Hard Light Productions Forums
General FreeSpace => FreeSpace Discussion => Topic started by: Black Wolf on April 05, 2018, 12:04:46 am
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This is a continuation of this discussion (https://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php?topic=94591.40) about capital ship damage models in space sims. I thought a new topic was called for rather than derailing Goober's.
The discussion in question was about the right model for damage to capital ships - Freespace1s big dumb box with a set number of HP, FS2's slightly leas dumb box that needs heavy weapons to kill, or a different approach where you kill all the subsystems to kill the ship.
I'm curious what people think reflecting on how FS handles capships, and how they might design capship combat if they were building the engine today. Personally, I'd like to see an evolved version of FS' system.
All large ships (corvette and up) would be split into a small number of segments (probably no more than four or five on the absolute largest ships and stations). To kill the ship, you have to cripple all the segments (which may or may not need big ship weapons) and deal enough overall damage (with big ship weapons) to kill the ship. Each segment would have to be visibly destroyed, so it was obvious when it was time to move on.
All the subsystems would be individually destroyable to degrade the capabilities of the capship (like FS does now, but where each subsystem always has a destroyable submodel associated with it), but destroying the associated segment would also result in either blowing out or at least severely degrading the subsystems on that segment.
What would you do? I'm also interested to know how other, more modern space sims have dealt with capships?
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In "Project Freedom" (well, modern - 2004 but it's a space sim similar to FS), you had to do exactly that - blow up the sections of capships to destroy them. However, the game didn't had any "big" weapons like FS, the biggest "bomb" had a small impact. I think the best FS ship you can use when thinking through new damage models is the Hecate. If a Sath fires all 4 main guns on one of the "Wings" the ship would be destroyed, while logic tells you that only the wing would be totally gone, the rest of the ship would be working fine. On the other hand, if the central corridor of the ship would be hit with a BGreen, it could be damaged to the point it'd break into 2 pieces while, say, trying to jump out, destroying the entire ship. Also, the Hecate has several other pieces that could be split of before the ship would be totally destroyed. I think of them as hardened (also, different armor type) "shields" that prevent the main frame from being hit with beam weapons (somewhat).
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I like the segmented approach. I would probably include critical subsystems (reactor, "spine", fuel/munitions depot, etc.) that would only be vulnerable after damaging the relevant segments and/or using anti-capital weapons. Blowing those up would have drastic effects like causing the ship to shut down, or blow up the entire segment.
Overall, I would expect a modern game to make more liberal use of damage type vs armor type, and try to prevent tiny fighters from blowing up big ships by parking somewhere and firing a thousand or so shots at them.
I would also if possible try to do away with the whole "combat ends when the ship explodes" thing - I've always love Nexus : The Jupiter Incident's approach of evacuating the ship when hull integrity gets critical.
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Having something like a capital ship sized damage model from Mechwarrior (or to a lesser extent Chromehounds) could be a reasonable direction to go. Everything has armor and there are 1+ critical sections that when destroyed, destroy the whole ship (or at least make inoperable).
The number of reactors/center torso sections could easily be scaled to the size of the ship.
You'd also make focusing fire a lot more important and give a much bigger trade off to going for the fast kill vs. the careful kill.
Now that I'm writing this, damn I want to see it implemented.
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The most basic change I'd make would be to change armor from purely ablative (a hit point model) to a more 'realistic' and gameplay-enabling system: below some threshold, weapons fire would not penetrate, or simply do minimal damage. This reflects the role of armor in real life.
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How does real life armor do against a varied spectrum of energy weapons?
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We don't have a varied spectrum of energy weapons in real life! What armor does in 'realistic' damage models is say "okay, weapons below this power are basically irrelevant: you don't need to worry about them." So an anti-infantry weapon is irrelevant against a tank, a destroyer's main guns are irrelevant against a battleship - but an infantry ATGM or a destroyer's torpedoes are still capable.
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The most basic change I'd make would be to change armor from purely ablative (a hit point model) to a more 'realistic' and gameplay-enabling system: below some threshold, weapons fire would not penetrate, or simply do minimal damage. This reflects the role of armor in real life.
