Lobs. Useless?

[Cannon Fodder]

Never seen one work. Every net player magically gets all the way back and no-look cross-courts me. Like magic. Regular or aggressive lobs, baseline T and corners, as close to out as literally possible not ONE has ever mattered. Smashed, or no-looked overhead backhand without any error. Net play is irritating.

[ManuTOO]

Hello,

at what difficulty level are you playing ? If Pro-10 or less (and likely up to Master-10 as well), the lob is actually kinda OP.

However, you have to execute it properly : wait for the opponent to get really close to the net, which usually happens after 1 or 2 volleys, and you should stand near the baseline. Then if you're correctly positioned to hit well the ball, the lob should be quite efficient.

Also how high is your lob skill ? If it's really low, it won't help... :-)

[Cannon Fodder]

Originally posted by ManuTOO:

Hello,

at what difficulty level are you playing ? If Pro-10 or less (and likely up to Master-10 as well), the lob is actually kinda OP.

However, you have to execute it properly : wait for the opponent to get really close to the net, which usually happens after 1 or 2 volleys, and you should stand near the baseline. Then if you're correctly positioned to hit well the ball, the lob should be quite efficient.

Also how high is your lob skill ? If it's really low, it won't help... :-)

Plenty of examples here...this is TWO games, I played for an hour and 10 minutes and got all this.
https://youtu.be/eUWYJXUTmKo

[ManuTOO]

Thanks for your video ; I see better what causes you issue now..!

So :
1) Overall, the CPU animation is not well synchronized (or even doesn't start at all) when he's late on the ball ; it's something I plan to fix when I'll be working on the gameplay (it requires a little rehaul of the IA calculations).
From your video, the smash seems to be particularly vulnerable to that issue. Although you can note that the CPU is (almost) always positioned correctly and if the animation had worked normally, the strike would have made sense. (except probably for 1 high volley)

2) There's a little jump when the player stands at the net, to simulate the jump we see in real life ; animation-wise its support is very basic though

3) When you have written "swing" several times, I guess your issue is that you were standing too far and thus hit the ball after the 2nd bounce. If you had run a bit more further, you would have played these balls correctly.
Or your issue is something else ?

4) I'm going to look into the broken-spine smash anim, to see if I can reproduce it with your Bug Report and hopefully fix it... :-)

5) At 1:51 , we are far from a perfect shot : it's more a poorly hit acceleration that ends on the service line, near the center of the court. He then gets a completely mishit dropshot that he can hit 3 meters after the service line... :-) (and once again you stand a bit too far to catch the ball before its 2nd bounce)

6) The head looking left/right jerkingly when the ball is right above the player is an issue I only noticed very recently ; I'll try to fix that in a future update.

7) 3:57 , I'm not sure to understand your issue. You would like your player to not be able to hit a ball that comes on his body, is that it ?

[Cannon Fodder]

Originally posted by ManuTOO:

Thanks for your video ; I see better what causes you issue now..!

So :
1) Overall, the CPU animation is not well synchronized (or even doesn't start at all) when he's late on the ball ; it's something I plan to fix when I'll be working on the gameplay (it requires a little rehaul of the IA calculations).
From your video, the smash seems to be particularly vulnerable to that issue. Although you can note that the CPU is (almost) always positioned correctly and if the animation had worked normally, the strike would have made sense. (except probably for 1 high volley)

2) There's a little jump when the player stands at the net, to simulate the jump we see in real life ; animation-wise its support is very basic though

3) When you have written "swing" several times, I guess your issue is that you were standing too far and thus hit the ball after the 2nd bounce. If you had run a bit more further, you would have played these balls correctly.
Or your issue is something else ?

4) I'm going to look into the broken-spine smash anim, to see if I can reproduce it with your Bug Report and hopefully fix it... :-)

5) At 1:51 , we are far from a perfect shot : it's more a poorly hit acceleration that ends on the service line, near the center of the court. He then gets a completely mishit dropshot that he can hit 3 meters after the service line... :-) (and once again you stand a bit too far to catch the ball before its 2nd bounce)

6) The head looking left/right jerkingly when the ball is right above the player is an issue I only noticed very recently ; I'll try to fix that in a future update.

7) 3:57 , I'm not sure to understand your issue. You would like your player to not be able to hit a ball that comes on his body, is that it ?

