I'm coming to your rescue, Aki!
A bit on actually hitting a target in Legions. There are two components that factor into a successful hit in mid-air, first is your velocity relative to the rest of the world, second is your opponents velocity relative to the rest of the world. The first part, your velocity, is needed because projectiles "inherit" velocity from their parent (you, the player). Think of it like this, you're on a train going 100 miles per hour, you have a gun which shoots a bullet at 100 mph (slow bullet). Hypothetically if you disregard air resistance, gravity, and all of that, if you shoot the gun from the front of the train facing forwards, the bullet will travel at 100 mph away from you. However, if there's someone on the side of the track that's stationary he will see the bullet traveling at 200mph relative to him (and the ground) and the train going at 100mph. Of course if you shoot out the back the bullet will have zero velocity relative to the observer on the ground, although it'll be traveling 100 mph away from the person on the train. If you shoot out the side it will actually go away from the train at a 45 degree angle traveling at 141 mph according to the observer on the ground; the person on the train will see it traveling directly away from them at 100 mph.[1] The second part is your opponents velocity. You need to be able to accurately determine where he will be so you can aim there to actually hit him. Only the laser rifle is a hitscan weapon, every other weapon has projectile travel time. That means as the bullet, rocket, or grenade is going towards the enemy, he's moving. So you need to be able to fire where he's moving to so that your projectile and his body end up in the same place at the same time. Bam, mid-air!
This LCOS type system focuses on the first part only. It shows you where you're firing relative to the ground taking into account velocity inheritance. This does not take into account where your enemy is or will be, it has
zero knowledge of that. I'll put it to you this way, when you're trying to MA someone you almost never aim directly at them, you will almost always miss. However, even if you aim at where they are going to be (assuming the projectilet and opponent would get there at the same time) you will
still probably miss. It's not enough to fire at where they're going to be because your projectiles do not go straight from your gun to where you're aiming except when you're standing still and a few edge cases while moving. If this wasn't the case you could fire a projectile that's going slower than you're traveling, wouldn't that suck? Although apparently this was the case in that god awful T:V game
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So now that I've actually explained aiming let's go into why you're not going to become an MA god with this. I've actually done the calculations taking into account the player hit box. Even at close ranges such as 30 meters and only going 50 m/s (which is basically in your face in Legions and pretty darn slow) you will still miss if you don't lead your target with the LCOS crosshair. Granted not by much, I think it was like a meter or something (and assuming my calculations were correct going from the actual code). Further that's one more thing to track on your HUD. Unlike the static crosshair this thing will be bouncing around a lot as you move through the map. It definitely would make MAs easier in some circumstances, though it becomes practically useless at beyond 50m since a player can change directions so easily. It would make ground pounding quite a bit easier, though if you can't ground pound you need to practice more anyway.
Really this is a way to learn how projectiles actually act. It's not auto-aim in any sense of the term nor is it going to make you an MA god, although it might increase your chances of a successful MA in certain situations. So I actually think this idea has some merit. However, as I originally stated I think there's other things that need to be focused on unfortunately.
I remember at one point MungeParty detailing something similar to this (also Astrum brought up a similar system). Basically, the landscape changed colour to correspond to where you should be landing, etc. At least, that's how I think it was described as. Seymour's not good with details.
I wasn't around for this discussion with Munge. I don't think I've ever talked about a ski assist system, though perhaps I have. I did discuss bot skiing and how to get it to work on a map. That could be adapted for ski assist although the computations are complex and there's very large gray areas where it'd have to be kludged together. Btw, don't take this as bots are going to be put into Legions; it's not happening. It was just a thought experiment, and I'm not even one of the developers. If you misquote me I shall destroy you
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[1] Note that velocity "inheritance" does not act like this in Legions. For instance if you're traveling at 205 m/s (speed of the rocket) and face backwards and fire the rocket won't float in mid air. The Grenade launcher will simply fall to the ground if you oppose its speed though. In other words the three projectile weapons have different velocity inheritance factors, so each weapon acts differently. My train example was only meant to illustrate the concept.
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