Bleeding wounds

[homunculus]

I wonder what became of the wounds system that was attempted a few years ago?
I remember it was attempting to implement wounds by bodypart, with each bodypart wounds having special effects.

As back then, I would still suggest a simpler generic wounds level that would be simple enough to display to the user as a bar in battlescape HUD, rather than making the user open a special window to see the details.
The basic idea is to add a blood pressure bar and to split the health bar into:
1) undamaged health points--undamaged vs total health points affect general efficiency of the soldier's stats.
2) bleeding wounds--reduce blood pressure (quickly enough, so that treatment must be urgent).
3) treated wounds--do not bleed but also do not count as undamaged health points as far as soldier stats are concerned, and needs to heal in a hospital.
The additional blood pressure bar might have some effect on stats, and would cause unconsciousness and death if it drops low.

[geever]

The guy started implementing the system has disappeared...

He uploaded the half-patch to the tracker, but noone has picked up the line yet.

-geever

[Kahvipannu84]

How about making Medikits one time use items? Or have them have clipsize of 1, and make the clip so big you couldn't carry it with soldiers, so that using it on field would make it empty without reloading possibility, but in base they could be "recharged" instead just making new ones, if it is possible. 

They are easilly exploited now on battlefield, since you can heal all soldiers there completelly, and no healing is needed at base. Ofcourse it's up to player if to use them or not, but something like this would make temporary solution for it.

[DarkRain]

In fact in my game I’ve modded the medikit to have only 5 shoots per battle (recharged at the base) and halved effectiveness, it's still overpowered  maybe one use per battle would work indeed (keeping the halved effect otherwise even a single heal can recover nearly 50% HP of a soldier).

It's a simple mod, as it only needs a little tweak to the scripts, but adding ammo to the medikit also renders it un-throwable, but it's a minor concern as all my soldiers carry a medikit, you see, tough I consider it an exploit it doesn't prevent me from using it (it's the devs fault for making the system exploitable ), tough all my dropship bases have a hospital and any soldier that happens to return wounded (like getting shoot while killing the last alien) stays for a medical leave.

One of these days I might hack a simple bleeding wounds system into my game and stop myself from using exploits

Edit: I forgot to mention  that my modifications also render the medikit unusable in skirmish (same problem than the stun rod)... that idea of the un-equipable clip might help.

[Kahvipannu84]

Yeah, I too know it's a exploit, but still use it in the battlefield.. I play "no reloading a game" style, and try to keep my veteran soldiers alive anyway possible. It would be dumb to not use med-kit at all, since on hard difficulty aliens seem to wound a lot of your soldiers on the battlefield, but using it feels cheating.. :/

If you do changes that make it one use, lowers it effectiveness, bleeding wounds, or similar, could you post them here to the forums?

[homunculus]

As far as I remember the previous bodypart wounds attempt, coding started when the idea was still underspecified, and ran into a lot of clarifications about contradictions and special cases.
And, I may be confusing it with some other project, but as far as I remember, the coder quit when he was asked to follow formatting conventions.

Myself I do not quite believe 1 to 3 hp bleeding per turn would have the desired bleeding effect (that is strictly my opinion, though).
Therefore I think a wounds system should make the difference between unharmed health points and treated wounds, at least (with the stat reduction effects).

[DarkRain]

@Kahvipannu84
Attached is what I'm currently using: 5 shoot per medikie per battle -reloaded at the base-, with halved effectiveness, but makes it un-throwable and does not work in skirmish mode, just uncompress and drop it in your <ufoai install dir>\base\ufos (if there isn't an ufos dir just create one) OR in %APPDATA%\UFOAI\<version>\base\ufos (again create "ufos" if needed).

You can also tweak it to your liking, just open the .ufo file with a plain text editor (with utf-8 support), you'll see the first entry is the one for the medikit, you can change

Code: [Select]

ammo 5 to something else to change the shoots per battle and

Code: [Select]

damage "-20 10" to change how much it heals (original was "-40 20" so it would heal between 20 an 60 HP)

Adding bleeding wounds, requires changing the game's code, what I  have in mind is pretty simpler than the official design, but still would require you to be able to recompile the game

[Kahvipannu84]

Thank you, exactly what I looking for  One thing, will these changes be save-game compatible, or do I have to start new game?

[DarkRain]

Adding them to an existing campaign shows no ill effects, tweaking them afterwards also works well, removing the changes only breaks the HUD (it keeps showing the ammo count) but I've experienced no other ill effect.

[DarthLuca]

I can see that an overhaul of this is on the proposal list but I just wanted to add my 2pw.
The primary use of the medikit should be to heal 'fatal wounds'. Obviously means that a 'wounding' or 'Bleeding' system IS needed. A Medikit should not be able to heal faster than the hospital at least not once a mission is finished (i.e. Tempory battlefield healing could be allowed simulating painkillers and stimulants), wounds taken to a battle can NOT be healed.

[homunculus]

In my mind the main flaw of the current system is that after getting a few band-aids, the soldier is "as good as new".
Therefore, in my mind the most straightforward change would be:

treated wounds != healthy

Treated wounds would not be getting worse, but they would still need to be healed in hospital.
And stats would depend on the healthy part.
I think it would do the trick.

I might be willing to specify this kind of wounds (generic wounds, not wounds-by-bodypart which is imho too complicated), with blood pressure bar and without, and post it here for public review and input (I don't believe very much in such kind of spec coming from the top of the head of one person).
That is, if someone is interested in implementing a wounds system and would find such spec useful, either as a spec for implementing generic wounds, or even as just another opinion about the wounds system (= for diversity).
(I might do some battlescape GUI things, but I am definitely not going to dive into the C part of the game)

[DarkRain]

Well in my personal implementation (yes I just made a simple one) the basic purpose of wounds is to limit medikit usage: only wounded soldiers are actually healed and wounds disappear on treatment or end of battle, but that combined with the above nerfing of the medikit should mean that soldiers have to heal most of the HP lost form all but the lightmost injuries in the hospital, or that's the plan, it probably isn't the best system (and still needs tweaking) but is enough while I wait for the official one.

[MCR]

Well in my personal implementation (yes I just made a simple one) the basic purpose of wounds is to limit medikit usage: only wounded soldiers are actually healed and wounds disappear on treatment or end of battle, but that combined with the above nerfing of the medikit should mean that soldiers have to heal most of the HP lost form all but the lightmost injuries in the hospital, or that's the plan, it probably isn't the best system (and still needs tweaking) but is enough while I wait for the official one.

Where is the patch ?   

You are the one to bring us the first part of "the official one". Congratulations . 

[DarkRain]

Wait what? Hold on! You want me to create a patch? But... but...

Didn't the last one to make a patch about this just suddenly disappear without trace?

...

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO I don't want to disappear without trace!!!!!

...

...

Ok, maybe that was exaggerated.
Hmmm... I need to fix one little problem, and test it some more, and then I might have a patch to show (If I don't disappear in the process )

[geever]

Wait what? Hold on! You want me to create a patch? But... but...

What about continuing the lost one's?

Ofc. I'm interested in your implementation, just it had more features planned. Well, any patch is welcome!

-geever