Weight of Fire

Very true but we are talking about projectiles a good deal larger than bullets. We are talking cannon fire and rockets and missiles; munitions with a good deal more distributed kinetic force. These munitions are not designed to puncture organic bodies and body armour like current bullets are. they are designed for the expressed purpose of smashing and blowing up machinery on such a much larger scale.

I for one agree in that I dont want industrial machines being thrown around like ragdolls, I think this would damage the suspension of disbelief and remove a sense of weight to our armies - however I dont think the idea of WoF is limited to this kind of application. The idea that a large explosion or a massive impact could have an effect more observable and complex than "remove x hit points from unit y" is a good one in my opinion.

Ive said the following in another thread and I'll say it here: I have seen this response being thrown at ideas too much lately. Uber I think are capable of deciding what is/is not worth spending time on in development. They have shown as much with the rejection of space combat as an aspect of the game, despite many people requesting it initially.

It isnt helpful to a discussion, nor is it relevant to dismiss an idea on the basis that Uber dont have time to do it with everything else they are working on. I would rather see an idea rejected or developed based on its own merits (or lack thereof). At least until Uber give a definitive yes or no, or the community collectively breaks it down in a constructive way.

In addition it has been stated continually in this thread that this would not purely be cosmetic as you state. Debris and exploding munitions from the big heavy metal robots would not be inconsiderable. It would certainly give greater punishment to players that bunched up their forces if when they get hit with missiles/artillery/lance like weapons if there were knock on effects beyond a predetermined area of splash damage.

[Edit] - Looking at the original post and what I wrote I think I should make myself a bit clearer. OP is talking about the throwing around of whole units and I am not, sorry about that. I made my argument based on the development of the WoF idea by thetrophysystem and exterminans which I think is a good direction for the WoF concept.

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Actually this does sound kind of neat. You could have little exploding bits thrown up when something takes a lot of damage. Also it'd be neat if crashing air units and orbital units could damage things they land on.

Spring has a similar system built in. Exploding units can emit debris which fly away from the shot which killed them. The debris can deal damage and as in TA units can be overkilled to explode into more debris. This also happens in Cossacks for structures and ships. They could explode and spray planks/bricks into the sky which could fall down and kill infantry.

I prefer damage-dealing-debris to full unit throwing. It doesn't make sense for an entire unit to be thrown only when it reaches low enough health. Why couldn't it be thrown earlier?

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On topic, I would love to see robots sent flying by big explosions.

Though an explosion that makes units flying, regardless of their remaining health, could be interesting. Zero-K has a few of those, IIRC, but I never used them this far. How well does it work?

Probably as well as the unit magnets in SupCom 2, not very well. Moving them around around before they actually get destroyed leads to strange piles of unit which take ages to resolve again since the units get stuffed so close together that pathfinding becomes complicated. Some units with non-spherical collision boxes like ships or large land units even fail to get out of such situations at all since they can't turn on the spot when blocked from all sides and they are unable to walk backwards either.

Keep overkill simple. Either pierce or deal the remaining damage as AoE. But please don't try to invent some sophisticated, physics based features which are neither realistic nor actually useful. Why? Because they will only work if the enemy units stand to dense, thats a rare case since the original formations have already designed in such manner, that platoons would be able to move "through" each other without colliding. So when launching wrecks on the platoon, chances are that it won't hit even a single unit. Even piercing attacks might rarely work, to be precise only when you fire along the grid of the formation which requires either micro above all extends or pure luck.

To me simple AoE damage combined with the VISUAL of the wreck exploding sounds best to me. Just like they did it with wreck damage for crashing aircraft in SupCom.

You're making a lot of sense upon reflection. There would be little real world difference to the player between having a set number of overkill AoE variables (small unit overkill looks like this, big unit like this, etc) with a sufficiently convincing number of animations - and having a full blown simulation of an explosion on a unit by unit basis (particularly if you have 100's of units clashing on a battlefield).

I do feel a little attached to the idea of damaging debris from violent explosions but again there is no reason this couldn't be handled by the game engine as a number of projectiles flying outwards from the AoE, the same as it deals with any projectile being fired from other units (just depicted as flaming wreckage). Nothing so complicated as a full ballistics simulation as you say.

I still think that piercing shots could be handled without too much difficulty. Simply having the projectile propagate through the hit unit if the parameters for piercing the unit are met. Any unlucky unit in the line of the piercing round would be damaged for an appropriately lowered amount of damage (or pierced again if the projectile/beam/lance had sufficient energy to do so)

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I support this.

