Weight of Fire

I cant help but ask if there will be support for Weight Of Fire (W.O.F)?

Q1: What does W.O.F do you ask?

A1: It allows for weapon impacts that "kill" a unit, to also throw that unit along the same vector and at a velocity comparible to the level of overkill. This applies to all forms of damage... Direct fire, beam weapons, area attacks, splash damage and of coarse, NUKES!

Units thrown do damage to what ever they hit... so stacking up masses of smaller units can potentially mean that they all get thrown into the air from an artillery strike. Only to later land on other units and structures to do yet more damage lovely damage.

Here's a short video of WOF in action. (Created for FA)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FVqMqz8PgEc

Resin

welcome my friend! !shrugs! !giggle!

This is a must have. :mrgreen:

Well an artillery fire would blow them all to pieces so you refer to all those piece then landing on other units or constructions?

You people should listen to Resin. He has been one of the few GREATEST modders for Forged Alliance before the community died.

There are good FA mods?
I kinda wanna play around with the game again.

Also, overkill like this sounds incredibly fun and awesome.

IIRC, Red Alert 2 even did this. Tanks could explode on buildings damaging them. Buildings exploding released exploding pieces that could then hit nearby buildings and damage them.

uber cannon to full power blast the enemy scum to the moon! (or atleast into orbit)

Course there are good FA mods. Look up 4DC or Domino mod support

I used to work on another called Wyvern Battle Pack, but I only release that to a select few.

Realy not sure about WoF. It requires a lot of physics and that has one big disadvantage:
While trajectories are rather simple and determinstic to compute, collsions require an iterative approach which makes the accuracy of the simulation depended on the available CPU power. This means trouble, since the calculation will never be deterministic unless you restore the precise momentum, position and angle of every unit and assign a fixed amount of CPU time to physics.

Problem is, that breaks replays. You can't just store all information required to create the exact same situation twice, this kind of physics ist just to chaotic (even slightest misalignments would lead to visibly different results).

Wrong.

Only reason RA2 does it is because the tanks explosions damage buildings when they literally explode, the area of effect is reproduceable on the tanks position, and the building's explosion pieces are seperately created entities when the building is destroyed, also reproduceable like a cluster bomb from the building's location.

That would be fine. REALLY REALISTIC exploding debris? Probably too hard for what it is worth in development time.

I see, so just overkill which results in the remaining damage beeing dealt as AoE?

Yeah, that should work. Debris would have been almost impossible to compute for this task.

Btw, it's very similar to an older idea: Making all direct fire units piercing, if the damage exceeds a certain part of the units health (like 50-70%), then the projectile would also hit units behind wherby the remaining damage of the projectile is reduced by the damage already caused.

I quite like this idea, I wonder how hard it would be to impliment? The impact on the ability to have replays is an angle I honestly wouldnt have thought of.

Zordon what part of exterminans post was wrong? would it be possible to realistically retain WoF data in a replay? - genuinely interested I have never looked into what goes into storing a replay. It would be cool if it could be.

I suppose if it was too difficult in light of that it could be reduced to a fancy debris animation with an AoE as some have described.

Very cool idea, I'd like to see this kind of thing if there were rail guns or laser/energy/plasma lance type weapons.

Don't store that information. Recreate it from state. If replays work, then so too will kinematics (don't call it physics; every time you do, a scientist cries).

I would really like to blast a unit into orbit. And just see it floating there. Forever.

Depends on what are you looking for, you won't find high quality mods like you find for example Total War games or Homeworld, but if you just want to play around there is some stuff.


On Topic: How I currently imagine it, it will look ridiculous. Entire tanks flying around when a large artillery shell explodes near them, wrecking the rest of your army that actually survived first... :?
If just some wreckage parts would fly around, it would be okay. However you would assume that the amount and size of the wreckages parts will scale with the amount of overkill too (more overkill -> less and smaller wreckage parts)...

Not sure if its a good idea.

As long as I can time the destruction of an enemy orbital platform to drop the resulting debris ontop of his base for collateral I'm fine.

Not sure how this would work from a gameplay perspective. Maybe only for the most extreme weapons. (Bots are heavy and all that.)
But really, it seems to me to just add extra and unnecessary cruft to the game.

As for recreating it in replays, etc, this really isn't as big a challenge as all that. There are plenty of methods that you can use to recreate it. Pseudo-randomness is used in a lot of games for that reason. (Take a look at some of the old Doom netcode.) Also, if you create it using procedural methods, as long as you have the proper seed, it's easy to recreate. (Similar to how planets will be created in PA.)

At risk of interjecting some realism (BLASPHEMY!) into this conversation I should point out that the hollywood syndrome of people being thrown around by gunshots and explosions is complete nonsense. In the real world, it doesn't work that way.

Also, these are big heavy metal robots. Do we really want them being tossed around like rag dolls? I'm not so sure this is a good idea, nor do I think it is a good place to be spending the developers valuable time for what is basically a purely cosmetic feature.