javier wrote: Reserve high order bit of the mask to damages not made by weapons. A shield with this bit on will not suffer damage from collisions.
(puzzled): but is it not the same type of damage which is caused by all kinetic weapons ? Autocannons, and suchlike ? And even explosions ?
safemode wrote:before we would start making use of this I think it's important to document what the masks actually refer to when it comes to the units (weapons,etc) that they cover.
Meaning, I think we should assign ranges a name and put certain weapons in that range, and make certain ships shields / hulls part of those ranges. All of that needs to be detailed and mapped out or we'll have a mess of trying to figure out which ship should have what mask to "balance" correctly with this damage system.
But is it really necessary to resolve weapons and defences one-by-one ? Would not effect-by-effect work better and have much less messy setup ? After all, there's less effects than implementations: all lasers are
much the same, etc. So if one shield of this class stops ray, another will too, though maybe more or less effectively. Instead of classifying dozen similar beams in one category, just assign them different damages of the same 2-3 damagetypes, and it will be obvious what works vs. what.
safemode wrote: I take it, the patch can handle that. Or are you organizing along a different mode that has nothing to do with the physics (real or not) of the weapons/shields/hulls.
javier wrote:Here it is a small patch to put in top of the previous one. It defines a new configuration variable "phase_only_mask" under physics section.
If set to "true", the mask only applies to phase damage, leaving out direct damage.
May i suggest to consider "
before we would start making use of this" another option instead: list of damages with single type each ? This way
instead of "all or nothing", effect can be countered, neutralized or ignored by shield or armor or whatever
partially, while others left intact, it's quite flexible.
E.g. something like: laser pulse with "damagetype=impact damage=X1; damagetype=heat damage=Y1", plasma bolt with "damagetype=impact damage=X2; damagetype=currents damage=Y2; damagetype=heat damage=Z2", neutron beam with "damagetype=particlepenetrating damage=X3; damagetype=inducedrad damage=Y3; damagetype=heat damage=Z3", and so on, with different comonents.
Processed in sequence, so latter passes through defence only as much as former. If laser blasts armor only after dropping shield, it gives less heat, if 1/10 of plasmabolt's second damage passes shield, it does not explodes armor at all and upsets ship's electronics much less than it could, and if neutron beam is stopped completely, it tries to make shield radioactive (shield just cancels this type of damage), then causes mild heat irradiation, which is applied to shield (but this damage partially bypasses it).
The same would happen if weapon causes damage of single type, but this damagetype in turn causes proportional secondary damage (which can do the same).