Well that's what the armor.tbl is for. What Black Wolf and I meant would require either SCP with GeoMod (unlikely to happen), or dedicated modelling which is - aside from Esarais Horizon - inexistent. The latter could be done if existing models were split into a main frame and submodels (untargetable subsystems). But that would require a lot of work. The only way to simulate this would be to create untargetable subsystems on weak points which have may have ~30% the strength of the main hull, and their destruction would cause the entire ship to die (like cutting a Hecate in 2).
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I for one, would love to see more derelicts and ships set adrift. It's much more likely that a ship would lose power than explode. Fighters especially should simply disintegrate into medium sized chunks, like a fighter plane would.
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We don't have a varied spectrum of energy weapons in real life! What armor does in 'realistic' damage models is say "okay, weapons below this power are basically irrelevant: you don't need to worry about them." So an anti-infantry weapon is irrelevant against a tank, a destroyer's main guns are irrelevant against a battleship - but an infantry ATGM or a destroyer's torpedoes are still capable.
You don't say.
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Imagine if only capships had heavy enough weapons to destroy other capships. Bombers can destroy turrets, but only with bombs, and fighters can't scratch them. So you either have to if without a capship defang it with bomber escort (or bomb it yourself) or you have to escort a capship and tilt the battle in your capship's favour. You might have to protect your capship from bombers so it can win or bomb the enemy's superior capship so your inferior one can take it down.
And of course, it's also possible to make missions where the player controls a capship...
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We don't have a varied spectrum of energy weapons in real life! What armor does in 'realistic' damage models is say "okay, weapons below this power are basically irrelevant: you don't need to worry about them." So an anti-infantry weapon is irrelevant against a tank, a destroyer's main guns are irrelevant against a battleship - but an infantry ATGM or a destroyer's torpedoes are still capable.
You don't say.
Ah ****, lemme just give a serious reply to this post of yours. Since I'm not sure if you're trolling me here or not.
1.) Yeah, no ****. I know how ****ing armor works in real life. Who do you think you're talking to?
2.) You're a smart dude, yet you amazingly fail to understand&answer what I was going for. No **** we don't have energy weapons in real life. Come on man.
Let me rephrase: How do you envision realistic armor would work ingame against the various energy weapons the player has at his/her disposal? With a machine gun you can fire all day on a tank and never do any real damage because each shot will be deflected. With an energy weapon that, quote: "Emits focused waves of subatomic particles that bombard its target. Impact causes the wave function of the particles to collapse and emit extremely intense, zero-point energy microbursts." that's literally not a relevant comparison anymore. Fire a bunch of Kaysers shots on a single piece of armor and it's not going to be in great shape anymore, thickness may just determine how long the plate will hold.
'Realistic threshold' type of armor only works if you assume weapons are straight out real life too. Which very few weapons in Freespace are.
At which point you'd need to come up with a bunch of magical armors that can somehow protect against a multitude of different damage types, at certain thresholds.
3.) A destroyer's main guns can actually still do significant damage against the lightly armored super structure of a battleship. Taking out important systems such as rangefinders and such.
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That would require that the game saves every single hit of a weapon and adjusts the armor type of the targeted ship. Some thing like that can be done in a single mission, like "This ship has super-heavy armor, but if our capships fire several times on the same position we penetrate to softer layers, causing more damage", but it'd be hard to implement ingame meaningful. However with these decals having been reimplanted, you could say if a decal gets hit, the weapon does 2 times the regular damage or something like that.
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I'm a fan of the idea of having to blow off armored sections to reveal critical systems underneath, which smaller weapons can also do serious damage on.
Stuff we could totally do ingame right now, but we just don't have any of the assets setup for it.
That would require that the game saves every single hit of a weapon and adjusts the armor type of the targeted ship. Some thing like that can be done in a single mission, like "This ship has super-heavy armor, but if our capships fire several times on the same position we penetrate to softer layers, causing more damage", but it'd be hard to implement ingame meaningful. However with these decals having been reimplanted, you could say if a decal gets hit, the weapon does 2 times the regular damage or something like that.
Having some interaction with capitalships melting away the super heavy armor type so you can start doing damage in your smaller strike craft is also neat.
