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Messages - TDS
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61
« on: April 21, 2016, 08:58:11 AM »
I wasn't entirely sure, When I can get back to my home computer I'll try and post pictures and sketches as it's literally all just sketches
https://gametechmods.com/uploads/images/2979IMG_0577[1].JPG
Here it is, sorry it took so long!
The link didn't quite work. Try putting ['img'] between the link instead, without the quotation marks. Kinda like this:
['IMG']https://gametechmods.com/uploads/images/30304157315.jpg[/'IMG']
Besides telling you that, I don't think I can be much help towards your robot building. Sorry.
the [1] in the name broke the code, you have to cut and paste it, but it works. Here's what I'll suggest for your first real robot. 1: get dimensions of everything, cut those dimensions out of cardboard and lay it out, you can also do this in draftsight or fusion360, but meat space is easier 2: 4 bar lifters are tricky geometry-wise but not undoable, again, make it out of cardboard and/or wood to figure out your geometry 3: chains/belts can be a pain in the butt because your first bot will likely not be perfectly aligned, as soon as something bends you are in trouble 4: support the output of your drill motors on both sides of the wheel with a bushing or bearing or else that plastic gearbox will likely break 5: aim to be at least 10% underweight, you won't be, but it gives you a good buffer I'd also suggest not going the drillmotor 12/30pounder route, as it can end up being expensive, you can get a decent 3pounder together for around a hundred bucks, figure out what events you can actually make it to before dedicating to a weight class (look into buildersdb event history)
62
« on: April 21, 2016, 08:47:29 AM »
B- *mumbles a famous robot with lifting arm under his breath*
But on a serious note, I was thinking of a system where flat areas on a robot's chassis could be separated at the connecting lines (I don't know what they are called) and re-attached via "hinges" allowing connector joints to be attached allowing that otherwise simple slab of armour to be used outside of just being a slab of amour.
It's really unlikely you'll be able to have two attachment points in one chain of components on the chasis for something like a 4 bar lifter, it is just too finicky and it would be too difficult for your average player to make something that doesn't bind up, if you /can/ have two anchors on the chassis though, it opens up a universe of possibilities in making really cool, complicated mechs. where you could make pseudo gearing out of axles and extenders for awesome flippers, hammers, ect. I /think/ I remember hearing hinges were in, you could do what you describe with clever use of axles in ra2 and components. But they have been pretty adamant about the body system being very close to ra2, no crushing in sides or detaching parts, holes, slots, ect ect.
63
« on: April 20, 2016, 09:05:39 AM »
I'm not sure people want lifting arms. Never heard them mentioned here.
Everyone wants /more/ lifters quickly become flippers or launchers, or something like that. It all boils down to how they do motor shafts and pistons, if those are finicky like RA2 you're in trouble, if they apply forces correctly we can do whatever. What will be interesting for me is where the balance ends up, Like ive said if we come up with scales for everything (motor power to battery usage, armor HP to weapon hp, traction VS wheel weight or diameter ect. ect. ect.) and slightly move those around every few tourneys, (probably via simple scripts) we could have a very interesting metagame that will keep folks engaged and playing/experimenting instead of coming up with one apex design and sticking with it.
64
« on: April 20, 2016, 09:01:46 AM »
I mean technically yeah, there is a finite amount of places you can place a component and those places are align in a grid-like pattern, but there are so many places that it's not really worth calling a grid system.
Even CAD programs typically use a grid or snapping for rough handing/aligning if you aren't typing in dims, its just too finicky otherwise, which we've experienced, if I were using a gridish system i'd expect the grid size to be like 1/10-1/20th of a motor or so, small enough that you don't really notice it and would be able to manually nudge one grid location at a time and line stuff up, but not so small that you'd spend so much time screwing around like RA2 which went to silly levels, except rotation where you had pretty limited control.
65
« on: April 19, 2016, 01:24:14 PM »
Forcing a snap to grid system for components would kill the game
It's already snap to grid, just the grid size is too small.
66
« on: April 19, 2016, 08:44:05 AM »
being able to edit the chasis after placing parts is great
No mirroring or anything is not, hopefully there's some kind of snap to grid or some other such alignment, I really don't want to get into manually editing bots via text editor.
Really, any mechanic that turns building into less or no squinting while trying to line sh** up pixel perfect so that the thing drives straight is a plus.
I hope there's some kind of sanity check that looks for illegal part placement and such if they are going to have multiplayer and allow manual bot editing >.>
67
« on: April 15, 2016, 10:29:32 AM »
I believe they said true pyramid bots aren't possible, but a builder could bring the vertices of their chassis really, really close together for a similar effect.
You cant combine vertex's into one, so a "true" pyramid you can't do But just like RA2, you can get them so infinitely close that for all purposes, it is a pyramid. Its not known if RA3 prevents extreme angles in some situations so that the skinning system doesn't freak out.