It can be handled, but it's hard to get it deterministic since there is much random in it, it also depends on the precise rotation and position of the destroyed unit. Also you would need at least 5-10 projectiles to be simulated in order to cause at least SOME damage to surrounding units, most of those projectiles will miss anyway.

Keeping it pure AoE combined with nice visuals should offer an greater experience since you can use the computation power on the client to visualize far more debris then the server could handle correctly. It also becomes more reliable as a source of damage.


Btw.: Please enable friendly fire for overkill. If you have to kill my tiny scout with the biggest gun had - that's fine. But don't whine when the resulting overkill causes more damage to your base then i could possibly have done.

Most of the time this works pretty well imo. It leads to occasional strangeness (sumos rolling head over heels across the floor look a bit odd) but generally it's good.

Other uses of impulse in Zero K include gravity gun turrets and an amphibious raider that fires water cannons with low DPS but huge impulse to push units away, preventing close combat units from getting near. It's also possible to push units over cliffs to kill them.

Units must have some sort of inertia attribute in Zero K. It's much easier to push hovercraft around than similar sized tanks for example.

I was more thinking along the lines of parts of the destroyed unit being thrown outwards from the explosion point. Like an AoE+ a few debris which in effect act like mini bits of splash damage. Nothing so complicated as deterministic ballistics based on rotation and positioning. In the same way as overkill sets up an AoE effect based on a few factors, these bits of splash damage could be handled the same way. Just a way of making the AoE more interesting than a straight circle of damage.

I like that idea but I think friendly fire should be a tick-able option. Otherwise I could foresee a lot of agony in the form of friendly fire from idiot allies in multiplayer matches...

I like the idea of debris flying from the explosion instead of in a circle. When a huge explosion destroys your raider swarm, it looks kind of strange to see pieces flying everywhere instead of following the explosion.

Also, given real precision issues with fancy collision calcs, you actually may not get the same result twice. Things like floating point precision become a big issue.

Is it really *that* important that you get the exact same effect twice? As long as the variations happen on the same scale and roughly in the same area I can't imagine them having any significant impact. Or am I totally missing something here?

I don't know, depends on how consistent replays need to be, or my impression of how it works could be totally off base

I can see weapons do so much damage that not reclaimable wreckage is left, but actually throwing this in the air? That's a little silly.

I came in here to echo this. If I'm seeing multi-ton robots being thrown around like confetti by a simple explosive, suspension of disbelief starts to crack.

So... no. Useless idea as well as it integrates a SERIOUS amount of randomness. There's also the immense network overhead as you'd have to simulate the exact same physics on everyone's computer as well. Despite what the moron on Page 2 who said "wrong" thinks, this would require a great deal of perfect syncing and performance overhead increases. There's a reason most every game out there doesn't sync physics across clients.

Also I find the idea of robots and machines being heavily damaged by spalling and shrapnel to be pretty damn stupid as well. They aren't Mazda Miatas. A bunch of random metal being launched at a tank is going to do ****-all to it.

Finally, a big 'no' on the direct-fire = piercing, unless it's a special unit feature. For various reasons to include 'it's a dumb idea'.

Agreed I don't think throwing units around wholesale makes sense and it would shatter my suspension of disbelief.

Admittedly I am no expert on the intracacies of how games work at this level so correct me if I'm wrong (ill get to learn something new ). I was of the understanding that the server hosting the game is responsible for the heavy number crunching and game size would be determined by what the server can handle. That would not require each client to individually simulate an event as the server tells each client what happened. That of course doesn't address the issue of simulating a LOAD of explosions with a full physics modelling which is why I think the idea of a number of explosion animations with associated AoE effects would be preferable

Maybe, but we aren't talking inconsiderable amounts of random meta considering the source of the metal is one of these tanks/robots exploding with considerable force. The tonnes of metal isn't vaporized, it is either going to sit as a wreck or it is going to be thrown. If a robot gets hit by an explosion propelled arm from another robot for example; they wont be destroyed but they aren't going to come away without a scratch either. There is also crashing aircraft to consider as well.

Without saying why it is a bad idea we cant progress, why do you think it is a bad idea? I agree it should be a characteristic of a specific weapon type. I mentioned before some kind of railgun or laser/plasma/energy lance type thing would be the candidate for such an effect. I dont see that it would be a hard thing to do physics wise, certainly not nearly so difficult as explosions and the kinetics associated with it.

Because it gives a huge bonus to DPS to people who are willing to micro their beam units to line up multiple enemies with each shot.

Yeah that is a really valid point, it would encourage micro wouldn't it? Ok I guess I am less enthusiastic about the application of it now. Damn. I liked the idea of punching through armour with such weapons.