The Ur-Quan Masters Discussion Forum

The Cruiser's PDL is generally impractically weak against ships. However, because the laser fires as many beams as nearby targets, the overall damage can be pretty high. If the targets are close enough together, the beams seem to overlap, dealing multiple points of damage to a target. This can be exploited against ships that fire multiple projectiles at once, by using the PDL just as the other ship fires. This can let you do things like two-shot a Pkunk Fury, or in the most extreme case, cripple a Kohr-Ah ship as it uses its FRIED (in tests, I've chopped a Marauder's crew in half with as few as two PDL shots following a FRIED).

I've never seen the PDL multishot another ship, definitely not in the decisive manner you described. This might be a lot to ask, but could you post a video clip of this occurring?

Trying on the kohr-ah was pretty simple - I easily got four damage from one shot in a test case, although it seems way to risky to take advantage of in practice.

I'm uploading a video to YouTube right now, I'll post it when it shows up. Yeah, this tactic doesn't justify rushing in right next to your enemy, it's just a neat way to dish out some damage before you're torn apart, if they're already closing in.

EDIT Here's the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zE1z6Mf2pY

That video shows the lasers hitting the FRIED particles, with the damage pips drawn on the FRIED particles, while the Kohr-Ah's crew goes down for no apparent reason. I can't reproduce anything like it. I'm highly skeptical.

(Also, this is one thing we need built-in record and playback for...)

The damage pips hit the ship too, as far as I can tell. I have a screenshot of the second volley here (omg totally shopped).
(http://img144.imageshack.us/img144/5678/picture2nk9.png)
I think having the Marauder moving might make more lasers connect, I'm not sure. We could try reproducing this over a net game, but I think the lag would be prohibitive.

In what version of UQM do lasers pass straight through plasma?!

OSX version of UQM 0.6.1, apparently.

Well, he got a video up. I'd be surprised if the trick didn't work in 0.6.2.

This is what I think whats happening.  The plasmas that are in front of the ship do not catch the lasers that are trying to hit
the plasmas behind the kohr-ah ship because they've already been zapped, toggling their collision flag.   The lasers pass on thru to the next object that hasn't been hit, which is the ship.     

Neat trick, I'll have to verify sometime that works in uqm: xna :)   I can actually seeing that be a viable strategy in a multi-ship scenario

I just checked, and the Mmrnmhrm laser actually works. Who would've thought?

What do you mean? Thhe Mmrnmhrm lasers to not pass through the corona

I mean, it can actually hit the same thing with both its lasers. Mr Brian's theory seems to imply that they wouldn't, so I was refuting it in a slightly sarcastic way.

I've done this for serious damage vs. the Chenjesu a couple of times, but never the Kohr-Ah.

In the video Main is controlling both ships. He can turn on the Kohr-Ah's secondary and Earthling's PDL at the same instant. That can't possibly be practical against a dynamic opponent. Most players have difficulty turning on the Utwig shield to guard at the right time, let alone anticipate the exact frame (1/24th of a second) another player is going activate their weapon. I'm not even sure it could be helpful against the predictable cyborg.

Well, it's no use against the cyborg because you can't get the cyborg to flame when you're nearby, not to mention the fact that you can probably win in perfect safety without getting close.

Likewise in PVP: if the kohr-ah is on a gravity whip, the earthling should avoid it, and if it's not, it's better off using the blades at close range.

True, this would be worthless against an actual Kohr-Ah opponent, I just used the Kohr-Ah ship to highlight the phenomenon. In practice, this actually works against the Pkunk ship's attacks, as its weapon fires a stream for several seconds, and its attack pattern is extremely predictable. What led me to notice the effect in the first place was the seemingly impossible speed at which I sometimes shot down the attacking Pkunk when it was at full health.

Heh, this is completely off topic, but I love your sig, Main.  I remember the good old days with all the candy I'd get from that thing.  :)

Would this bug be exploitable somehow? I mean, would it be possible/feasible for someone to design a bit of code that helps shoot tat the exact right moment when you're in proximity?

It would only be useful against Pkunk. Elvish Pillager has designed hacks for the game before so he could probably do it. In case anyone's wondering, EP does not cheat in tournaments. I know what his hacks behave like in game, they're easy to recognize.

Unless... you're in on it! I smell a vast melee conspiracy here!

On a more serious note, I don't think anyone is cheating. I was just curious as to whether this kind of stuff is possible in UQM. I know very little about programming, so I wasn't even sure it'd be possible to do stuff like this in NetMelee. What other sorts of hack has EP done?

Isn't this thing a bug? It doesn't seem intentional...

I believe this has been discussed before, but I'll summarise: both players' copies of UQM maintain the full game state; only the control information is transmitted (and, to detect possible problems, a checksum of the full game state). In other words, from each computer's point of view (and ignoring network delay), the remote player is handled essentially as a (hard to configure) joypad.

