[Knight Templar]

This was being discussed in the Wing Commander Forum.

How bout' something like realistic damaging effects in Freespace. I'm not talking Geomod, but you all know how you can find that sweet spot on the Hades or whatever and blow it to hell after half an hour with your prometheus?

Well I was thinking something like realistic damaging. Like certain subsystems on the ship, you can do a given amount of overall damage to the ship by shooting. Say the more important subsystems, like Engines you can damage up to 75% percent of the entire ship by shooting. This means that if the ship is at 100% hull intregity and you keep firing at the Engines, you can get it down to 25% eventually. This helps counter the 'camping' strategy with bigger cap ships and makes the game more realistic.

My version of the damage would be something like this.

Reactors - 90% - 100% (obvious reasons)
Engines - 75% or so (Melt Down, fuel, stuff like that)
Weapons, Sensors, Comms, etc. - 25% - 15%
Turrets - 5%

Now I suppose effects on the general hull would either be set to regular or something like 85% - 95% percent.

Either way, can this be done?


PS - Inquisitor, Check your pms sometime if you would. Thanks

[Solatar]

How about if you pummeled the same area for a while, damage would increase as that part of the hull weakened.

[Knight Templar]

that would be great too. But the only problem I can think of is how would it be able to tell which part of the hull you are hitting? With subsystems they can take damage relatively on their own which I think would make it easier to program, although the SCP project has put out some pretty slick stuff.

[Stealth]

Originally posted by Knight Templar
that would be great too. But the only problem I can think of is how would it be able to tell which part of the hull you are hitting? With subsystems they can take damage relatively on their own which I think would make it easier to program, although the SCP project has put out some pretty slick stuff.

it would be possible... even if something as primitive as adding hidden subsystems all over the ship, and making them trigger everything as they're damaged/destroyed/fired upon/etc.

[Inquisitor]

Best way to reach me is not PM. Email or ICQ

[Stryke 9]

Soft spots would be nice. Ideally, I'd say get rid of the HP system altogether and use a more realistic model (say, comparing weapon level to armor level to see if the weapon damages at all, so you're not plunking away 40000 times with a little Avengeroid and suddenly causing a catastrophic explosion in the capship at your 40000th hit), but that'd be a lot more radical a change than I think the SCP is up to right now...

You think it's possible to have "lucky hits"? Something like a random number generator determining that one of your shots can connect for two or ten times the damage once in a blue moon, because you hit some crack in the armor or something? Can cause the shot damage values to go up or down slightly from charge to charge, and sometimes change radically- it would help if you ever wanted to install a real armor system, and at any rate would be more interesting than watching HP levels fall at a set rate for every hit.

[Bobboau]

maybe I should look into the soft spot idea I had a while back

[phreak]

just don't commit anything, we need to get 3.5 finished

[penguin]

Hmm, I had an idea that's almost the opposite of a "soft spot." Since (in RL) naval vessels are compartmentalized, I assume the same would apply to warcraft in space -- it would be even more important in space, I would think.

As an extreme case, consider the forward prongs of a Sathanas -- with the current setup, you could destroy the entire ship by just beating on one tip with your HL-7 for a few hours  Not too realistic.

Anyhow, my idea: if a particular area (a "compartment") is damaged/destroyed, the total hull integrity goes down by some factor.  After that, you can pummel away forever on that same section with no effect whatsoever on the ship's integrity.  After a certain number of "compartments" are destroyed, hull failure would eventually result; geomodding or some sort of damage decal would be nice here, so the player could tell what areas have been damaged.

This pretty much trashes the entire system of hit points, etc., so it's probably not too workable w/ the current engine.

[Knight Templar]

That's pretty much what I was thinking. Like the forward beam on the sath, you could destroy it and keep firing at it, but once you do an over 5% of damage to the ship, it doesn't do any good anymore.

[Bobboau]

well I was thinking of the soft spot thing as being able to be ether hard or soft, but the compartment system would work into this idea, the only problem would be that there is no way to generate this for ships in the game allready, meaning it would destroy backwards compatability, unless we could devise some way of generating something like this dynamicaly,
one way we could do this is on a per face basis, each polygon could get a value computed that would be basicly it's aria divided by the total aria of the ship, and then you can figure how many hit points each poly should get, user defined zones could overide hit points of polys within them

[Stryke 9]

Hmm... maybe a version separate from the main SCP release, one built specifically for TCs that might benefit from this stuff with no backward compatibility...


