I don't think projectile properties affect damage that much. If you shoot a clone in the head with almost any weapon it will take 90 damage and then bleed out. I've tried it with all kinds of weapons and it always happens, it's kinda annoying.

I mess with the variables and it does affect damage. Not much, but enough.

I did it guys. I FIGURED IT ALL OUT.

p3lb0x was actually right about the damage, but the reality of the situation is a bit more complex. Damage taken is based off of the wounds taken. If you look at wounds, you'll see at the bottom of each wound a variable called BurstDamage. This is the damage taken when this wound is recieved. Now, you may notice that there are two wounds: an entry wound and an exit wound. These are fairly self-explanitory. The entry wound is when the bullet hits, and then the exit wound is when the bullet goes all the way through and exits the body. Oh, and all headshot damage is multiplied by 5. (really, see for yourself)

Now, the thing is that there's a method of determing just how far a bullet penetrates into an actor, if at all. Each actor is made of a material. You may have known this, and you may have even known that materials have a StructuralIntegrity variable. But this variable is what a projectile's mass, sharpness, and velocity is measured against. If it isn't strong enough, it just bounces off the actor. If its strong enough, it makes an entry wound and stops. if its really strong, it passes all the way through, making an entry and an exit wound.

The next point of interest is the actor's GibImpulseLimit. Each body part on an actor has a GibImpulseLimit, which determines how much force a part can take at once before it explodes. The force of a projectile comes from mass and velocity. (yeah yeah, mass * velocity is momentum, not force. whatever) The thing is, if a projectile passes all the way through an actor cleanly, the force is negated. Since the bullet doesn't stop on/in the actor, there's no "stopping power." So, weapons can theoretically be made that just make people's heads asplode through brute force.

This makes for some interesting possibilities, such as accurate depictions of bodily damage and armor. Like, I made a new type of wound called a "vital wound" that does 20 in entry and 25 on exit, and generally has 2.5 time more bleeding going on. I applied this wound to both the body and the head of a green clone, so now a headshot kills instantly (x5 damage = 100 damage on entry) and a body shot pretty much means you're going to bleed to death quick. Now, I countered this by making the green clone's material have a structural integrity of 250. pistol and smg shots bounce off of him, but AK-47 shots can make entry wounds. The only thing wrong with this is that shotguns and blunderbusses don't really work... I'm not sure how effective body armor can be against shotguns, so I'm not sure if that's realistic or not. Flack cannons mess them up effectively still, of course.

Those realistic guns I was talking about earlier actually work out pretty nicely under this system. Once I fiddled with the sharpness levels and decided upon 60 for regular pistol rounds and 275 for small piercing shots, I got a nice balance of some guns that pierce because of being peircing, and others (such as a big revolver) that pierce out of sheer mass and velocity. I'm really happy with these results, but I'm going to go look into body armor and the different piercing abilities of different kinds of bullets to make this all more effective. I'd like to make several different clones with several levels of body armor. (Type I, Type II, covering different parts, etc) Should be fun. Too bad I have to focus a lot on returning to the US next week. (I'm currently in Japan)

Hopefully somebody found all of this interesting. I put a lot of work into it!

Those variables may have needed explanation, but dang, that's more than I could've asked for! And I appreciate every word of it!

Also, shotguns are stopped by body armor, but for them to be completely and utterly ineffective you'd need to be made of the stuff. Humans aren't exactly stiff.

Yeah, I know. You'd think actors would get blown backwards by strong hits... or a group of strong hits. Then it'd be perfect.

Something interesting: if you look in the materials.ini in base.rte, you'll see a lot of unused materials, like Kevlared Flesh, Shelled Flesh, and Armored Flesh. