[Petrarch of the VBB]

Zylon, when you were making your beam faq, how did you find out the damage interval? I tried to reverse engineer your tables to worl out the damage per second for each beam, and found my self using multiples of 1100, is this what you did? I noticed you posted a topic about it on the VBB, long, long ago, btu I neevr had time to read it. Can someone enlighten me?

[CP5670]

I think that average beam damage per second can be calculated by finding 6DL/F where D is the damage rating specified in the tables, L is the life of the beam and F is the fire delay. I'm pretty sure that no damage is applied during the charge up/down times, and the firing delay value specifies the interval between one beam warm-up and the next, rather than the time between each beam shot.

[Petrarch of the VBB]

You misunderstand, I mean the damage value quoted in the tables. It says:
Damage:  200 ; note: for beam weapons this is a kind of continuous damage apllied every fraction of a second.

I want to know, what is that fraction of a second.

[EdrickV]

I'm not sure, but from looking at the source code I think the damage interval varies from beam to beam.

[CP5670]

Dave said that it was around 1/6th of a second.

[vadar_1]

Originally posted by EdrickV
I'm not sure, but from looking at the source code I think the damage interval varies from beam to beam.

I couldn't find the beam damage values... but I can say for sure thats absolutely not true.

[Petrarch of the VBB]

Surely Zylon must know, he made all those tables and had a HUGE VBB thread on this very subject. He's obviously not all there if he doesn't reply to a thread with his name in the title!

[karajorma]

Taken from my archive of VBB topics.

Originally posted on another (now closed board) by ZylonBane
Just a little update on the BEAM FAQ I'm working on...
It's 90% done. However, you know the bit about the last 10% taking 90% of your time?  

The final version will include tables that give three damage ratings for beams: per "tick", per cycle (damage per tick * cycle duration), and per minute (a slight abstraction that roughly comes out to damage per cycle * shots per minute).

Unfortunately, there's no way to determine exactly how much damage a beam cycle does-- the best I can do is blast a ship, observe its percent hull loss, look up its total hull in the tables, and guesstimate.

Too bad there's no debug code leftover that prints all the user-declared variables on the screen (unless I'm missing or forgetting something...).

------------------

Don`t know how relevant that is to what you`re asking but it was all I could find.

[Petrarch of the VBB]

Could one of you who has "A bit more clout with the brass" PM Zylon on the matter? It's been buggin me for months.

[^Graff]

I did the math, and according to Zylon's stats, it's .18181818 seconds.  So you have 5.5 ticks per second.

[Petrarch of the VBB]

Thang Cue!

[CP5670]

Cool, we have an exact value now.

[ZylonBane]

Originally posted by ^Graff
I did the math, and according to Zylon's stats, it's .18181818 seconds.  So you have 5.5 ticks per second.

Uhm, or you could have just read the line where it says, "The total damage dealt by a beam cycle is actually the value in the Damage column, multiplied by the Life value, multiplied by 5.5"

The reason I haven't responded to this thread before now is that I didn't see it. Sorry! I guess I should have put my email address in the Beam FAQ. Oh wait, I did.

Anyway, to answer Petrarch's original question-- I determined the beam damage interval by blasting a pristine ship with a beam. From the percent hull left, I estimated the number of hitpoints of damage that had been done. From this point, there are several ways to arrive at the 5.5 value, but the simplest (which I don't think I used at the time) is to do:

total damage / (damage per tick * beam duration) = ticks per second

So if a BFRed does 80850 (estimated) in one fire cycle, and the tables say one cycle lasts for 7 seconds and it does 2100 damage per tick, you get:

80850 / (7 * 2100) = 5.5

Moving on to the next question... "I tried to reverse engineer your tables to work out the damage per second for each beam". Okay, and what was hard about this? If you want to find out how much damage a 7-second beam does in one second, wouldn't you just... umm... divide the full damage by 7?

And CP5670... the 5.5 value isn't exact. As I also say in the Beam FAQ, the amount of damage a beam dishes out varies randomly by 1-2% in identical trials.

So here's a little something for those of you who haven't bookmarked it yet...
http://home.att.net/~clay.h/fs2/beamfaq.htm

[Petrarch of the VBB]

About the reverse engineering and the 1100 value.
What I did was this, work out and make a table of the damage per second for different damage values and ended up with this:

Damage Value              Damage per second
100                               550
200                               1100
300                               1650

etc.
Bear in mind that I did this without using the 5.5 value, I did this, took the Green Beam, which has a 200 damage value and takes 2 seconds to do 2200 damage (According to Zylon's tables). I then thought, this means it does 1100 damage in 1 second, so a 400 beam would bo 2200 damage in 1 second, and a 600 beam would do 3300 in 1 second, andd so on, am I a one for pointlessness or what!

[Petrarch of the VBB]

BTW, the table in the above post is wrong, It was meant to look different, but you should be able to work it out. The figures are right, however.

[Redfang]

Originally posted by Petrarch of th VBB
BTW, the table in the above post is wrong, It was meant to look different, but you should be able to work it out. The figures are right, however.

 
First: Edit.
Second: Code tag.