Damage types

[nemchenk]

Hi all,

Just wanted to run an idea past the dev team: when thinking about hand-to-hand blows and baton rounds, it seems to me that they currently fall under the Blast damage type -- bad for un-armoured targets, but relatively easy to shield against. I would also make that kind of damage deal stun AND wounds, so that while it is possible to knock someone out with a baton round, you may also end up killing them by accident.

But if we use Blast here, then shurely frag grenades are not the same damage type -- they have a Blast component, sure, but also shrapnel, which is more like Normal (AP) damage.

So, here are a couple of ideas:
1) Have a new damage type, either "Low-v Impact" or something, for things like melee or baton rounds, or "Shrapnel" for frag.
2) Make it possible to *combine* damage! So, a baton round would be (something like) "Normal 30 10; Blast 40 20", or a Frag Grenade would be "Blast 50 10; Normal_light 40 20", etc.

(2) seems to have great possibilities Make the engine more flexible for the future...

What do you think?


nemchenk

[Psawhn]

I think the word you're looking for is "blunt." That seems to me to be the right word for batons and rifle butts.

And at first glance, combining damage types seems only applicable to explosive weapons.

Luckily, combining damage types is simplified because armour failure is not modeled. There is no question of "do we apply the 15DMG of Blunt first then the 40DMG of Blast second, or the other way around?" because there is no difference. (Well, in either case they'd be modified by resistance first, then added and applied to armour and health).

[Surrealistik]

I agree with damage type combinations. Thumbs up. Lightweight subset normal (i.e. piercing) damage would suffice as a representative of shrapenal-type impacts, while bludgeoning might be represented by blast damage or a sub-category thereof. Keep in mind we want to minimize the total # of different damage types in order to avoid overcomplexity.

[nemchenk]

Yuppers, that's what I was thinking. And it makes defining some things *very* elegant. e.g. the proposed XVI "lance":
{
monomo      20 10
stun           100 30
xvi             30 15
}

etc

"blunt" sounds good to me!

EDIT: forgot the XVI lance was a mono-molecular weapon! D'oh!