On the plus side, this means that you can't modify the game state in illegal ways, as this will only affect your copy (even if you fake the checksums, you can only fool your own computer into giving you, for example, more crew). On the minus side, you can modify the controls any way you like, including giving yourself cyborg-like abilities (e.g. perfect aim and shielding).

Aimbots, auto-shielding, auto-detonating Shofixti when it's close or will get a kill, reliably exploiting the Mmrnmhrm instant switch bug, automatic accurate chasing with the Androsynth comet, and a bunch of minor conveniences.

Auto-aim and auto-shield aren't perfect. Using Kohr-Ah, I killed an auto-shielding Yehat which also had a "fire control" mechanism on its weapon that stopped the Yehat's guns from ever draining its battery to the point that it could not shield itself. Auto-shield doesn't work so great when you attack nose-to-nose where you aren't even giving the other ship any time to realize you're shooting at it. The other thing that contributed to the difficulty of the match was that Yehat would still find itself short on energy, so there were still gaps in its shield. The cheat Yehat was a much tougher ship, but it was not immortal. Auto-aim is probably meaningless against Arilou, which can stop in place or teleport.



The minor conveniences are as interesting as the big cheese hacks, so I'll touch on those.

Firstly there's Yehat's fire control. Already mentioned that.

He made an artificial lag hack which apparently doesn't rely on the pause button too. That doesn't relate to the player's controls at all. The purpose was to make Utwig have a more difficult time against Kohr-Ah. We tried several different flavors of lag, and the most deadly turned out to be "jitter lag", which would lag the game in very short intervals, very frequently and occur in such a way that there was no discernible pattern to it. It worked. I don't think I ever made a kill with jitter lag in effect.

One thing I suggested was to create little graphical indicators to help the player. One was to have the background turn another color between the enemy ship's firing arcs so you could see their blindspots clearly. The other idea was a graphical indicator to show where the planet was located off screen and its distance away. Not sure if that's possible at all.

What is the Mmrnmhrm instant switch bug?
Don't we want these things fixed?


How does that help the Kohr-Ah?

What is the Mmrnmhrm instant switch bug?

When the Mmrnmhrm switches forms, it starts with its battery at zero. There's a stupid trick you can use to switch and have maximum power immediately afterwards, allowing you to alternate between X and Y forms rapidly. It's very easy to spot when someone does this against you. Even if they do not carelessly switch rapid-fire between forms like an idiot, it's still obvious due to the Y-Form letting off four mini-missiles at the exact moment you switch into it instead of the two it normally shoots.



It doesn't make the Kohr-Ah any stronger, but it also doesn't really hurt them. The purpose is to throw off and disorient the Utwig player. Blocking projectiles with the absorption field without running your battery down to zero is tricky and stressful against a live player. Player controlled Kohr-Ah Marauders will typically make it their mission to screw with Utwig as much as possible. It becomes even more difficult when the game doesn't play at a smooth and constant rate. Presumably, this effect would exaggerated if the Utwig player did not know to expect artificial jitter lag and had never dealt with it before.

Let me rephrase that as "as good as possible"; it's obvious there are limits due to opponent unpredictability and time taken to do something.

Meddling with the timing didn't even occur to me, but it's not hard to add a random delay somewhere in the UQM code. Increasing netdelay would smooth things out, but the increased lag would be almost as bad as the unpredictable lag.

Another good point; you have access to the full state of the game, so you can add things like planet position indicators (or automatic planet avoidance or finding, if you prefer), blind spot highlighting (or automatic firing angle avoidance). The simplest hack to allow you to see everything would probably be to change the zoom of the display to show the whole playing field at all times (and change the Avenger's graphics a bit, of course).

You could also start adding indicators for hit points to everything, but apart from a few special cases such as ZapSats and Orz Marines, I don't think that would be much use.

Yeah, I made an indicator that's pretty good for showing where the planet is - multiple lines pointing at it some distance apart, so you can judge how far away it is from the angle they make to each other - and it's relatively easy to hack the game so that invisible Ilwrath are visible to you.

Changing the size of the view isn't so simple. The code governing the view is really complicated and screwy.

As Shiver says, my auto-shielding can't be 'perfect' in Yehat vs Kohr-Ah, but I think that it actually wasn't "as good as possible" either (for instance, it only caught about 99% of shots at long range, where it could be invincible :P) Any of my stuff could be done better given some more time and effort.

I'm a little confused... is the reason the kohr-ah is getting hit because the lasers are targetting the FRIED *behind* the kohr-ah, and the kohr-ah is in the way, so tha the lasers hit the ship instead?

Looks it. Plus one PDL is probably aiming for the Korh-Ah ship as well.

By the way, slightly off topic, but can someone enlighten me as to how I should be interpreting Main's sig?

-=PakoPako=-

My signature contains the best Pokemon never made.

Laser damage is definitely proportionate to the number of projectiles. Including the ship itself, I see potential for a maximum of 16 damage against a Kohr-Ah ship in one shot.

I think this trick works best against Pkunk opponents if they spin while firing at you. I tried a couple of rounds against an AI Pkunk attacking in a straightforward manner, and was easily slaughtered both times.