well i had a razer before... was called "death adder" or sth. like that... like the fact that the buttons are very huge and it's nicely balanced.. plus, never before have i had a mouse with buttons that are SO easy to click...

...UNTIL i had the chance to test the G9.... just top-of-the-line...
i know it's still quite expensive but lemme tell y'all: it's worth it!!! and i guarantee u improve your aiming-skills as wel (its 3200 dpi will help you8))


oh and i still have the Razer "exactMat x control" mousepad with a silicon surface... another explicit recommendation

btw used do be in a set with the death adder back then ^^ so look out for bargains

Ok since this a 'help and advice' thread and not just about mice, here's my question:
Has it ever happened to you before that you're in a Hellbender and switch to the rear turret, but the shot you fire hits a place which is totally not where your crosshair is? It's gay because I don't hit anything and it gives away my position.

hekamephi wrote:
Ok since this a 'help and advice' thread and not just about mice, here's my question:
Has it ever happened to you before that you're in a Hellbender and switch to the rear turret, but the shot you fire hits a place which is totally not where your crosshair is? It's gay because I don't hit anything and it gives away my position.


it happens almost all the time. and i don't know why. i think one of the reasons may be the bender's position stopped on a slope. if u move it on a plane terrain, you'll shoot the crosshair

Actually, when this happens it affects the perceived origin of shots from both the skymines and the twin beams seat. The problem occurs when the server and your local client have different information of where exactly your bender's position is after it stopped moving and it's probably due to packet loss. You see, coordination between the two works with sent and received packets, but that only happens during travel, so if minor movement happened as you were switching to a weapon seat and the bender was coming to a stop, it's possible that the server's simulation of the physics and that of your own running game won't agree completely of the vec's final position. In the end, however, there's not two rights about this, only the server's opinion matters (in UT games, everything is simulated and coordinated server-side), so if your screen's showing something other than what the server knows to be the truth, tough luck for you, you'll be firing your twin beams from a false point of origin. Funny thing is, if you think aiming offset at twin beams is a crappy deal, try finding and getting back in your previously drifting away raptor when the server has a COMPLETELY different idea of where it is vs. your own client (you're just walking around where you see the raptor like an idiot then, hitting the enter key all the time hoping that it'll let you in somewhere near that).

Anyways, long story short, there's only two choices if you see that happening: either quickly get out and in the vec again (at which point the server will recommunicate the "right" information to your client and you'll be adjusted) or just compensate for that drift as well (like snipers do for long shots based on prevailing winds :p), kinda like when you go to the arcades to play a cool shoot-'em-up game and the aiming's a bit off because of muck on the gun's IR emitter; you get used to it after a few minutes and keep playing.

3rd option (which btw is NOT very elegant and I'm not even sure if it works 100%): try to stop bender slowly - do not change seats in full throttle... what I am tryna say is: stop the bender to 0 miles an hour and THEN change seats...

it works for me.


__________

my question would be: is it only me or do the flares of the cicada simply do not work?! missile is locked, i fire the flares ---> missile hits nevertheless... that sucks!

__________


another questions and I know it's noobish but since i don't play UT for years and i'm too lazy right now to google it - what's the best method to get down the paladin shield w/o having a vehicle?

Yeah, the server communicates a lot with the client. The server uses in UnrealScript "functions" and the clientside things are "simulated functions".

I was writing a long example now, but I exceeded the post-length of this board and all was unrecoverably gone.

So instead i'll just link this informative link about Ticks in the Unreal Engine: http://wiki.beyondunreal.com/Legacy:Unreal_Engine_Core#The_tick


To come back to the problem: The server isn't calculating the coordinates all the time, to save performance. Coordinates for vehicles are only updated, if the player is inside the vehicle, or if the vehicle takes damage. This leads in example to the following problem as an example: Vehicles aren't affected by lifts, if the players exit them to activate the lift - they'll just fall through.
Now one (not very common) way for a mapper to get around this problem is, by putting a volume around the lift zone, that deals 0.0000001 damage to everything inside it. Though the engine will round this value to 0, it is still enough to activate the collision of the vehicle, so that the coordinates would be updated. The vehicle could this way use lifts, without needing a player inside it.

Now back to the real twinbeam-problem. Above I said, that the coordinates are updated, whenever the player is inside the vehicle. Now, why are they not recalculated, when the player is in the skymine-launcher, or the twinbeam-turret?
You have to imagine the that the vehicle consists of multiple parts. The chassis has a collision-hull, the turrets are Pawns, that are attached to it. Their coordinate depends only on the chassis. They also don't have the kind of collision, that is necessary for vehicles to collide with objects, only such for calculating that they were hit. The turrets (pawns) are some kind of containers for the player. When he switches to one them, he'll be drawn inside and is no longer inside the vehicle itself. So the vehicle itself is empty and coordinates won't update. And since the turrets' coordinates are only depending on the vehicle, they will also stay wrong.


I hope you know now a bit, how the engine works.


And Peg, I'd be careful when talking about "physic" in combination with "online". Karma-objects will get their position updated from the server, but the players won't see their position. That's an issue with the engine. However thanks to a great scripter from the community with unknown name is it possible to have them working though. He wrote a "Karma online"-script.
But vehicles don't use real engine-physic. They are sVehicles (s for static, I guess). The only real kVehicle (k for Karma) was the bulldog from UT2k3, but it never made it was removed from 2k4, probably because of these too complicated physic-issues. It had all it's wheels calculated seperately, now with the current vehicles the wheels are just eye-candy.

ok we appreciate your posts


so, when we'll have the drunk-crosshair problem again, we will eject from the vehicle and re-enter. that should do the trick

a) here's one more: why i have this cicada-bug? i jump into cicada, and the next moment i'm kicked off the game returning to windows

(see post #15 questions too)

new edit/questions:

b) why are we falling if we ride on manta's wings? it's a bug or just the way things work.
c) what must i do to be kept more time logged in on this GT account?

thomasito wrote:
3rd option (which btw is NOT very elegant and I'm not even sure if it works 100%): try to stop bender slowly - do not change seats in full throttle... what I am tryna say is: stop the bender to 0 miles an hour and THEN change seats...

it works for me.


