Destroyable parts

[Andon]

Alright. As you've probably heard from me dozens of times now, I'm going to suggest a system from one of the best old games out there: Starsiege.

SS had a good system in regards to equipment being destroyed and parts of the ship being blown off.

Each part had a parent - A section of the actual vehicle. These sections also had parents, until you got to the main body.

The tree went something like this (Example is a walker). This is how it was in SS, where you didn't have the ability to mount/unmount things like alleg and didn't have a cargo hold - each of the 'equipment' things were various items, like ECM, boosters, cloak, etc.

Code: Select all

     - Left 'Shoulder' - Shield generator, Equipment 1, Equipment 2
     - Right 'Shoulder' - Reactor, Equipment 3, Computer
Body - Weapon Mount 1, Engine
     - Body part - Weapon Mount 2
     - Left Thigh - Left Calf - Left Foot
     - Right Thigh - Right Calf - Right foot

If you destroyed the left calf, then the left foot was also destroyed. If you destroyed the right shoulder, the reactor, a special equipment, and the computer were destroyed.

Each section of the actual vehicle (and not the internals or weapons) was given a percentage of the hull. Granted, the ships all had their own little script file that kept all of this information (and hard points and other things like that), but it was a nice system.

Now, for allegiance, you could do it in a pretty similar manner.

Most ships/small craft would end up just having the 'body' with everything being attached to it (There are very few ships that I can think of with anything like how SS had the components), but this could work well for a capitol ship. If you could get past the shields and you knew where the shield generator's parent was, you could target the parent and take out the shield generator. Or you could target the engines, or perhaps even the turrets. Granted, the capitol ships' models would have to be re-done to have these 'children' incorporated, but it's a possibility

[HSharp]

Would be cool but I think this would be a bit more coding work needed to implement, not only to change ships to have subsystems but to add special hitboxes to said subsystems and have the game calculate it. Also how would AoE weapons affect these special hitboxes? Multiple splash damage?

[Andon]

Well, I hadn't thought about AOE. The most 'fair' way of doing it would be to divide the damage by the parts hit.

[Vlymoxyd]

I think a good start would just be to randomly affect any damage to a "part" which could affect the stats ona ship(Like if the damage gors to the engine, the ship max speed could go down). it doesn't sound like really hard to code.

The full localised part would obviously be much better,but I'd rather have the "small" idea fast and wait alittle bit longer for the "big"one than having to wait months to get the localised damage.

[Andon]

Good point.

Perhaps have it so that the area that was hit determines where the damage goes. Ships are, or can be assumed to be, pretty uniform in what is where. Engines are in the rear, you could put shields in one side, cloak in another side, guns in the front, etc

It would also be easier to have each component have a pre-set health (Perhaps have it set core-wise) and have each component have the same amount of health - would make things simpler, as well.

[wizard58]

Destroyable parts u say , i like it in fact if this can be implemented on cap ships it will boost game play to a new lever .
Think about it instead of actually killing a cap ship u can disable it destroying ( engines , shield generator, turrets hard points) and just leave it to float dead in space until a capship killer comes and finishes the job

[notjarvis]

This is an excellent idea, even if it's just applied to capships, something like this was toying at the back of my head too...

reminds me of the old days playing wing commander, when it was a massive achievment to finish a mission, with a ship that could only turn left, and the radar/comms was on the fritz - was lots of fun to overcome adversity like that :-)


Although - if you could disable capships totally, wouldnt you just do that and leave it there - effectively taking three players out of the game?

[Andon]

It could also be used on bases - Take out the shield generators, sensors, whatever

[Vlymoxyd]

you can eject when you are a turret gunner. They might just need to allow pilots to eject too.

[Andon]

A manual eject was one of my ideas - have a toggle for the game that's just 'manual ejects only' and people have to choose whether to keep fighting and possibly die and loose their KB, or eject 'early' and keep it.