Why do you say max speed is achieved after 10m? I thought max speed happened after a set time interval since you last blocked, sidestepped, etc, about 3 seconds in my experience. Which means these 3 seconds can result in different distances. Thinking about it there is not really a proper way to test acceleration or other important effects of athlethics. Your current test will tell you something, but actual conclusions are hard to draw from it, but it is probably as good as it gets.
Another interesting part of movement which can be easily tested, would be the movement speed without actually reaching top speed. This is the type of movement which archers use to strafe and shoot and dodge cav. Maybe you could do the same test as before but without allowing the character to reach top speed by constantly drawing a bow or something. This way you can determine whether athlethics significantly improves the 'after action' run speed.
We abandoned 10 meter run. We did a 5m run. So we shouldnt really reach the top speed (buuut). Only problem is we did the forward movement. We are going to do strafe movement tomorrow most probably.
Here are the results and setups. Note that we didnt use error in the final result (i dont think its rly much needed) so u wont see y=f(x)±f(z), but only y=f(x)
SETUPArcher1 (agi/ath)=24/8
Archer2 (agi/ath)=27/0
Distance (s)= 5m
Time measurement (t): stopwatch that measures minimum of 0.1s
10 runs per test
Acceleration (a)= 2s/t²
1st test: Total weight (m)=9.7kg (armor effective weight)
2nd test: m=9.7kg+32.7kg (armor effective weight 9.7kg, mw hornbow 2.7kg, 3x mw bodkin arrows 10kg each), weapon sheeted
3rd test: m=9.7kg +32.7kg (same as above), weapon unsheeted
RESULTSTEST 1
t1=1.41s
a1=5.03m/s²
t2=1.63s
a2=3.76m/s²
TEST 2
t1=1.52s
a1=4.32m/s²
t2=1.63s
a2=3.09m/s²
TEST 3
t1=1.62s
a1=3.81m/s²
t2=1.87s
a2=2.86m/s²
DISCUSSIONThose results suggest that you actually reach max speed quite faster than 3s we have read on some other threads. Now we have 2 different results. It would be quite nice if someone could do those tests independently to confirm which results are valid. According to our results you reach max speed at around 1s run time. If our results are correct that means that high athletics characters can reach top speed before they reach 5m distance. That could make our results slightly off, because the acceleration might be slightly higher than we calculated. For the sake of this experiment we will assume our results are correct.
If you look at acceleration comparison it seems quite large, but dont forget that archers dont run 5 meters to dodge cavalry. By looking comparing our experience fighting the cavalry we concluded that average dodging distance done by archers is approx 2.5m (we didnt do statistical tests but rather used observation and experience and measured it on the map).
With given acceleration values and distance of 2.5m we got the following results that are not looking so well in favor of athletics skill (weight and weapon sheet/unsheet conditions are the same ones we used for measuring acceleration):
Time to dodge in case 1:
t1=1.00s
t2=1.15s
Δt=0.15s=150ms
Time to doge in case 2:
t1=1.08s
t2=1.27s
Δt=0.19s=190ms
Time to dodge in case 3:
t1=1.15s
t2=1.32s
Δt=0.17s=170ms
CONCLUSIONAcceleration is much greater than we assumed so far. Characters need ~1s to reach max speed. There is a great difference in acceleration values between those two builds but the time acceleration takes place is rather short which is shown in the theoretical forward run escape from cavalry. Most common gear archer would have in strategus is bow, 2 quivers and a melee weapon (or no melee), or bow and 3 quivers. Since we decided to go extreme we are not sure that 170ms would count much considering horse speed. Our theoretical escape mechanism isnt used much in the game since most archers either strafe or jump in order to doge, or both of those actions. This experiment is done only to show how this may or may not influence dodging capabilities if someone would just run in a straight line. The most notable benefit from high athletics build would belong to players with higher pings. If they already have 100 ping and need additional 170ms to move to a desired location it could be really helpful, but for players with so called good pings we doubt it would mean a lot.
We still need to check at least 3 more situations (1. strafe movement; 2. forward run with jump; 3. strafe with jump) before we can be brave enough to say whether athletics is really useful for archers or something that can be neglected in favor of attributes or some other skill.
EDIT: For all those that still dont understand how we got exact distances here is the explanation. There are props in the editor that have actual dimensions in meters (for example: 10m chain, 5m chain, 2m chain, etc). Now a fun fact: Did you know that our characters are 2m high?