__________

my question would be: is it only me or do the flares of the cicada simply do not work?! missile is locked, i fire the flares ---> missile hits nevertheless... that sucks!

__________


another questions and I know it's noobish but since i don't play UT for years and i'm too lazy right now to google it - what's the best method to get down the paladin shield w/o having a vehicle?




Flares only work for AVRiL-missiles, those from Raptors still lock and hit without being affected.


The best way to take out a Paladin by foot is either getting on a good position higher than it and shoot with flak chunks over the shield, or shoot an AVRiL above it and lock the target when the missile is over the shield.



@ Hunt:
Cicada-bug: Don't know, never had it. Do you get an error message? Maybe you are missing a certain Cicada-related file (probably a sound file or something). Maybe try to install the ECE-pack again.


Manta: This is the collision-box of the Manta:

http://img36.imageshack.us/img36/6173/manta.jpg

The violet boxes are responsible for player-collision. If you get too close on an edge, you fall… it is just so, so try to stay in the middle. You don't always fall, but it depens on the driving. The engine works with almost the same gravity-system as the earth. The acceleration in direction of the z-axis is -950. So it's naturally to fall of at high speed.


Gametracker-account: You can't do anything about it. Even if you keep the cookie forever, the "Remember Me"-button will only give the cookie a short validity. Other forums do it better, there the cookie is valid for almost forever.
Only way to make it faster to login is to let Firefox save your password, but that's unsafe on the other hand.

crusha_k_rool wrote:
[...]Peg, I'd be careful when talking about "physic" in combination with "online". Karma-objects will get their position updated from the server, but the players won't see their position. That's an issue with the engine. However thanks to a great scripter from the community with unknown name is it possible to have them working though. He wrote a "Karma online"-script.[...]Yes, phrasing it that way was probably misinforming, sorry 'bout that.


thomasito wrote:
[...]my question would be: is it only me or do the flares of the cicada simply do not work?! missile is locked, i fire the flares ---> missile hits nevertheless... that sucks![...]Like Crusha said, flares will only fool avrils, but I think there's one more condition that has to be met for that to work: the 2nd seat gunner must have the warning outline of the incoming avril missile in view before releasing the flare. If anyone knows this to be false, plz correct me.

Few more (potentially helpful) facts about UT2k4's missiles/rockets:
- There's 4 kinds of guided rockers, AVRiLs, raptors' AAs, leviathan AAs and homing rockets from the rocket launcher. AVRiLs do 200pts of damage, AAs do 150hp and each rocket takes off 90pts of health from hit vehicles. The first three will cause an incoming warning text, while the homing rockets are the sneakier kind and can go unnoticed if the driver isn't looking at the right place (3 homing rockets cost 270hp).


Here's another rockets related point I wanna make that's been on my mind recently. Playing Unreal with all the underlying math in mind can make you a better player and a much bigger threat to enemies. For example, a goliath tank has 800hp. A pedestrian player that approaches it from a medium distance and has some helpful geometry to work with wants to destroy it. So what's the best way to do that?

Clearly, the ped has to consider two important factors: maximizing damage and minimizing risk. The biggest amount of hp the ped can knock off is 270 with 3 homing rockets, followed by AVRiLs doing 200 (it goes down from there to 180 by 2 homing rockets, 90 from just 1, then 80 from the flak's shards... snipers do 60, shock does 50, I believe). There are matters of reload timing and making the driver aware they're being attacked to consider as well though, so it's equally improtant to keep them ignorant for as long as possible that an attack is underway. Thus, here's a method that has a pretty good chance of success: you can try firing an avril somewhat high, locking in 3 rockets, then another 3 while the first trio is flying to their target and then switch back to avril to make that missile land as well. That's 740hp of damage with the driver realizing they're not alone only the moment the first 3 rockets hit and then imminently receiving another 470 of damage in the next 1-2 secs while the victim's just starting to try locating the opponent, who should be taking cover behind convenient geometry and guiding the avril. If all's done well, even if the driver does get lucky and figures out where the avril came from (remember, it'll be coming down on the goliath from a different direction than where its shooter is), the attacker can then just switch to a sniper or shock hitscan and finish things instantly.

Now, note that this method ensures that most of all the tank is taken out, but if you're more interested in getting its driver dead (by the time the tank's down to 60hp, most ppl will get the message that there's not much of a future for that vec and bail out), that plan should be a bit reordered so that the driver's lulled into a false sense of security up to the final blow (most ppl don't jump off a tank just because it started smoking a bit, right?). Ideally, there, you'll want to deliver the biggest hp hit at the end, so the hitting order should be more like 3rox, avril, snipe, 3rox.

Anyways, another rant done, hope this helps ppl on the battlefield.

Double posting cause I broke the max text limit, lulz.


thomasito wrote:
[...]what's the best method to get down the paladin shield w/o having a vehicle?I'd like to ask a variation of this myself. What are the best weapons you should use while on foot to drain an enemy pally's shield as fast as possible? Is the shield comparable to tank armour or nodes? Should I be spamming link gun plasma and similar energy ammo or armour-killing stuff like rockets and flak? Understandably, this doesn't happen too often, but it helps to know.