HSharp wrote:QUOTE (HSharp @ Apr 11 2011, 09:59 AM) I know there are a lot of Alleg players who are smart and articulate.
Either none of them are on the hull-conforming hitbox side or maybe even they cannot come up with a logical argument in favour of laggy gameplay with hard to hit ships.
The real trouble I am having is the vets with the better aim and piloting skills are arguing for easier to hit hitboxes while the carebears (with arguably less skill) are arguing for hard to hit, lag inducing, exploitable hitboxes.
Nobody on the hull-conforming side is in favour of laggy gameplay with hard to hit ships. That's kind of the point.
The impression I keep getting from these so-called vets with better aim and piloting skills is, "I'm used to re-centring my aim based on invisible hulls and I don't want to lose my advantage over people who don't know about it." I daresay that's not what they're trying to say, but it keeps jumping out at me like that.
Bleh. I'm going to try to evaluate the situation smartly and articulately using badp's example because his pictures are so terrific and distinct. Consider this ship (dreg sf I think) when attacked from the pictured angle. Let's disregard things like leading and speed because that only serves to displace the angle of attack and such, but the collision detection is the same.
This is where you should try to centre your shots on the ship if it uses a bubble hitbox. The red cross shows the centre for aiming at, the red circle shows the cone within you can land your shots and still be guaranteed 100% accuracy, and the black dotted line marks the boundary of the hittable area. The issue is that the centre of the visible part of the ship is above and to the right, and anybody who is unaware of this quirk or, like me, keeps forgetting and aims intuitively, will aim at that visible section and be off-centre. The cone for landing 100% hits about that point is smaller, as shots will start going off the top and right side of the hitbox. So anybody who is trained in aiming at Allegiance ships will have a distinct advantage over those who aim intuitively. The ships needs to be scaled down to balance for the specially trained people, then everyone else finds their target getting smaller and they miss more because of those shots that go (in this case) over the top.
Now consider the exact same ship with a hitbox ~= visible model:
Again, the cross shows the centre for aiming at, while the circle shows the cone for landing 100% of hits around that target. Compared to the overall size of the model, it's much smaller than the one above. But where are people intuitively going to try to aim when they see the ship? The same spot! (Personally I'd go a bit lower for the possibility of hitting the wings in the lag but that's probably just me). But then the relative size of the cone poses issues. The model is going to need to be scaled up compared to the bubble version in order to bring that cone near to that of most other ships, but if it goes all the way then the ship will be so big that random, unaimed shots will have a chance of hitting the boat-like wings.
So what does it mean for lag? Those with perfect aim and zero latency will find themselves needing to get a bit closer than they previously had to in order to maintain their perfect dps.
Those who lag slightly (I'm talking 100-150) will find their shots going wide of the cone more often, but the shots that do are more likely to hit by chance.
Those who lag moderately (250-300) will rarely ever get perfect accuracy, but we rarely got that anyway. Then the shots that go wide due to a lag-hop will have a chance at hitting the other pointy bits of hull - levelling the playing field in a manner similar to particle dispersion.
Those who lag severely (Fuzz on satellite, Vort on occasion) won't notice a difference either way, because they can't try to aim at anything smaller than a capship anyway.
So it's not ideal in either case. Models with more centralised cross-sections will get hit harder by well-aimed weapons, while those with arching, spiky or otherwise distorted cross-sections will get hit more by accident. Turns out these factors are a property of the model, and are different for each of them. Which makes these factors a property of the faction, and it turns out, all the factions are different.
The only ideal model would be one that's a uniform sphere, as then you will always intuitively aim for the centre and your cone of 100% accuracy will cover the entire cross-section of the model from every angle. Those who desire that are welcome to make their own core using the Deb Shield artwork replacing every ship.
