BFett wrote:So you assume that drones have next to no health and that 1 point of damage is enough to destroy a drone? Because that's the only way I see this working in any feasible way. No matter how you cut it the computer is going to have to manage a percentage of the drones health. This also means that you can't divide a group of 300 drones into 300 groups of 1 drone each. Because the mechanics you describe make that impossible.

errr.. no.

its a bit more complex than computing hit/no hit but its surely possible.

have a common health pool from which hits deduct HP from and do a bit of probability function magic to tell if a drone got destroyed or a different one just hit.

Cornflakes_91 wrote:

BFett wrote:So you assume that drones have next to no health and that 1 point of damage is enough to destroy a drone? Because that's the only way I see this working in any feasible way. No matter how you cut it the computer is going to have to manage a percentage of the drones health. This also means that you can't divide a group of 300 drones into 300 groups of 1 drone each. Because the mechanics you describe make that impossible.

errr.. no.

its a bit more complex than computing hit/no hit but its surely possible.

have a common health pool from which hits deduct HP from and do a bit of probability function magic to tell if a drone got destroyed or a different one just hit.

Right, so 300 drones with 5 hp each equals 1500 hp for the group. You shoot into the group with a 10 damage laser with a second duration. We then run the damage through the function that you describe to find the number of drones destroyed. This doesn't weaken the swarm's damage because the swarm is seen as a single entity within the game environment. So the net result is a random health drop of 20 hp or more while also maintaining the exact same damage output. Or do we have a percentage modifier for damage that correlates directly to health?

Then comes the question of splitting the group when the old group had damaged drones. How does the computer handle this? 10 damaged drones are more difficult for the computer to track than just a living or dead state.

I like the idea, I just don't know how it could be represented in a way that it works with a FPS type of game where a player is literally shooting into a cloud of moving objects, and each object has health that is being tracked.

BFett wrote:

Cornflakes_91 wrote:

BFett wrote:So you assume that drones have next to no health and that 1 point of damage is enough to destroy a drone? Because that's the only way I see this working in any feasible way. No matter how you cut it the computer is going to have to manage a percentage of the drones health. This also means that you can't divide a group of 300 drones into 300 groups of 1 drone each. Because the mechanics you describe make that impossible.

errr.. no.

its a bit more complex than computing hit/no hit but its surely possible.

have a common health pool from which hits deduct HP from and do a bit of probability function magic to tell if a drone got destroyed or a different one just hit.

Right, so 300 drones with 5 hp each equals 1500 hp for the group. You shoot into the group with a 10 damage laser with a second duration. We then run the damage through the function that you describe to find the number of drones destroyed. This doesn't weaken the swarm's damage because the swarm is seen as a single entity within the game environment. So the net result is a random health drop of 20 hp or more while also maintaining the exact same damage output. Or do we have a percentage modifier for damage that correlates directly to health?

Then comes the question of splitting the group when the old group had damaged drones. How does the computer handle this? 10 damaged drones are more difficult for the computer to track than just a living or dead state.

I like the idea, I just don't know how it could be represented in a way that it works with a FPS type of game where a player is literally shooting into a cloud of moving objects, and each object has health that is being tracked.

Each item can be a separate entity, however it's a sub-entity of the parent "Swarm"
This means each item blocks shots, and can be killed, and puts out a little damage.
But the swarm is the one with the AI picking movement vectors and the like.

Oddly, it's not actually too expensive to do this, the majority of the CPU time in games is pathfinding. Simplify this down to a single entity doing the pathfinding and you can do a lot of things.

BFett wrote:and each object has health that is being tracked.

they dont have individually tracked health
at least not in cloud state.
(or at least its far from being necessary)

when you separate one out it gets a health value calculated based on some probability math.

its abstraction and LoD math but you can "see" it easier where it does the abstractions.

BFett wrote: Right, so 300 drones with 5 hp each equals 1500 hp for the group. You shoot into the group with a 10 damage laser with a second duration. We then run the damage through the function that you describe to find the number of drones destroyed. This doesn't weaken the swarm's damage because the swarm is seen as a single entity within the game environment. So the net result is a random health drop of 20 hp or more while also maintaining the exact same damage output. Or do we have a percentage modifier for damage that correlates directly to health?

no, if it decides that a drone was destroyed the effects the swarm can cause get reduced accordingly.
but the rolls dont have to decide that the 4x5 damage only hit 5 drones, it could as well have hit 10 drones for 2 or 3 damage each (assuming its a continous beam weapon)
which wouldnt destroy a single drone and dont change the effects the swarm can cause.

if its a discrete pulse laser that hits something, 1 drone would get destroyed and the effect output of the swarm would be reduced by some amount.