Cornflakes_91 wrote: ↑Sat Aug 12, 2017 2:50 pm
if you look very closely you'll see that i didnt say "per system damage is bad"
what i am saying is that weapons that can essentially cut away large portions of your equipment in one swoop and without the attacker needing much precision or knowledge to do that is bad.
...
it just doesnt seem to be any fun losing large chunks of your ship to bad luck or because you got screwed over by the PCG ship generator that dared to give you any protrusions from the ideal solid brick/sphere design.
OK, clarification appreciated.
I'm still not seeing how being able to target specific ship components necessarily winds up being worse for the defender than an overall-damage design, though. If I can destroy some important component of an opponent's ship, and have some reason to be satisfied with that -- rather than continuing to wreak havok until the opponent ship blows up -- isn't that potentially
less hardcore (and unfair-feeling) than a design where there's just a "% damage" number and your ship is destroyed completely once that number >= 100?
To the "protrusions" thing, let's go there next:
Cornflakes_91 wrote: ↑Sat Aug 12, 2017 2:50 pm
also, how would you define internal structural integrity in an easy to understand and calculate way for many many ships?
how would you model the cutting/holing without making LT a full-blown voxel game?
Grumblesaur wrote: ↑Sat Aug 12, 2017 6:00 pm
Freelancer had mechanics for partial ship destruction and weapon loss. You could lose wings or protrusions, as well as the things mounted on the ship's hardpoints (thruster, countermeasure dropper, guns, even your shield module). This is partially because a lot of the ships in Freelancer were originally intended to have animated wing deployment animations, but this feature was
dummied out because the game was rushed. This made the blast radius on explosives pretty deadly, since you could hit several components at once and deal a lot of extra hull damage, and would let you fly ships that are basically falling apart.
This is a cool feature both for aesthetics and strategy, but in Freelancer's case it required ships with predefined sections and joints where the sections could break off. Cornflakes has a point in that if we wanted to achieve this procedurally, there would need to be some kind of voxel system that could determine how to break the ship into chunks.
But making it so that shield, gun, and thruster hardpoints (and similar mounts) are all exposed (and thus, the things attached to them are exposed) would be more interesting than
critical existence failure at zero hit points.
I'm wondering if you guys are thinking about semi-realistically modeling ships: form follows function, where each kind of component produces a certain distinctive visual section of a ship.
With two exceptions, I'm not making that assumption.
What I'm thinking is that, except for guns and engines, ships visually are just all hull structure. As a pilot, you can see the internal systems of your ship
schematically, and their status (which affects performance). And as an enemy pilot, you have access (only notional if you're an NPC pilot) to a bit of UI that -- depending on the quality of your ship's targeting system -- shows you some or all of an enemy ship's components and the percentage chance of an attack on that target succeeding. (Not unlike V.A.T.S. from Fallout, I suppose, only without the magic pausing.)
For giving up some "realism" (code that has to figure out how to represent every kind of ship system with some external/visual greeble), you get a design that makes it easier to implement system-targeted damage. If ships are mostly just structure, and I succeed with a targeted attack that damages your scanner, the damageShip() function can just randomly pick part of the damaged ship and remove some structural bits. If it's your ship that's hit, you also see that system damage reflected in your ship schematic (which does not have to correspond exactly to what your ship looks like visually) and the basic ship-system UI elements.
Guns and engines are a little bit different in that these things are shown visually as external components. So "randomly damage some structure" wouldn't work for them; you'd really need to pick a weapon or engine and remove it from the ship (and maybe add some blast damage decals). That reduces the value of "internal components don't need external representations" somewhat.
Maybe not entirely, though.
I know this suggestion won't sit well with some folks, for whom abstracting away visual representations of internal systems is irrational, illogical, and Goes Too Far, Sir!
But there is an element of realism required here, and that is: in this real world where software development takes real time, are you willing to give up a little visual verisimilitude in order to get a cool gameplay feature such as targeted damage?
If not, then I think it's fair to suggest that it's incumbent on you to suggest how a requirement for visually fidelity can be implemented efficiently. I'm saying I don't think that's necessary, but I'm open to being persuaded otherwise.