2014-06-23 09:08 , edited 2014-06-23 11:58 by DarkEtheereal

This edition of CTE Experiences isn't particularly to tell you about anything new going on with CTE

Visual Recoil

The argument.

compromised on realism

removed a large part of recoil

BF4 guns recoiled by shaking about the screen

you had to aim with the shaking gun to hit the target.

after the patch

This

it's dumbing it down!

The trick: Why they do it.

The trick: What IS the trick?

Where it all goes horribly wrong for BF4

How CTE tries to fix it.

This post continues in comment 3

If any mods see this, can you find a way to make the second part right bellow this one?

This edition is purely to deal with some of the arguments in the row that errupted in the comments to my last edition of "CTE Experiences". [battlelog.battlefield.com]The comments made in that thread weren't an isolated case. These feelings can be found knocking about on CTE forums just like they are here. On the CTE forums though, these feelings are definately in the minority, but they are a very upset, vocal minority.On Battlelog, I can't tell how many people feel this way yet, but in either case, what we are dealing with here is a particularly toxic set of misconseptions, mixed with contempt for anything that appears to be sacrificing realism for gameplay (even though nothing of the sort is happening here).These misconseptions can't be left to fester, otherwise they can spread to people less informed, and grow into more misconseptions and become something very nasty, so I'm going to try to fix them right here.This concerns an argument about the latest CTE patch and how it fixes visual recoilSome people think that by locking the reticle to the center of the screen, the latest CTE patch has, And effectively, making the the game easymode.This is what these people think:"Before the latest CTE patch,, andAfter the CTE patch, the reticle is locked to the center of the screen, and, bullets are now only fired towards the center of the screen.makes it unrealistic, and because there is not this form of recoil any more, this also makes it easier than before, soNow you are probably wondering why I'm highlighting parts of things said. The answer is that every underlined phrase indicates that an erronious assumption has been made. All will be explained.Perhapse you agreed with that argument and now you feel insulted because I've said you have made an erroneous assumption. Well don't feel insulded. There's an illusion at play here, the oldest trick in the book. It's job is to fool you and fool you it did!In video games the "suspension of disbelief" is far more important to the developer than "realism".Realism is a measure of how close the game is to reality.But "the suspension of disbelief" is a measure of whether or not as you play a game, your subconsious can be fooled into believing for a while, that the game you are playing IS your reality. Suspension of disbelief doesn't need total realism, it just needs enough of the the game to be true to the games own sense of reality.Implementing total realism can be a hastle. It's a pain to code and can be computationally expensive, and also it can end up not being fun anyway. If a developer making game can stop at the point there something LOOKs realistic, but isn't they usually will.Here is a list of FPS games.Half-life.Counter-strike.Call of Duty.Quake.Unreal tournament.Medal of honor.Wolfenstein: Enemy TeritoryCrysis.Bad Company 2.Battlefield 3.Battlefield 4.What do these games have in common? Well a lot of things! The two important things are that they are all games, and not simulations, and that they all use the same illusion.Here's some things which don't use the illusion:Arma 2Arma 3Oh look! They ARE simulations! (Though arguably they are also games).In Battlefield 4, you hold a gun in your hands right? And when you press the fire button, the gun in your hands shoots, right?WRONG!The gun in your hands is just an illusion. Your bullets come out of your eyes. Here let me explain.Guns shoot bullets, yes?But does your gun model make bullets shoot? no. Bullets don't even come from you gun model, so it isn't really a gun.The game engine makes bullets and shoots them, so the engine is the gun! Confusing?Ok, Here's how it is. There is the invisable "engine" gun, which is the ACTUAL gun, then there is the Fake, illusionary gun, which is the gun model.When you shoot, you see your gun flash and move, and at the same time a bullet appears and goes off towards it's target. So it looks like the gun shoots the bullets. THIS IS THE ILLUSION!So what reality is the illusion hiding? The truth is that the ACTUAL, invisable gun is INSIDE YOUR EYE!The engine gun fires the bullet from you camera position, in the direction of your camera's view direction,(That's important later).So why don't they put the gun in the gun model? The reason they do this is that it is simple and it stops players from accidentally getting their gun blocked by an obstical, and becaues games don't give good depth perception we can't really get a good feel for where the gun is pointing anyway. So it's a tiny, normally ignorable sacrifice on realism for the sake of gameplay.So what problems does this cause? Well one tiny issue is that it means there's a difference between where your gun model points, and where your bullets actually go.This is minimized by having the angle of the model during hipfire such that it looks like it could probably shoot to where the screen center is (as long as you aren't shooting too close), and during ADS fire, the gun model is brought to the face and the(trouble is brewing here...), so the gun looks like it is pointed at the place where the engine gun is.Remember what I said about how important the suspension of disbelief is?Well it turns out having the fake illusion gun sit completely still doesn't look very believable, because guns are meant to move.Enter visual recoil! Visual recoil is meant to be an ENTIRELY COSMETIC feature, it's not part of the recoil used to make shooting harder, it's there just to make the game look believable.The thing with cosmetic recoil is that as said earlier, the gun model should stay looking like it's pointing where the actual engine gun does, and the sight ABSOLUTELY HAS TO point where the engine gun does, otherwise you can't aim properly!This means that the kind of recoil animation you can do is limited. The safest is simply to move the gun back and forth, so it stays pointing in the same direction.Unfortunatly someone at DICE wasn't happy with that.Someone at DICE made the gun recoil animation swingh side to side, and twist too, so the golden rule of having the gun model and sight point to where the actual engine gun points was broken.The sight stopped pointing where the gun actually shoots. This was a disaster and we picked up on it long before CTE.The ghetto solution which I have used for the longest time is to use something stuck on your screen to mark the actual screen center.Using the laser sight also works.DICE LA can't change the animation because:- They don't have an animator becaues this game is meant to have finished animations.- There's too many animations to have to change.- If they did, someone would complain that the animations are less realistic.- It's just a lot easier and quicker not to.So instead of trying to make the gun model point to where the actual engine gun is actually shooting, they just used some clever rendering tricks to make the sight always point where the engine gun is pointing, even though the sight is attached to the gun.The result is that the geometry still doesn't make sense, and while the effect looks similar to an actual holographic/reflex scope, it isn't strictly realistic, but it does the job.But the break in the realism really stems from an imperfect execution of the gun illusion.