(Decals are we have them ingame are purely a visual thing though, you can't actually check if you hit a decal and such, afaik.)
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Let me rephrase: How do you envision realistic armor would work ingame against the various energy weapons the player has at his/her disposal? With a machine gun you can fire all day on a tank and never do any real damage because each shot will be deflected. With an energy weapon that, quote: "Emits focused waves of subatomic particles that bombard its target. Impact causes the wave function of the particles to collapse and emit extremely intense, zero-point energy microbursts." that's literally not a relevant comparison anymore. Fire a bunch of Kaysers shots on a single piece of armor and it's not going to be in great shape anymore, thickness may just determine how long the plate will hold.
I'm not sure if it's actually possible using the current armor types system to degrade armor over time to make it less effective. That would be a very interesting idea, though! Something along the lines of asscreed4 boats, where you could fire a broadside and uncover a weakspot that you hit for massive damage.
efb
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Stuff we could totally do ingame right now, but we just don't have any of the assets setup for it.
I mean, theoretically you could just add a bunch of Weakpoint subsystems to a .pof and table, make them invulnerable and untargetable, SEXP them to be revealed at certain damage thresholds and sabotage-hull it when each weakpoint is destroyed. I had this idea in mind for Bravo command, but then I got sidetracked with other mods that needed FREDding attention.
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Well my idea about decal was that having this feature requires the game to save the position (I remember the picture of the colorful ship Spoon posted in that thread), so some coder might come up with a function that says if this texture (maybe using the specified radius of the decal) is hit, the weapon deals more damage.
Stuff we could totally do ingame right now, but we just don't have any of the assets setup for it.
I mean, theoretically you could just add a bunch of Weakpoint subsystems to a .pof and table, make them invulnerable and untargetable, SEXP them to be revealed at certain damage thresholds and sabotage-hull it when each weakpoint is destroyed. I had this idea in mind for Bravo command, but then I got sidetracked with other mods that needed FREDding attention.
That's what I meant with cutting the Hecate apart (see earlier).
Making this directly with modeled assets is for a number of assets is unrealistic because
a) it changes gameplay dramaticly
b) this requires A LOT of work that can be invested elseway, unless you want to push the complexity of assets to the point only a few people are wiling (and able) to make them
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I mean, theoretically you could just add a bunch of Weakpoint subsystems to a .pof and table, make them invulnerable and untargetable, SEXP them to be revealed at certain damage thresholds and sabotage-hull it when each weakpoint is destroyed. I had this idea in mind for Bravo command, but then I got sidetracked with other mods that needed FREDding attention.
Sure, but that's the cheap and easy way out. Having no visual indicator outside of the hud telling you "well, thats 0% now. you can stop shooting it now" is dull.
Making this directly with modeled assets is for a number of assets is unrealistic because
a) it changes gameplay dramaticly
b) this requires A LOT of work that can be invested elseway, unless you want to push the complexity of assets to the point only a few people are wiling (and able) to make them
Point A is managable, but point B is definitely where all the hard labor comes into play.
Well my idea about decal was that having this feature requires the game to save the position (I remember the picture of the colorful ship Spoon posted in that thread), so some coder might come up with a function that says if this texture (maybe using the specified radius of the decal) is hit, the weapon deals more damage.
Pick a weapon that is the easiest to paint a ship's hull with.
Spray and pray
???
Double damage profit
Splatoon 3, Freespace edition
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Sure, but that's the cheap and easy way out. Having no visual indicator outside of the hud telling you "well, thats 0% now. you can stop shooting it now" is dull.
when-argument any of Weakpoint1 Weakpoint2 Weakpoint3 is-subsystem-destroyed-delay "Boss" "<argument>" explosion-effect
Granted this is only really feasible for single-ship boss gimmicks using this system. Scripting or other solutions will be needed if you want to both use this in more than a couple ships and not bloat your mission with incredibly difficult to debug hacks and repeated events.
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Well my idea about decal was that having this feature requires the game to save the position (I remember the picture of the colorful ship Spoon posted in that thread), so some coder might come up with a function that says if this texture (maybe using the specified radius of the decal) is hit, the weapon deals more damage.
