Yogi Klatt · Gameplay Programmer, Vehicle Experience Team

Okay, so nudging does not mean that we put the bullets around the corner or anything like that. Every weapon on every ship has a convergence allowance, right? At the moment, that allowance is quite high for each weapon. It's like eight degrees. So when you target something with fixed weapons or with any other weapons and you don't fire at the target, but if the target is really close to you, then you will see that your shots will cross over in front of you. That is convergence, and this is just an inherent property of the weapon, so they can gimbal, a little bit of gimballing in each, right? So we're using that to help the fixed weapons finding the target. I know that people would say, oh, wait a sec, it's auto-aim, but it's not really auto-aim. So assuming, I'm prepared, you have a ship flying in front of you, right? So this Hornet goes into this direction. Then the predicted impact point will be here. Let's say John is aiming at me. Let's assume this is the center of the predicted impact point. What we do is when your current aim vector is intersecting with that, at some point we will start nudging the bullets towards the target, but it won't be an instant swap, it will be a fluid ratio towards the target. So if you're really aiming good anyways, but if you're slightly offset, it will still nudge the bullet in this direction, but not perfectly. So it kind of slowly fades them onto the target. What this effectively does for fixed weapons is it makes the target a little bit bigger, so it's a little bit easier to hit, but it's not auto-aim. It's just an assist that we allow based on the convergence properties that the weapons have anyways. Because you could argue, hey, if the weapons can converge, why can't they go a little bit more on the target? So this is what we're doing with that. And it is really necessary. So we did a lot of gameplay tests with that. And it definitely improved the viability of fixed weapons. Not to the point that they're already on par with auto gimbals. That's something we need to fix later. But they will be more usable in 3.10.