Variable types of damage

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-REBEL3-
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Variable types of damage

Post by -REBEL3- »

I'll probably feel stupid for mentioning this later, but..

Do we have any kind of different types of damage for ships atm? For example, in Warzone 2100, various units have differing amounts of thermal resistance, impact resistance, etc-and the game has different types of damage (like thermal and kinetic). Adding variable damage types could have a profound effect on Vega Strike and *might* be able to be done without a huge amount of work.

Benefits: If we did this in VS, we could finally implement those nebulas-have them do radiation damage to ships. We could also do some other things, like mining, espionage, salvaging, etc. We also could set it up so different weapons could do different types of damage-and I don't just mean phase damage and shield damage(though that is a good start). Lasers could do heat damage, and certain parts of a ship might be more susceptible to heat damage. Likewise, some parts of a ship might be heavy shielded against heat.

We could also generate a whole bunch of new quests like spying and salvaging other parts of enemy ships. To learn more, read on. :D

OK, so for mining, we should set up a new type of damage that only can be generated by a few select objects-lets call that damage type "mineability." If you have 100% mineablility, you can be killed...if you are killed, you drop some type of cargo. Mineable asteroids would have 100-50% susceptibility to mineability damage. If you have 0% mineability, you can't be mined-ships have 0% mineability. Then, you can create a special type of mining laser-one that only does damage to the mineability to an object-thus making it useless for combat. Then, we can ascribe different values of mineability (lower values of mineability make the process take longer-the longer the process takes, the more valuable the cargo should be. Things we can have drop from mined asteroids include...

Iron
Copper
Gold
Various trace elements-more rare, but worth more.


Salvaging and Espionage:

In the near future, we could also create some persistence variable for derelict ships. You might also be able to create a salvaging beam that would work the same way-only affecting the damage type called salvageability. If a ship was alive, it would have the salvageability value set to 0. However, if it died, but was not totally destroyed, you could implement a system where you could salvage certain pieces of the ship by shooting them with the salvage beam, and having them drop cargo. This could be profitable for the player-imagine looting a Leonidas and finding a GrandGaus you could sell, or, better yet, mount on your own ship! This could also lead to new campaign missions-kill an enemy ship, and salvage some parts for research by the military. Or, you could create a variable called "research" and use a "research beam" to scan things (like enemy bases). This could also lead to new types of quests, like scanning some enemy ships or bases. Of course, we would have to implement partial destructibility, damage effects, and ship carcasses before the second-to-last example would work.

Downsides:

It would probably place more strain on the engine to run the new content required for some of these changes required for this change to be implemented. For example, asteroids will be a prime candidate for adding, yet could eat up large amounts of engine space if done wrong.
Only other thing is that I would have NO idea how to even begin implementing these changes, or even it is possible.
klauss
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Re: Variable types of damage

Post by klauss »

Duplicated post, please reply at the original thread
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