Pick a weapon that is the easiest to paint a ship's hull with.
Spray and pray
???
Double damage profit
Splatoon 3, Freespace edition
With that I meant the code that makes the effect optical effect come into place (i.e. saving the impact location of primary weapons).
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Sure, but that's the cheap and easy way out. Having no visual indicator outside of the hud telling you "well, thats 0% now. you can stop shooting it now" is dull.
when-argument any of Weakpoint1 Weakpoint2 Weakpoint3 is-subsystem-destroyed-delay "Boss" "<argument>" explosion-effect
Granted this is only really feasible for single-ship boss gimmicks using this system. Scripting or other solutions will be needed if you want to both use this in more than a couple ships and not bloat your mission with incredibly difficult to debug hacks and repeated events.
Adding an explosion effect doesn't really alleviate the dullness though. The ship will still look untouched.
With that I meant the code that makes the effect optical effect come into place (i.e. saving the impact location of primary weapons).
Yes, I know what you meant. I just don't think thats going to be feasable at all though. Because four fighters can **** out weapons projectiles and create decals at staggering rates. And the coder would need to add a buttload of customizable parameters to these decal effects if they're going to be workable for the modder at all.
Not trying to be a big sour spoilsport here.
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Would it be possible to cell fracture the model armor chunks and add them as destroyable untargetable subsystems? With the collide submodel flag weapon hits could destroy the chunks and reveal the inside.
It'll be crazy to do it for a whole capship but it could work for a specific small part.
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Would it be possible to cell fracture the model armor chunks and add them as destroyable untargetable subsystems? With the collide submodel flag weapon hits could destroy the chunks and reveal the inside.
It'll be crazy to do it for a whole capship but it could work for a specific small part.
The only ship I remember that ever used exposed interior was Esarais Horizon battleship.
Well it didn't seemed to be a good idea to have this kind of armor effect for fighterweapons anyway. What I'd like to see would be (bit OT) some cool huge/supercap related effects - currently it looks that way: a beam with defined sections fires, creates a cool impact glow and maybe some nice piercing particles, just like one would expect it from other modern games. But after that the surface isn't damaged aside from a fighter-sized particle spew. Same for bombs. Having a weapon-size related particle spew that makes it look like the ship is burning (or atleast dust clouds of vaporized metal) and decals for huge weapons makes much more sense to me than to paint ships as colorful as possible.
Perhaps unrelated, but I've experimented with the death flash cfg a bit to make the death roll of fighters more look like WWII fighters being shot down, leaving behind a trail of fire instead of just more small explosions, with medium results due to the addontional created explosions not being centered.
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Would it be possible to cell fracture the model armor chunks and add them as destroyable untargetable subsystems? With the collide submodel flag weapon hits could destroy the chunks and reveal the inside.
It'll be crazy to do it for a whole capship but it could work for a specific small part.
It's not that its not possible, just that it'll be a big chunk of work and :effort:. But yeah, untargetable subsystems would be the obvious way to go about setting it up.
Perhaps unrelated, but I've experimented with the death flash cfg a bit to make the death roll of fighters more look like WWII fighters being shot down, leaving behind a trail of fire instead of just more small explosions, with medium results due to the addontional created explosions not being centered.
Sounds neat, can you show it off in a video or something?
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I've added 2 screens from the FS2 intro I used for reference. Maybe it had turned out better if I had used a smoke effect, but it shows the problem I had with this - the explosions are being generated across the entire hull, what makes the trail too wide and you see the individual explosions, so I had to increase the size of the explosions to compensate this. While a certain variance is good, I wanted it to make it look more like a particle spew.
[attachment stolen by Russian hackers]
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That still looks pretty cool imo
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I've used a custom effect I made by cutting off the initial frames from an old MediaVP particle spew. I used this also as a custom effect that meets the special impact behavior of beam weapons - it always looked odd to me to see ExpMissileHit1 repeating over and over in various angles.
Still, I consider this a rather failed attempt, but maybe somebody edits this script a bit and makes addontional explosions for fighters centered...
Name: GTF Ulysses
Detonation Radius Multiplier: 3.0
Detonation Effects: 7 ---Custom effect
Detonation Multiplier: 4.0