Thoughts on Damage Date: Thu, 6 Apr 2000 16:01:00 -0500 (CDT) From: Just This Guy <steveb@herd.plethora.net> To: halo@bungie.org Subject: Damage Idea, Other Thoughts Hi. One thing that has always bothered me about realtime strategy games, and most games out there right now, is the fact that the lowliest weapon can eventually fell the heaviest armor. In Tiberian Sun, massed infantry can shoot up a Mammoth MKII. This is ridiculous. There's no way that a 5.56 slug is going to do hardkill damage to a buttoned up Abrams tank. It simply won't penetrate-- probably wouldn't get through the outer plate on the reactive armor let alone the meter of Chobham steel. You should either implement a detailed table-lookup schema for the armor/projectile battle (interactions between armor and various types of warhead) or you should implement a weapon class system whereby a weapon of class 1 has no chance of hardkilling a vehicle through class 3 armor. You might allow it to inflict half damage through class 2 armor, but 2 classes above should be impenetrable. One accurate way of implementing vehicle damage that I've thought of would be as follows: Maintain a low-resolution voxel model of the interior of the vehicle. Say, a grid of 20x20x20 cubes. Each one of these is assigned to either empty space (the interior of an empty semi trailer) or some system, which is then in turn assigned to a function. Example: A certain cube in the interior of a tank represents the vehicle's autoloader. The tank is engaged by a spalling warhead (warhead designed to send a harmonic shockwave through the armor breaking off a percussion cone of fragments inside the vehicle. The warhead itself doesn't penetrate at all.) Several fragments are modeled, and their paths are traced on a bouncing trajectory inside the vehicle. Ascertain which cubes intersect these paths. The armor value of the cubes is compared with the weapon class of the fragments (say class 1, same as bullets) and damage is handed out accordingly. Say the autoloader is destroyed. It itself explodes, producing further fragments inside the vehicle. These fragments bounce around reducing the crew into pastrami and intersecting the ammunition compartments whereupon a catastrophic explosion destroys the vehicle. Complicated but might not be all that processor intensive considering that we're dealing with a very low resolution model and insanely fast processors. Now what if the vehicle had an internal liner to prevent spalling? Another thing this system would allow is different armor values for different parts of a vehicle. You might know that there is weak armor to the left of the gun mantle on a Type V alien heavy tank, so you aim there, and your recoilless rifle has a ghost of a chance to stop the tank before it crushes you. Game looks COMPLETELY OUTRAGEOUS. -Jason Thomas Back to the Theories page

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