But I don't see why the subsystems approach would keep people from using the old models, they'd just not have this function, yes?


Oh, and Bob- that's a cool idea, but I see problems as far as modelmaking goes in it. If you want an area of high damage, it'd have to be some HUGE polys, while heavily armored spots would be subdivided all over the place- basically, it'd just make for a mess for modelers. I dunno, maybe there's a way to work it out, but I don't fancy the idea of having Big Vulnerable Planes-O-Death on cruisers.

[Galemp]

Impractical thought: armor values for textures?

[LtNarol]

How about having the engine automatically split ships into 100 meter cubes on destroyers, 50 meter cubes on cruisers and corvettes, and 5 meter cubes on fighters/bombers (basing this off the ship class flags in ships.tbl)?

It could work on the same general principle as the splitting of shields into quadrants.  Each cubic section could be setup to only take damage up to a point before further pummling will cease to affect it.

Obvious short cuts could be certain subsystems specified in ships.tbl; for that matter, the amount of damage each section can take could be kept in ships.tbl as well.

This would effectively require application of damage to several areas on a ship (since to destoy ships it doesn't make sense to have to damage every surface, just enough that hull integrity and systems fail/leak).

Just my 2 cents.

[DTP]

Originally posted by GalacticEmperor
Impractical thought: armor values for textures?

Atcually this makes sense. this kind of plating has this kind of resistance to laser fire.

optional("meaning not breaking backward compatibility")
+Armour Texture NAME,resistance,percent.

But there weill be plenty of issues however.

Should it be Global, or for this ship only.(global means faster implemention/coding)

Also finding the polygon hit, in order to aquire the texture.(think bobboau did this in his decal code however).

And im sure plenty of issues more.

But i like it this way.

[Bobboau]

the model colision code will return the texture (and UVs) of a hit polygon,
but I think this would be a good excuse to bump our model format up to ver 3000, before we do that though I would like to get a list of changes we would like to eventualy make

[phreak]

first one would be a presorted vertex list sorted by texture

[Bobboau]

the BSP tree is still usefull for colision if nothing else, so I think we should keep it, maybe add some things like a poly count or something to the OBJ2 strducture, but makeing vertex buffers from the current bsp tree is fairly simple

[KARMA]

maybe more than textures (you may want to unwrap some parts)  we may use some other parameters appliable from the 3d progs (reflectance?) to assign a hit value to the polys while converting
but personally i'd like more a solution like this (that will remain compatible with older ships..):

a new string in tables is created to individuate the critical subobjects, something like:
"critical= "hull, engine, bridge"

if "hull" is present a ship can be destroyed by reducing its hull to 0
if the string is not present (so for all the older ships) hull is the only critical by default
if any critical subobject is destroyed hull is automatically bringed =0 (so if "hull" is not present the ship can be destroyed ONLY destroying a critical subobject)
some kind of operation may be needed to make combinations example: critical= "bridge + engine, core" in this way the ship can be blown by destroying its bridge AND engines OR by destroying just the core
If operations will not be possible it will be better probably to have a ship destroyed when ALL the critical subobjects (except hull) are destroyed

i'd like even more a "modular" solution (a ship is done by modules, each with hp, when you blow a certain number of modules the ship is gone) but it will not be compatible with older ships+ it will be probably annoying to make a capship model with dozens of modules

[Nico]

about the damage per poly, unless I understand nothing, doesn't that mean you'd have to shoot ALL the polys if you want to destroy a ship?

I think the best way would be some kind of subsystems like in modelview that define areas of the ship, you place "critical" and "non critical" zones all over the ship ( cubic areas ), with a percent of the hull pallied to that zone ( after all, if I'm not mistaken, HP of subsystems in the tbl ARE percents of the whole hull, no need to go farther than that, old ships already have that entry ). "non critical" areas will drop to said percentage, and won't damage the ship if shot anymore once it has reached its limit.