Developer Diary: Parallel Guns

Commanders!

Today we’d like to tell you more about the gameplay of two Eclipse Battle Path reward vehicles – the Gadyuka and Gepard.

When selecting these vehicles for the next Battle Path, we were facing a dilemma. Oh one hand, both of these machines have been highly requested, which (along with their compatibility with the story) is the reason we wanted them in the first place.

On the other hand, there’s a reason why we haven’t had them until now. Both of these vehicles feature something that can’t really be found anywhere else in the game – two parallel guns located quite far from one another (in both cases on the opposite sides of the turret). This basically creates a major aiming problem as their shell trajectories and impact points do typically not intersect anywhere near the vehicle.

There were three potential solutions to the matter. The first and the easiest one (but also the dumbest one) was creating a single firing point in the middle of both turrets. That way, while both guns would have a firing effect, there would only be one stream of shells. This solution is fine when there are two guns close together (typically the Terminator series) but for the Gadyuka and Gepard it would just look strange.

Another solution was to set these guns up so the shell trajectory would line up perfectly with the barrels. In real life, in both cases, the shell trajectories do intersect but this happens very far away from the vehicle. Since Armored Warfare doesn’t work with such distances (Gepard’s effective range is around 5km), this would effectively lead to two impact points very far away from each other.

The solution we went with is a compromise of sorts and mechanically it works roughly the same way as it does on the Ontos (which was the baseline for our research). The guns stay positioned correctly but the shell trajectories have been slightly adjusted inwards (by roughly 3 degrees). From the outside, this isn’t truly noticeable but it allows you to fire more accurately at long distances.

At medium or short distances, however, there truly are two impact points and it’s quite difficult to target weakspots with both guns at the same time (we’ve adjusted the gun performance to compensate). The best way to target weakspots is to target them with the reticle first as usual and then “walk” one of the tracer streams onto it.

This is especially interesting for the Gadyuka, creating a rather unique close combat vehicle that’s best played by switching between autocannons (short- to mid-range) and rocket (close range only).

We hope you’ll enjoy the vehicles we’ve prepared for you and, as always:

See you on the battlefield!