Armour Bits?

I thought it would be cool if units, when hit but not destroyed, would have bits and chunks of armour fly off them. Commanders would take longer for their armour to fall off, and weaker unit's armour would fall off quicker. This could be applied to factories and bases, as well. This would add a lot of depth to the game because you could see the inner workings of a unit or building. Maybe this is too micro, but if the zoom permits, mabye only render the fallen armour from a certain zoom point. No so much that it jumps out and looks tacky, and laggs the game, but slowly, as you zoom in. This concept could replace the way overused health system that nearly every game uses. If all the armour on something falls off, it overheats, and explodes.

Seems like a superflous bit of eye candy for a lot of effort.

But I am interested in what kind of damage effects are actually planned....

Total Annihilation did it when they were destroyed drewsuser, and it looked super cool.
Is that where you got the idea from?

Actually, I didn't get it from TA. I was just thinking on how annoying health bars or just "health" in general. Like of you get shot in the head in a game, you mar lose a great portion health, but not die? Let elaborate a little more on the topic. If a large gun, or a heavy damage gun, or something really powerful hits a chunk of armour, a lot, or all may fall off, if a weak gun hits it just a few bits may fall off. If a weak gun or powerful gun hits a critical point, or weak spot in the armour, the unit or building explodes.

Sigh, it's a shame but I'm not sure it could be done without eating up CPU cycles.

Lovely thought, but it would cripple the server.

But how does a player track the well being of his units across hundreds of units?

HP make be fairly arbitrary in most games, but it's done for a reason, the most prominent of which is that it's extremely user friendly and very easy to understand and internalize.

Mike

Buildings changing with damage has been around since the RTS genre was conceived.
Front/Rear armour in tanks has been done for years.

Specific location damage on units is fairly recent though. I've only seen C&C4 do it, and the rest of the game was... well, it was terrible. So there isn't much on it.
With the aim on masses of units, I can see keeping track of specific damage being an undesired drain on the system.

However, it is always used in combination with health bars because it's easier to read a health bar at a glance than it is to read small alterations to a structure/unit.

if it's only a visual thing, well it can be cool but simply having the unit's texture change to be more and more worn out is enough for me, you also can add smoke or fire yeah, i think SC does this.


but this remind me something i loved in an other game, it's a bit off-topic, but in the mechwarrior/mechcommander series there is some kind of damage localisation that is quite neat :
basically, each mech' has a certain number of hit points on each "part", for exemple arms, legs, front, rear, sides and cockpit, and damage taken did little effect as long as the armor wasn't pierced, however once you start damaging the internal structure of the mech you could destroy its weaponry, tear away legs and arm, or direcly kill the pilot if you hit the cockpit.

what was funny is that you could peel of entirely a mech' armor but still leaving it at 100% firepower, of on the contrary pierce the back armor to blow up the reactor while leaving all the rest unscratched.

but well, that's an other game, and it would essentially reward micromanaging which is not the focus here

Did you not read all of the first post? I said the armour bits would only render, or come into view at a certain zoom point, so it wouldn't lag. This makes sense, because if bits of armour only came to view at ground level zoom, and only within a certain area of the zoom, only a few bits of armour need to be shown. But I know what you're thinking: what if many people are zoomed in at ground level? This feature could be automatically turned off by server if to many people are present. How you address the problem of keeping track of all the unit's and building's armour, is by finding their armour percents and calculate a mean average and display it along one side of the screen. This is much like a health bar, but for the overall units. It also prevents excessive micromanaging.

I certainly would much rather quickly look at the damage effects on the unit itself rather than have my view blocked by a messy mass of healthbars. Even at the strategic level I'd much rather tell damage from the selection menu than have more stuff clutter up the icons.

This is no different to HP, except it's visualised instead of a bar or number. This comes with the issue of loss of readability, as there's only so many changes to a model you can make, and not only that, but it would take much more development time to create models that worked in this fashion.

It's a good idea, but it's one that compliments health bars, instead of removing the need for them.

Having specific hit locations which caused more damage has too large a performance impact, and as it alters the gameplay it's not something that can be turned off and on at will. This kind of mechanic more suits games with smaller unit counts that are more tactically focused.

raevn has a point.
i just dont see why it would impact the server. it could simply store the HP and each client would render proportionally damaged units based on that. its not like units needed to crash exactly where the shot hit, nobody will pay attention to that.

id like an alternative way to show damage. HP bars are really annoying and break immersion.

RTS's aren't about immersion, they're about strategy. I don't need to feel like I'm on the planet. I need to feel like I can see all my units health at a glance and command them without the UI getting in the way.

Healthbars don't "get in the way" as long as they're handled properly.
A lesser evil to allow me to command and strategise properly and efficiently.

Why not? Isn't that how games get better? The original Rome Total War executed this concept near perfect (for it's time). Instead of health there was fire that indicated your building's or siege equipment health (even though this wasn't shown in troops). If you really wanted to know exact health all you needed to do was put your cursor over the building. I really don't see how this is challenging at all, seeing as how it was released in 2004. What you are telling me is that over nine years it is still an exceptional challenge to use nice looking effects. I'm not trying to be insulting or rude, but I think it is possible.

Lots of things are possible, that's not really the point, the point is that as arbitrary or abstract health bars are, they are more user friendly. Immersion is/can be important, but good gameplay comes even before immersion.

Mike

to me a smoking, broken or flamming robot is at least just as much user friendly as a red health bar in saying that guy is not ok.

if only the strategy matters, maybe you dont care about the asteroids too. they have pretty much the same strategic role as nukes. and why not, lets just replace robots with colored dots, green is healthy, red is not.

i do agree with resources being spent in more important things than this right now, though.

If not for the fact that my eyes like the look of robots, i wouldn't object to just having various different flat shapes as units with colors denoting health. It'd be a very bare-bones sort of RTS as far as graphics go, but as long as the gameplay is polished enough to justify it i have no problem. This is why i still play Dwarf Fortress.

It's a total waste to even have graphics if theyre going to be constantly buried underneath the UI. The game stops being the game and the UI becomes the game.

Molyneux has the right idea take that stuff out of the UI and put it into the gameworld. The UI should abstract what's necessary such as units that become too small at high zoom levels but no more.

(once again the church of "gameplay" rears its ugly head, how does not being able to see your units help gameplay?)

C&C4 did that, but hey how many units did you have ? 3 ? 4 ? :lol:
out of topic but to me EA as ruined C&C franchise.

yeah, i think we all agree to that, C&C4 would have been a joke it it wasn't real.


to come back to the topic, i think both of you are right actually, having health bars everywhere covering your units is kind of annoying and you don't even see the action anymore, but on the other hand i understand that you can want/need to see how damaged are your troops.

if i remember correctly back in Warcraft 3, you could just press "alt" to show the health bars of everything in sight.

i think it wouldn't take a lot of time to do both, edit the unit's texture to make them more and more worn-out, add a small smoke effect on the unit at 50% health and fire at 25%, and show the health bars only when you press alt (and if you want, make an option "healthbar always on" in the menu)

this way, you can basically tell that your army is ok when everything's shiny and glittery, and you have to worry when all you have is a walking barbecue.

and let's be honest, this game is about having swarms of bots, you're not going to repair any of them. you build them : they're brand new, you send them to battle : either you win or they get blown up.
it may happen that you successfully retreat with damaged bots, but you're just going to mix them with brand-new units and start again. in the end you don't really need to know how damaged they are.