Movement Inertia

[Hypno Toad]

Habitually the only way I play the game now is by spinning around people and doing weirdo speed bonus tricks to hit them first, so on so fourth, etc, etc. We're all familiar with the dance-fighting in the game.

As it is now in Mount and Blade (and NW, duh) your player character retains forward movement speed even if they make sharp turns. This doesn't make sense. It's strange because if you strafe while running, you do lose speed, whereas if you turn sharply while running, you don't lose speed. You can literally be at full sprint, reverse direction instantly and retain the exact same speed:

Loss of movement speed when strafing:

No loss of movement speed when turning:

It doesn't make sense that you can whip around in circles and retain the same momentum that you had when you were running straight, this leads to a lot of speed bonus exploitation, and turns bayonet fights into spin-fests rather than actual melee.  I think if there were movement inertia for mouse movement, you'd see people relying more on blocking and chamber blocking, instead of of just spazzing around in circles to win in melee.


Thoughts? Is it even possible to program this into M&B?

 

[TheFlyingFishy]

I like your observational skills

 

[Hibiki]

Changing this would make marching in any kind of formation exponentially harder, and it's already not easy. Just imagine what would happen to a formation with such constant fluctuations in speed every time someone needs to correct their direction of march. It would be neither realistic, nor benefitial, and utterly ruin any kind of cooperative play and use of formations.

If you wanted to say, lower turning or running speed though, I don't see any harm in that.

On further thought, the real problem that you might be noticing is the little "speed boost" inherit to the M&B engine. You will notice that after running for a short time, you will suddenly start running slightly faster. I would assume that strafing interrupts this bonus, whereas running does not. I wouldn't mind seeing this bonus being removed altogether, so that strafing and mouse-look speeds are equalized. This would both help formation marching, and I think address the heart of your issue. However, I'm pretty sure this is a hard-coded thing with the mount & blade engine, so I'm doubtful how easily the development team can change it.

That possible problem aside, the speed difference is actually non-existant. It's because you're looking forward, and not to your true direction of movement that it looks like you're going slower. You are moving on two planes now, but you are only looking along one of those planes. In other words, the speed is normalized. Imagine that you have two planes of movement: x, and y. When the player wishes to run forward, a value - let's say 1, is added to his x coordinate. Now, if when the player strafes to the right, another 1 is added to his y coordinate, he is now moving at twice the speed, stepping both 1 forward, and 1 to the right, giving him a velocity of 2. Therefore, these values are split, and the player instead moves .5 on the x axis, and .5 on his y axis while strafing, as opposed to 1 forward. Hopefully that helps.

 

[Evanovic]

The problem is that it's not possible to change stab direction without being able to turn easily. The 'spinning' is simply making up for the fact that the stab is stuck originating on one side of the player and is not able to be thrust to the sides; it simply thrusts forward and that's all.

If the player could stab to the sides without moving his entire body (i.e. by leaning) it'd sure eliminate 'spinning', but alas I don't think the Warband engine is easily going to support that and therefore I believe the only way for good polearm melee is to keep it as it is.

They've already reduced the turning speed significantly of bayonets to avoid excessive spinning. In my opinion too much, because it's now very hard for a decent player to stand a chance against when even slightly outnumbered simply because he cannot turn fast enough to take on the various opponents, when really, if given the opportunity to use his skills he'd be able to take them on easily.

 

[DarkOmega]

Don't forget the face hugging. 

 

[Pelgrane]

If the player could stab to the sides without moving his entire body (i.e. by leaning) it'd sure eliminate 'spinning', but alas I don't think the Warband engine is easily going to support that and therefore I believe the only way for good polearm melee is to keep it as it is.

You can kinda already do it for one-handed polearms esp. on horse, except then you run into the problem of the lolblock down which makes it not matter. I'm not sure the engine cannot handle it in principle, but the design prevents much use being made of a lot of the effort. So here we are.

They've already reduced the turning speed significantly of bayonets to avoid excessive spinning. In my opinion too much, because it's now very hard for a decent player to stand a chance against when even slightly outnumbered simply because he cannot turn fast enough to take on the various opponents, when really, if given the opportunity to use his skills he'd be able to take them on easily.

The object most similar to a bayonetted musket on outstretched arms would be the smaller weightlighting bar (EZ curl bar), 15 lbs vs. 12 for the muskets. Or the womens' throwing hammer, 9 vs. 12. The implications of game physics with spinning included are nothing short of hilarious, you gotta try it some day. It's even funnier than Warband Vanilla because virtually every piece of equipment available there wieghs less than a musket+bayonet (including nearly all two-handers and lances).

But then again it is a game.

 

[Shoep]

I think it's got to do with holding down the W button with no other keys pressed makes you run a little faster than when you press different keys, if you swing your mouse around, you're not pressing any keys. Just like you run slower while blocking / attacking than while just holding W down and doing nothing.

 

[Evanovic]

The object most similar to a bayonetted musket on outstretched arms would be the smaller weightlighting bar (EZ curl bar), 15 lbs vs. 12 for the muskets. Or the womens' throwing hammer, 9 vs. 12. The implications of game physics with spinning included are nothing short of hilarious, you gotta try it some day. It's even funnier than Warband Vanilla because virtually every piece of equipment available there wieghs less than a musket+bayonet (including nearly all two-handers and lances).

But then again it is a game.

It is very unrealistic to be able to swing a heavy weapon around like was possible in MM, but the effect of turning the rotation speed down so much was that small turns were affected as much as large ones. It cured the lack of realism of turning 360 degrees but at the same time it had the silly effect of making it hard to turn within a 180 degree scope. It's now not unheard of to miss someone, or for it to take ages to stab someone who's only (lets use clock-face orientation) say at 9 o'clock or 3 o'clock to you, when in real life you'd be able to lean and thrust right into them. It's partly due to the bayonet being longer as well, as it overshoots sooner.

If there was a way of capping speed after a certain amount of turning (say 180 degress) then you'd both keep spinning out of the equation and allow for a realistic representation of agility in the frontal semicircle range of the bayonet, and I'd be all for that. If it wasn't possible to do that (which it hitherto and prospectively look so) then for reasons of it being a game, as you said, I'd rather have faster turning for more compeitive gameplay than slow turning for superficial realism.