68
« on: April 11, 2016, 10:37:24 PM »
It depends how they code the physics, since all objects are rigid in RA2 they made all the shafts flexible (or else it would have been boring with impacts not doing anything) physics explosions were just the engine being unable to carry zeros and deal with bad things happening.
I've got to assume modern systems are more stable, I've made some bonkers stuff in games like besiege that dont detonate all the tim, as long as the energy levels are high enough for fights to not be boring, but not so high you cant control anything, there's no reason to not just have shafts and hinges be on impossible to move rotation axis's, so stuff that would cause detonations like spinners on spinners "could" be doable.
I'm just hoping whatever bugs show up, and there will be a bunch, won't be gamebreaking, or can be modded into reasonableness.
69
« on: April 11, 2016, 07:02:36 PM »
in the video you can see that we will be able to relocate components even when there's another one is attached to it. pretty sure you can edit the chassis during building as well then. even though those two things are not related
We'll see, what they seemed to show was a copy + paste, I'd like the ability to make a radial array or mirroring from one side to the other, like say you make a triangle body and want a spike at each corner, it's a /tremendous/ pain in the ass. At least have visible coordinates so you can tell if the parts are lined up. Also no more motors with offset shafts from the centerline >.>
70
« on: April 11, 2016, 01:45:40 PM »
Did they skip QA 3 ?
No
Hm, apparently on my phone I could only see 2 and 4 Here's hoping there's a motor that doesn't backdrive (like the old servo motor) ... if so I may have an evil plan that was just too big and heavy for ra2 vanilla. I hope to god there's some sort of mirror or rotate functionality, lining sh** up and rebuilding a chasis over and over so everything fits took like 90% of my build time.
71
« on: April 11, 2016, 07:52:07 AM »
Did they skip QA 3 ?
72
« on: April 06, 2016, 09:07:54 AM »
Maybe reduce the damage weapons do the longer it contacts with weapon/chassis ? It wouldn't affect power-based spinners and make gutrippers useless since usually they need prolonged contact with the chassis to do anything.
Proper damage modeling is tough, I think a better way of doing it is to not actually do it, and let the physics engine do the heavy lifting (lets go ahead and admit the phyx guys are likely better at their profession than outsourced programmers) so on impact, you dont immediately apply damage, you wait a fraction of a second, then the game looks back simply put: "well the impact happened, now the chassis is traveling at X speed upwards, the lifter is traveling at Y speed still, the difference between the two is energy imparted, calculate that into damage. It would also really turn angled armor into a thing, since deflecting the force of a hit would result in less damage (not more damage like ra2, where if the weapon keeps spinning it's going to hit you more times and do more and more damage (see DA)) But you're right, crushing/rigidity of the structure wont work (but really, there has only been one "good" hydraulic crusher EVER) the minimum entry for doing damage should be a little higher than ra2, "well I have a weapon on the front and i'm sort of pinning a guy" shouldn't be a free ticket for infinite damage until the weapon breaks off. You really don't do much damage spinning your wheels against someone with a spike on the front in real life. simply put, what if instead of having tremendously higher HP, bigger, tougher components had higher amounts of damage reduction. I have a big half inch thick steel wedge, the first 200 damage of a hit, just doesn't happen, ex: if you do 220 damage, I take 20, if you do 1000, I take 800, ect. this pushes people more towards bigger weapons and not a million small ones, but would require tighter balance.
73
« on: April 04, 2016, 07:38:54 PM »
Please tell me we're talking 1x10kg weapon should do more damage than 10x1kg weapons, not more damage than 10x10kg weapons?
We're talking about exactly what I posted if I have a 90 pound bar with 10 little 1 pound teeth at the end, it would actually do less damage than a 100 pound bar in real life because the impact is spread out between 5 little spots instead of one little spot. In robot arena 2, dealing maximum damage was all about getting as many small weapon tips to impact at the same time as possible, which makes absolutely no sense. Yes a 30kg weapon did more damage than a 10kg weapon, but it did dramatically less than 3 10kg weapons. or a handful of even smaller ones, its compounded by a bunch of things. Like if you go weapon to weapon and hit eachother equally, a small weapon might hit for 1000 but it only has 100hp, then snap off, basically giving you 900 "free" damage that didnt count weightwise, a larger one is not going to be able to frontload anywhere near as well.
74
« on: April 04, 2016, 04:02:53 PM »
Maybe I'm overlooking something but I'm not sure why that'd change anything, it's like a hammer hidden in the chassis.
You hit the chasis with a weapon going 10mph, it does 10 damage but... You hit the chasis with ten weapons going 10mph, total weight/energy is the same, it does 100 damage because each weapon does individual damage based on speed In real life it would deal /less/ damage since you have the same amount of force being distributed across a greater area.
