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Unable to get missile lock?


Iliac

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Was just in a match and for the life of me I could not get a missile lock. Target in range & in center of firing arc. Would get 1-2 tones then it would drop and start over. Target never getting out of firing arc or range. No signs of a missile break of any kind being used. Happened constantly throughout the match. Another person on my team reported having the same issue.

 

I'm running with about a 45 ping & 90 fps. So shouldn't be lag or anything.

 

Am I missing anything? This was just screwy.

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Was just in a match and for the life of me I could not get a missile lock. Target in range & in center of firing arc. Would get 1-2 tones then it would drop and start over. Target never getting out of firing arc or range. No signs of a missile break of any kind being used. Happened constantly throughout the match. Another person on my team reported having the same issue.

 

I'm running with about a 45 ping & 90 fps. So shouldn't be lag or anything.

 

Am I missing anything? This was just screwy.

 

The below is my speculation, but I'm confident about it.

 

Missile lock, more than any other part of GSF, is susceptible to network issues, because the lock has to constantly be roundtripped between you and the target (the target needs to know the lock is happening so they have the opportunity to break it, and you have to know if and when the target does break it).

 

All primary weapons, Rocket Pods, and Railguns, happen instantly, and their success depends only on your mouse being over the target and the Accuracy vs. Evasion check. Your client decides entirely on its own if you hit or not . This is why if you are aiming properly, you will often see a damage number appear the instant you shoot, before the lasers even reach the target.

 

That bring said, I suspect the server does a sanity check on what your client reports, after the fact, before actually applying damage to the target. If someone hacked the GSF client to give them free hits, I could imagine them seeing damage numbers, but then the targets not actually getting damaged because of the server sanity check.

 

In short, even if your ping was fine, your targets may have had crappy pings due to some regional Internet trouble. And the server likely gives the target the benefit of the doubt--if it can't complete the roundtrip check, it gives the target a free missile break, at least while you are locking on. Once you fire a missile, the server doesn't owe you real time updates except the final damage number, so it can take its time waiting to hear back from the target client. This is why missiles, even Clusters, can land a very long time after you expect them to.

 

It is also why a missile-break does not affect whether the missile animates a hit or a miss. The animation is always a hit.

Edited by Nemarus
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Even with good ping it's usual to lose locks when the target is ~200 meters short of maximum range and flying away from you. Lag also affects the effective size of your missiles's firing arc; sometimes, even if you see the target inside the circle it may have already left the circle for a split second, interrupting the lock.
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Even with good ping it's usual to lose locks when the target is ~200 meters short of maximum range and flying away from you. Lag also affects the effective size of your missiles's firing arc; sometimes, even if you see the target inside the circle it may have already left the circle for a split second, interrupting the lock.

 

This is not the issue, I know what those behaviors are. This was something different.

 

-Hydra (Pot5/Harbinger)

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Could be a matter of a few problems:

  • Sync issues, which happen A LOT in GSF (IE someone locking onto you and fireing a rocket when they already passed you)
  • Server lag
  • Personal lag
  • Processing issues
  • RAM issues
  • Hardware problems on your end (mouse)
  • Hardware problems on their end (See Sync/processing issues)
  • Wrong Crew Setup for lock dependant ships (Cookie cutter builds aren't always the best)
  • Theoretical "Evade" (I developed a theory that sometimes high-evade ships can actually break a lock while sitting still, without using a lock break. As it seems to happen to me most when fighting t2 scouts)

 

Beyond that, I would actually need to see what happened before being able to tell you what's happening.

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I think the roundtrip client check is the answer as well.

 

This happens to me pretty regularly when I fly on the Harbinger, but almost never on the Bastion. I think that's because the Harb has a higher latency rate due to the population size. I've also noticed that it seems to happen more with particular players, suggesting that they have client lag on their end.

 

No idea how to stop it from happening. Sure is annoying, tho.

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I have a lot of gripes about the missile mechanic, but this one is probably the biggest. Because the server has to vet the missile lock as legit, you can have a good missile lock break for no reason at all, and then see the opponent do some defensive flying (but flying you can easily track). The likely issue in this case is that the opponent, upon getting the missile lock, immediately began trying to lose it. This meant that, according to the server's point of view, there was a point where he flew out of your circle and you didn't follow him, even though you did everything correctly.

 

Normally in these situations, you can adjust a little bit- for instance, if you think he's going to go far to the right, you can do that earlier. But because the missile lock is checked constantly on the client side as well, your missile lock must both be good on YOUR side and on the SERVER side, at all points in time. This is a very rough requirement, because these events take place at two different times- now and slightly in the future- and both must be true.

 

 

I suspect they spent some real time trying to mitigate this issue, but I do consider it generally unsolvable by them. We also see stuff like, protons seem to lock easier than thermites, so I suspect they actually went missile by missile and tried to help it out (ex, the server side targetting ring for proton may be larger than the client side ring, to help with this).

 

 

As a player, you simply push through it. You can still lock and fire missiles, but the situations can be different. It's a big part of why the community keeps asking for missile buffs- it seems like the devs assumed locking and firing missiles would be easier than it really is by some small but real amount.

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I'm not entirely sure it has to be good on the client side all the way through. I've fired (very few) missiles without hearing the "completed lock" tone before. All it takes is a little timing and weird lag.

 

The easiest way to half-fix this is to make it so it's only checked server-side. Once your client tells the server you tried to lock [missile] on [target] and were pointed in [direction], once you get a feel for the lag, you get a lot easier time locking on, and a hacked client can't exactly un-tell the server about something it already said.

 

Or the client could be made to expose all its lag compensation settings to us so we can change how it extrapolates what it puts on your screen, or it could give the option to show a bracket which shows where a target could really be.

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