Midair Rearm

[[CW]Aresye]

First off, I thoroughly enjoy the fact the extremely angry runway bug from the 0.4 era was fixed.  This allowed the implementation of the midair rearm being disabled.

However the landing bug, as evidenced by most pilots, is still there, and still results in the total loss of asset and/or death of the player.

For this reason I think most servers should enable the midair rearm until this bug is fixed.  The turnaround time of landing to rearm vs midair is not very substantial, so the gameplay impact should be marginal, if not non-existent entirely.

As it stands right now with most servers having this setting on default (disabled), it practically dooms ASF pilots to either lose their asset with no money to buy another, or end up suiciding.

Take this as an example:

Mechs power down to repair, like all assets.  Now imagine a random bug that would explode your mech at random every few times you shut down to repair.  If there was an option to override that function, and allow mechs to repair powered up, I'm sure most servers would choose to override it.  Unfortunately I think the dedicated ASF community is quite small, so our voices are generally not heard.

[=KoS= Saber15]

+1. Make the midair rearm very low altitude though, like only a few meters above the runway.

[=CJW=YalK]

*Backs slowly away from thread*

*turns off light*

*shuts door*

[Ressk [CSF]]

isnt this technically allready possible to do? ive noticed the buy icon appearing when i am still a couple meters up... of course im still going 240kmh at that time so...

[Taemien]

Aresye can you record your landings and throw up a video when the crashes start happening?

I've not been able to recreate the runway bug myself. Not saying it isn't there since I've seen people crash but I wasn't close enough to determine if it was a bug or a pilot error. Though I'm not the best pilot by a longshot so I'm not going to rule out that it exists. There's gotta be something triggering it and I haven't found it yet.

Since its not happened to me yet, I can't agree to having Mid-air rearm unfortunately. But a video would definitely help the case.

[Atomos Darksun]

Land exact same way every time.  Explode 1/5 times.  I know how you feel.  And it's not even like we can repair midair.  In terms of fighting time lost, it's sort of like making a mech power down for ammo (although this setting is for a much more logical reason).

I would love to fraps it however having 5fps would probably hinder my ability to land correctly.

[Artemis Dragmire]

Huh, the only times I crash on the runway are because I come in too fast. If I do it slow and steady, I never crash.

Always find it odd that the people who fly air and do it really well have so much trouble dying to the runway, when I never seem to. *shrug*

[Ressk [CSF]]

ive seen it happen too many times to count. never to myself, one really funny time was the guy behind me got gibbed while i landed safely. wouldnt the area required to rearm in the air have to be huge, or else we risk stalling?

[Serious Table]

During those particular crashes, are you particularly damaged before you land?  That might make a difference.

Otherwise, I've yet to crash since 0.5 released.  Hell, I landed on a rather rocky slope in Mirage and taxi'd into the Mech bay just to avoid AA fire.

[CHHš Aurailius]

I'm working on making landing a little easier, but the changes I'm working on aren't easy.  I'm still figuring stuff out in the code that will make it work properly.

[RabbidFerret]

Now imagine a random bug that would explode your mech at random every few times you shut down to repair. 

Ferraris do that. The Italians call it "passion".

+1 for adding passion to mech construction.



Edit: I have no problems with mid-air rearm until the bug is addressed.

[KingLeerUK]

One of my suspected reasons for random aero crashes is that the landing gear entity is not being deployed in a physicalised state OR that the trigger for deploying the landing gear is not getting set properly in all cases.
 
Either way, one of our planned features is to allow pilots to control the deploy/retract state of the landing gear themselves manually and represent that on the HUD.  This should fix the issue.
 
As far as changing back to a default for in-air rearm, no we are not doing that.  MWLL is a beta and the only way that we discover these sorts of bugs is to subject the beta tester population (aka "you") to a little bit of pain while we sort things out.

[=KoS= Saber15]

One of my suspected reasons for random aero crashes is that the landing gear entity is not being deployed in a physicalised state OR that the trigger for deploying the landing gear is not getting set properly in all cases.
 
Either way, one of our planned features is to allow pilots to control the deploy/retract state of the landing gear themselves manually and represent that on the HUD.  This should fix the issue.
 
As far as changing back to a default for in-air rearm, no we are not doing that.  MWLL is a beta and the only way that we discover these sorts of bugs is to subject the beta tester population (aka "you") to a little bit of pain while we sort things out.

I've had my landing gear deployed (watching the shadows on Sandblasted, you can see your own landing gear), but when I land they clip through the ground, and my plane instantly explodes. This is only really a problem with the Sulla and VERY rarely, with the Shiva. The Sparrowhawk never gets the collision bug.

[LordHack]

Huh, the only times I crash on the runway are because I come in too fast. If I do it slow and steady, I never crash.

Always find it odd that the people who fly air and do it really well have so much trouble dying to the runway, when I never seem to. *shrug*

We had a long discussion on this previously; and, honestly, unless I am -trying- to push the limits to test stuff, I would say my landings at all speeds and attitudes is better than 95%, probably more like 97% (to include the combusting Shiva bug).

I'm telling you all, powering into the landing pretty much defeats this.  I pretty much know when I've screwed the pooch on a landing (gear entity or whatever as Leer suggested) and/or the chance of a stopped Shiva explosion.

You want to REALLY fix something - fix the netcode / server performance!!  I just want fly without laggy stutter, get hit detection, and have reasonably  consistent performance in air assets.  Mechs, etc. work pretty well for me all-in (hit detection notwithstanding at times).  Couldn't tell you why such a huge difference.

QQQQQQQ

[[CW]Aresye]

One of my suspected reasons for random aero crashes is that the landing gear entity is not being deployed in a physicalised state OR that the trigger for deploying the landing gear is not getting set properly in all cases.
 
Either way, one of our planned features is to allow pilots to control the deploy/retract state of the landing gear themselves manually and represent that on the HUD.  This should fix the issue.
 
As far as changing back to a default for in-air rearm, no we are not doing that.  MWLL is a beta and the only way that we discover these sorts of bugs is to subject the beta tester population (aka "you") to a little bit of pain while we sort things out.

Your suspected reasons may be spot on.

I've gotten into the habit of powering down and ejecting before touchdown when using variants that warrant excessive landings (aka Sulla C).  Each time I hop out I check to see if the landing gear is deployed, and most of the time it crashes, the gear wasn't deployed, despite flying the same profile on landing or flying at a slow airspeed longer at lower altitude to trigger the gear deployment.  I've seen the landing gear deploy and gib through the runway on a few very rare occasions, so I think the majority of ASF crashes are an improperly functioning trigger in the deployment cycle, related to the server or net code.  Reason being it seems when 1 aero explodes, any others following suit do so as well within a certain timeframe.

I like the idea of a manually deployed landing gear, although I'm sure it will be a few patches before that can get implemented.  If possible, the best thing we could get in the near future, is a hud indication, or even a text message somewhere, saying the landing gear is deployed.  That could also assist in determining whether or not the trigger is permanently doomed (ex. doesn't fix itself over multiple attempts), or based on certain times (ex. fixes itself after a few passes).