75
« on: April 03, 2016, 10:07:28 AM »
>Is there a limit to chaining components together, a rule of 7 components chained in a row?
There is no limit currently defined, nor do we intend to provide a limit initially. Testing every permutation and combination of components would take quite a long time and we don't want to set an arbitrary limit. We want the user to be able to experiment with the bot creation as much as possible and discover what inherent limitations there are. What does that mean? Well let's say you chain 100 components together and it works, that's awesome, if you add the 101st component and the physics fail and things fly apart, well "The more you know".
>Will there be belts or chains?
The short answer is no. The longer answer is that while we don't intend to have belts or chains for the aesthetic side of bot creation, we will have smaller motors that will attach to the end of extenders that can accomplish things similar to what a belt and chain might.
Ugh...
I'm not liking this idea of balance in my mind, the only thing I can think of to counteract the kind of tremendous spam this will seem to spawn would be to have damage chain backwards through the components, so maybe the part that gets hit takes 100% damage then the next part takes half of that then the next half of that and on and on, or something, I dont know, tiny motors powerful enough to use on infinite chains is just... O_o yo dog I heard you like spinners on your spinners.
Maybe balance it with batteries? They were kind of an afterthought in ra2, I'm still thinking something like. (in addition to capacity like ra2)
-torque from your motors turns into "heat" units (less at full spin, more when spinning up, basically amps)
-each battery eats however many heat units per second, more batteries eat more heat per second, bigger batteries more efficient than more smaller ones
-too much heat, maybe rapidly decrease capacity (batteries burning up)? chassis or internal parts damage(?)
It just doesn't seem like robot fighting without robots battery/motor fires or really pushing players to really flirt with that red line of self destruction.
where did you guys send your questions in?
76
« on: April 01, 2016, 12:20:00 PM »
I have a feeling, looking at what we have here, that walkerbots won't be viable. But they might surprise us.
Also hey it's ACAMS again :D Been a loooooong time.
It's entirely on if the tourneys we run allow a weight bonus for them or what, it would be virtually impossible to program in a walker weight bonus that couldn't be exploited greatly. It'll be interesting to see how they are doing lever/lifter/ect. forces and such, I have a few RA2 ideas that never panned out since the only way for them to work was the funky dunky servo drive
77
« on: March 28, 2016, 08:15:49 AM »
I know this is too much to ask but why don't you guys just wait to see how the game will be?
I trust Mr. Zoss and Click with the things they've said. I'm still scepitcal about some things as well but let's just wait and see. Even if RA3 is just an updated version of RA2 I wouln't mind.
-hypehype
Thats pretty much all i'm expecting, which is fine, as long as the mod tools are open ended enough and the whole thing doesn't break down at high rpm/speeds/ect. because I think everyone can agree that having to deal with stability and centrifugal force in mods with the powerful motors was more fun than the mostly boring spinners of vanilla It's also not exactly rocket science to stop "massive" physics explosions these days :) But I think you need the flexible shaft attachment points or else you need to model materials flexing (or the impacts get uninteresting because nothing really happens) I'm hoping that the stacked motor spinner bug isn't in this one. I'm also hoping for a control type that lets us adjust throttle without a wacky joystick controller or something, full on/full off doesn't really happen anymore unless you want your batteries and such bursting into flames and would be way too squirrely for drive. ... Now that I think about it, pushing your batteries too far and causing fires inside your robot would be relatively simple to do (each battery has a max amp draw, dont exceed it or add more batteries) and awesome, and could be a strong balance measure to push people away from the many many rotor spinners.
78
« on: March 26, 2016, 08:20:39 AM »
You guy's do know I am old and the oil field shut down and I haven't worked for 1 1/2 years ........ what are you guys gonna do when my savings run out?
We can hope you stop being a welfare queen before that happens? :)
79
« on: March 25, 2016, 01:35:39 PM »
Gtm will be mentioned somewhere as it is the forum for it
Beats having to support your own community! :)
80
« on: March 24, 2016, 09:46:26 AM »
I don't think much can be said about the physics using what we have, both robots use car steering axles so the fact the bots have turning circles (and would seem to be sliding because we can't see the wheels underneath the chassis) has to be discarded.
So back on track, i'm gonna have to agree here after looking at the trailer again. We definitely didn't have sliding bots with car steering before, and definitely not with the speed it they seem to have in RA3 here. So if the robot is sliding while turning, it's got more physics do it than we've ever had before. [/quote] The way the chasis seems to bebop slightly, the way the spinner appears to "push" away from the wall in a way that would not work if real, and the snappyness of the turn leads me to think its the same physics tricks as before, if you've ever driven a larger bot before, once they reach the kind of speed you see on average in RA, they operate like boats, steel floors are a son of a bitch for turning :)
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