1: Positionally, sure. But the amount of times I see no-look back shots perfectly placed is absurd.

2: I don't know, I think we're going to have to just accept that we don't agree on this aspect. It looks, and feels unnatural and results in a lot of my well placed shots that in a normal situation would be outside of the reach of an opponent, getting returned without issue. I have actually been 100% sure i've outplayed an opponent at the net only to see them "jump" (as you say) and suddenly beat me. I would genuinely like to see something like 3:05 occur.

3: The very first one I showed at :30 he brings his racquet up to swing, and then steps backward to stand still. Same with the second instance. Which actually brings me to a larger point of contention...this games odd focus on "you have to be standing still and ready for a ball to return, and be accurate". While I'm glad the "press nothing for a safe return button" exists for times when I have to book it across court, a LARGE portion of some of the best shots made by pros are made moving, or JUST arriving at their position. The whole "the longer you stand in the position the more accurate you are" process is infuriating. And I think it's why this sort of thing happens...your player can't make a swing while moving, apparently.

4: To be fair, this is the ONLY time before and since I have seen this issue.

5: "Perfect" or not, it emphasizes my point in 3; you apparently can't swing while moving (You even see me trying to ready the shot, and my character is moving the whole time to get there. There's NO REASON he wasn't there in time), but he has to slow down and stop to swing. But this emphasizes another point... I have more breath, and more energy, and am outplaying him, making him run, making him struggle, and more often than not I see no result from it. Those bars could not be there, and honestly I would never have known. See "Chekhovs Gun"

6: I assume you're talking about the one at 3:42 ish. Honestly that doesn't bug me. I know why it's happening, and it makes sense. That's pretty low on the list.

7: Yes, legitimately yes. With as harshly as I get penalized for a ball being too far outside, or inside on a swing, I think ball collision with a player, Player or CPU should 100% be a missed shot and count as a point for the opposition. It would make smash plays at the net, or fast serves at the body far more interesting. It's part of the game, and if you play the net it happens. Hell I had a pair of sunglasses getting smacked in the face in a doubles game once.

[ManuTOO]

1) In the video, the CPU always looks at the ball before and when he hits it, he's never back to it.

2) The jump might need a bit of tuning in some cases, but overall I feel it's realistic enough to represent what volleyers do at the net : they jump tower the ball if it's a bit too far.
Also gameplay-wise, it's a great tool to balance the effectiveness of the net game : if it's OP, lower the jump, if it's under-powererd, raise the jump. :-)
=> I lowered it a lot for TE4 compared to TE2013, especially after adding the extra reach.

3a) At 0:30, when he slightly walks back it's because the ball already bounced for the 2nd time, so he's re-adjusting for that.

3b) The player inertia and the auto-pos are there to allow you to hit the ball when you just arrive in position, because you can start to prepare before you're in the exact correct position.
It still works the same for the strike on the run, although they are less well represented because usually the preparation time you can put into them doesn't allow you to aim to the left or right lines. This is likely the biggest downside of the control system. But allowing to move & aim at the same time would make the control too hard for too many people (probably including me ), so I did it like that. :-)

Possibly, you can change Auto-pos to Fast in your Character Sheet ; it's meant for newcomers to the game, and maybe you'll find the game more pleasant with it.

4) I tried to reproduce it with your recorded match, but unfortunately I discovered that starting the replay was corrupting the recording..! I spent all day yesterday trying to fix that issue, but I still didn't manage to do it, so I hope I'll be able to find the root cause of this today.

5) If you handle a bit better your positioning, I'm sure you'll harvest more the fruits of having him out of breath, because when he's like that, he'll also do poor strikes that force you to step in and if you didn't master the positioning then it can be quite challenging (in real life, it took me years to manage that poor strikes I was getting in response to my accelerations or my good defending strikes >_< )

6) Yeah this one, gameplay-wise it has no consequences, but it looks silly...

7) I had some thoughts about that when preparing the changes for TE4, and I ruled it out because it'd make the game way too hard, especially for the newcomers (I got a good bunch of outcries from TE2013 players already when they 1st arrived on TE4 >_< ).
You already cannot accelerate a ball on the body, and the normal strike quality is poor, so I think it's enough of a penalty.

[ManuTOO]

In today's update, I found & fixed several bugs linked to the CPU running back to get a lob, so now animation-wise it is more consistent.

Please let me know if you feel it's better or not.