work with lots of lighting effects and transfer all the work to the vid card(s)), at full detail and resolution (1600x1200) i can run it rather smoothly with just one of my GeForce 9800 GX2s with an acceptable FPS to make gameplay enjoyable. But to even 'ulock' the "Ultra-High Detail" levels in Doom3 as well as Quake4 (and several other games) you need a videocard with on-board RAM of 512MB or higher. So it would not be too hard to just dull down these effcts into more of just a cheesey cloud haze/fog for lower graphics cards, as well as the other 3D detail renderings and textures. But yes it would take a rather monsterous performance-PC to run such high-end graphics and FX at a high resolution. I have yet to see a game take use of multi-core CPUs, this could be the one boys

I belive it is very possible to encorperate a keyboard as well as a mouse or special joystick for this game on the xBox 360, most modern consols are jsut the same as a computer now days and surly could be updated. Why not? If you can get a PS2 to run the Linux O/S surly you could make a 'driver update' for the xBox to encorperate a keyboard and mouse (or other hardware) for a simulator style game such as MW that takes a multitude of control functions.
However they were jsut tossing arround the idea, and mentioned that the game engine they were useing was compadable with the xBox 360, they never made it clear that they will produce it for the xBox or any other consol as of yet.

I belive I read or heard them menthion that that was just a brief "overview" of your damage, with future plans to expand this into detail or place a more detailed display in the cockpit. I do belive what we see right now is just an early stage developmental prelude to the game (mostly designed to entice a publisher), so the final product will be differant. So it still has a chance to turn out to be our wet-dream of a MechWarrior game. ...Or it could just make us sick that we wasted about $50 to $60 on some stupid game with the title "MechWarrior".
But after all looking back at it i had some pritty fun times playing online in MW4, dispite all the bad changes M$ made to it that i really did not care for and all the things they could have done better. For one thing i was not at all impressed with the graphics, I felt it was almost a step down from MW3. When i first sat down and played MW4 it felt like they supercharged Earth-Siege and tried to turn it into MechWarrior, then we had some other issues such as the insta-hit lasers, as well as getting knocked arround by a bombardment of photions when you got hit by the lasers (WTF?), and if you had the fancy Force-Feedback Sidwinder Joystick when you fired the lasers you wild feel a recoil (agin WTF? my flashlight has yet to kick back when i turn it on). the only upward jumpjets (the only neat part was that your aim was unsteady while firing your JJs, which reflected upon B'Tech). ...Yea... We could all go on for hours about this.

LordNova2 wrote:Well for starters they used the Unreal-3 engine, which shaves off alot of time on having to build a game engine from ground up. However this dose raise some questions and concerns with me since the Unreal-3 engine is nothing like MW2 MW3 or even ..... MW4.

I have had first hand experiance with UE3 playing the Gears of War games. In my opinion, an engine that is all about destruction, debris, (and gorey realism), would make perfect for a mech game with crumbling buildings and blown-off mech limbs.

I was more less refering to the intracate details of locations (HTAL) and thier respective criticals, ammo critical explosions (heat and damage), weapons exploding via damage... As well as the control functional of a BattleMech (jumpjects, MASC, TSM...) and other things such as the radar light amplifacation/infra-red. Are such things stock to the Unreal3 engine?

No they are not, but there is nothing at all preventing them from being included. The Unreal Engine 3 variant that MW4 is being built around is probably little more than a renderer and physics engine. Everything else is provided by the game coders themselves. If the developers want those things, they will code those things. The Quake III Arena engine did not come stock with lightsaber combat moves, Force powers, and single-player AI but Raven Software added those things for Jedi Outcast and Jedi Academy. Keep in mind that this game is probably not even 10% complete.

then we had some other issues such as the insta-hit lasers

Lasers travel at the speed of light, 1,079,252,849 km/h, at mech combat ranges they are effectively instant hit. Official BattleTech sources like Technical Readout 3050 depict them as continuous beams. MW2, as an adaptation of BattleTech, is in error by depicting them as slow-moving bolts.

as well as getting knocked arround by a bombardment of photions when you got hit by the lasers (WTF?)

Lasers would cause layers on the outer surface of your mech's armor to superheat and explode. The explosion would cause a shockwave which could knock around your mech.

Good point with the armor exploding, i always had the image of it melting away the armor. But since this stuff is super-hardened it might crackle and explode a little bit. But even with that fact given i would not see it knocking your aim off like in MW4, it felt like i was getting mule-kicked by a quad.

"Insta-Hit" meaning that you donot have a prolonged beam like in MW3 that you have to hold on the target. As soon as you pull the trigger it is either all hit or all miss. I know MW2 was poor at depicting the weapons, the PPCs was this slow moveing blue floating funky orb (better looking in the early versioan then the 3DFX ones), when in actuallyity it should have been a beam like a laser.

