I've mentioned this a bit before, but the autoaim when using rails is off just a bit. against Vultures it's noticable at 200m already, against other ships, it depends on how distance.

I just now played with Ote Korus and at around 950m the drift from the autoaim places every shot from a hornet (no matter the port) to the targets left (my right). turning off autoaim I had no problems hitting the rev c he was in.

it isn't a biggie, but it's somewhat annoying that the little autoaim you have with rails _sometimes_ does more harm than good. why does this happen?

It's an Orion software bug, one of the many many flaws in their coding. That's why I advise against inferior Orion technology such as the rail autoaim.

I recall something like this from before. try using a ship with only ONE slot, in the dead center of the ship, and adding a rail then seeing if autoaim still doesn't work. I think it has something to do with the rails trying to shoot "inward" on a ship with two slots. (IE a vult)

I've had this problem on the center port of Valks and Mauds, but I can do some more duck hunting today and report back.

part of the problem is also that at >500m the autoaim can jitter a bit, and a slight degree off at that distance turns into a really big miss. like I said, I can manually compensate for this without autoaim, but it makes snap shots a _lot_ harder, the biggest reason for the rails autoaim right now is to give you a bit of help to fire while the reticule is passing quickly over the target.

right, with the center port of a Cent MkII I have the same problems. at 450m I'll miss a Vult when we're both still. it can happen at closer range too, but not as often.

if I flip over on my head, the shot can go up and left instead of down and right. the aim seems to lock on something odd. :-/

wierd... it didn't use to do that.

Has auto aim gone backwards? I dont use it lots.

somewhat related, ever notice that if you zoom in and fire weapons, the beams are off center. my vult with dual neut 2's as well as most ships i think has the weapons fire down and to the left of the cross hairs.

just wanted to through that out there.

yep, I did, even made a post about it.

Maybe the fix to this is slow everything down a bit, like you yourselfs suggested devs, cos it wasnt that much a prob before ships broke the 55ms combat speed. never mind the buzzcocks, lots of people came here with new ideas about speed, but this isnt really faster!

Faster would be done by blurrin the screen when ya turbo or some such!

ect ect..

[bump]

the problem seems to be the autoaim itself really. if we're both standing still, autoaim can still *miss*. IMHO, this should *not* happen, unless someone tells me that autoaim is supposed to have "issues" to make it "slightly flawed" and promote non-autoaim flying. if so, weapons like the rails should have autoaim removed.

Nothing to do with autoaim, really, it's the quantization of angles sent over the network.

Don't you have an auto-aim off toggle, terjekv?

Not the best solution, I know, but still... better than nothing :/

terjekv does not play any more so that point is kind of redundant, how ever his main point that the auto aim is buggy remains, as does a1k0ns reply.

ah, that explains things I suppose. so the slight spread of neuts (for one thing) then explains why a few shots in a stream still hit when a rail shot misses. heh. I don't suppose there would be a way to fix this?

as I stated a few months back, the autoaim of the rails is very small, but it's still highly useful for making snap shots at targets when your reticule is passing over the target very quickly, like most "modern" dogfights (or especially in multis) in VO. the autoaim gives you a slightly bigger slot to fire your shot in to get the hit. that is, if the autoaim worked. =)

I've fought some epic rail vult duels (nothing like getting the kill with the last single rail you have) and the constant work of having to turn on / off autoaim depending on your targets alignment to you is kind of annoying. it's not like the rails need to be harder to use in a dogfight, is it?

and Starfisher, I used autoaim about 90% of the time with rails. I more tried to align myself with the target in a fashion where the autoaim would be an aid more than a hinderance. against most targets this is no big deal, against mauds (of all things), vults and cents, it requires a bit more work. mauds are iffy to target, but they're also big enough that you can get away with the odd point the autoaim seems to want to hit. vults are painful, especially with rails, since they can fly straight at you and you'll miss if you just shoot at it with autoaim on.

anyway, the bottom line is that somehow addressing this issue would be nice. either provide more precision in the network protcol or somehow make autoaim target "center of hittable area" better?

Agreed. I noticed this most recently in the "Mine Darts" event on Saturday. I was in a Centurion with one weapon port and my shots from whatever weapon I had equipped did not go "straight", but kind of "snapped" to the nearest vector. That's the best way that I can explain it.

Autoaim off, I zoomed into the target (pressed "i"), fired, missed, corrected properly, fired again, and my shot would take the EXACT same vector. If I overcorrected a bit more, it would "snap" to the next vector. I don't know what fraction of a degree the weapons "snap" to, but it's definitely not as detailed as the roll/pitch/yaw of the ship was. I understand that there's probably some reason for this game-engine-wise, but this effect is very noticeable at "longer" ranges like 500+ m

http://www.vendetta-online.com/x/msgboard/2/4267
http://www.vendetta-online.com/x/msgboard/3/3938
http://www.vendetta-online.com/x/msgboard/3/9905

Sheesh. Nobody does their research any more... It's the quantization of angles with your ship (read as truncation/rounding) in order to reduce network latency. There are really rather few online games that have such large areas as VO. I mean, we need to be able to accurately see and represent things several kilometers away, yet much combat also takes place <100m away from another ship, sometimes much closer. I imagine it was a hard bit of work to optimize the quantization such that lag was not extreme (imagine if every rotation was stored as a vector with 64 digits after the decimal point!), yet that things were reasonably accurate...

interesting threads, thanks Roguelazer. I looked for those back in April, didn't find them, and, well, noone pointed to them until the end of October. heh.

/me will just ask Roguelazer all my questions from now on.
(Although at least I kinda figured that it something like you said what with the "latency-reducing angle quanta" and all...)