F = ma progress update, Weapon Balancing Feedback
See the upcoming physics changes to Rotor parts in action.
We hope that you’ve been enjoying RoboPass over the winter holidays. We have just one more month until our first season ends on the 18th of February 2019. So there is still time to unlock the new cosmetic items!
Weapon Balance Feedback
Last week I asked for your feedback and thoughts to aid us in locating what weapons were in need of a nerf or a buff. While the post is currently locked you can read through the feedback in the post below:
Weapon balance Feedback thread
The data we received from this post has shown some areas where the community have come to a general consensus regarding certain weapon types. We will work with this data to implement decisions based directly from player feedback.
I’d like to thank everyone who participated in providing feedback, it was very useful and I intend to create similar posts in the future to provide the team with better data which they can react to.
Physics! F = ma
You may remember that a few months ago we discussed a plan to improve the physics within Robocraft to make robots feel much more intuitive. We mentioned Newton’s second law of motion F = ma to help provide some insight into the type of changes we wanted to make.
In summary, we want large, chunky robots to have some real weight to them and become a sturdy opponent with increased armour. While smaller robots can dart in and out of battle quickly at the cost of much lower armour.
As mentioned in one of our previous updates, this is going to take a lot of work to roll out across all movement parts. We are working on one movement type at a time, with the aim to release all of them together in our next major update.
The Rotors will have 4 variables that will adjust the agility of robot which are affected by the type of parts you place on your robot.
Light robots will see the following changes:
- Faster change in direction
- Faster strafing
- Faster turn speed (this also responds to turning on the spot to face your camera)
- Faster acceleration when moving forwards or backwards.
Switching directions quickly is better achieved with lighter robots. We anticipate that this will be a major update which will make robot building matter more.
We will need to make changes to the mass for various parts. Combined with weapon balancing we have our work cut out for ourselves as we balance weapon damage, movement and acceleration.
The current live build of Robocraft does not contain any of these adjustments.
To show you the sort of behaviour you could expect from heavy and light robots we’ve created a few gifs. Please note that in order to show these changes we’ve had to adjust the weight parameters of a single robot build. So while the two robots in these gifs look similar, their weight is the only thing that has been adjusted.
First up, here’s how the upcoming changes will affect turn speed
Here are the differences between a heavy and light robot accelerating forwards and backwards
Heavy Robots won’t be able to strafe as fast as lighter robots, but they’ll also be much slower in changing direction as seen from the strafing gif below
Giving lighter robots the ability to change direction very quickly also affects how fast they can switch between increasing and decreasing altitude too
We believe that the changes made will make each robot feel more unique in maneuverability and increase the quality of core game feel.
Thanks for reading, if you have any feedback on any of the info in this post, do let us know!
Build, Drive, Fight!
ReelBigKris
Early Feedback Response From The Community
Hi everyone, I wanted to append some info which is based on early responses to this announcement.
Some players expressed concerns over inertia from the gifs that were shown, we do have a system that calculates inertia based on mass. The current work in progress gifs are the two extremes of light and heavy. I’m really looking forward to seeing what you all think of these new physics changes once they go live. Thank you everyone for the initial feedback, continue to share more comments and I’ll do my best to respond where possible.