BTW are you useing the original FASA 3050TRO or one of the newer ones? I have the original and i donot see such a discription depicting lasers.

Actually if you've read the novels, Armor does melt when taking hits from Lasers (and crack and explode)

here is the original 3050 cover

The version I posted was the 3050 Upgrade then. Whatever, it's still official Battletech artwork put out by the people maintaining the game.

I was just wondering which one you had. I have original FASA materials for the TROs. Anymore they are nice for collecting, but they do lack some of the extra materials and such that is in the newer stuff. However my TRO does not look like that, BattleTech is in all white letters, not that gradient brass looking lettering, and "The Return of Kerensky" is in a white box with brown letters. (Copyright 1990). That photo is the one printed in 1996. Unfortunately the only thing I have in hardcopy from WizKids/FanPro and beyond right now is the CBT boxed set (10980). I think that was the last time I bought something from BattleTech that was new, everything else was the old and odd OOP materials that are getting harder and harder to find every day. I am getting off subject a little bit here, perhaps I should start a new topic, kinda interested as to know what everyone else here has in their prized B'Tech collection.

Unfortunately I never got into the novels too much, small text can give me headaches as well as I tend to not move allot while reading which usually leads to lots of neck cramps for me. When you put those factors into it and that allot of writers (not BattleTech writers particularly) tend to put in allot of filler in the book to make it have that extra 100 pages or so, sometimes this can actually lose my short attention span on the words I am reading and so I am thinking about the cramp in my neck or something else and my mind is not absorbing what I am reading. But those few that I have read were good books, one was pure torture because I could not put it down.

I know BattleMech armor is some rather interesting material (from the metallurgy standpoint). When this stuff first came out with the 100t Mackie it was virtually impenetrable by any conventional weapon, due to its superior strength to the current armor as well as BattleMechs contained an inner and outer layer of armor, from my understanding the inner layer was mostly to protect the internals from debris and exploding shards from the outer layer. I would have to take a look through some of my manuals to get exact details on the inner layer but I do not think it was of the same material design as the outer layer (being more soft and malleable).
If a larger area is rapidly heated (like with a PPC blast) it basically explodes off in layers. Most hardened metals would react this way to this effect. even though it may be one solid layer, it sheds in layers due to the way the metal absorbs and reacts to the heat (the super heated area expands and finally pushes itself way from the rest of the mass, when seen in action it looks like the metal is actually exploding). And for a BattleMech this could actually cause enough of a shock to throw your aim off. I have always visualized the beam having an effected area of about a 1.5 to 2 foot on the armor. But I do not have an accurate understanding of the time duration of the particle-beam (if it has to be carefully held upon the target like a laser).
Like I stated before it was my understanding that lasers more or less melted the armor. (guess I learned something about them today) However even though it can cause the armor to crack and explode (which also dose make sense when I think about the nature of the armor), as I have never really read many novels I would depict the beam being about 1-2” in diameter, and having to be held upon the target for a period of time. Which in most cases even though you managed to land the entire shot on the left torso of a mech the beam would have been walked across a large area on the left torso (I would visualize this as being 3-5 foot area for a skilled pilot, giving the fact that both mechs were in motion when the shot was made). And the beam being rather small it would not affect a large enough area to explode and knock your targeted mech around like seen in MW4 (I would still see it as being felt as more of a vibration and knock through your seat rather than a jolt to the entire mech). However my understanding of equipment is more from the scientific and theoretical side of we know now about such things rather than what the B’Tech novels portray them as (and from what I have heard from other people it is rather accurate depictions). If this is incorrect to the novels could you describe what they have to say about this?

I am a little sketchy when it comes to the intricate details of HeatSinks as well, but I know they work more like the radiator in a car(rather than being just strapped on and passively dispersing the heat), I know they have a system of coolant that circulates through them and other components in the mech. But the part I am left in the dark about is their location in relation to the armor, I know the armor dose protect the HS, but it is still possible to damage this system spilling the coolant (I have seen references to this depicting it looking like the mech is bleeding from AC rounds). But if they are complety engulfed by the armor that means in order for the mech to cool off it would have to radiate the heat through the armor (which makes since when you look at how heat buildup will cause internal ammo explosions because it is heating up the inside of the mech). Does anyone have better technical information upon this?
Another aspects of physics that CBT had left out (not sure about some of the more recent materials in the past couple years) is that in space you cannot disperse heat efficiently. Yes the heatsinks would draw the heat way from the components but they would not effectively disperse the heat they have gathered from the components since there is no atmosphere to transfer the heat to.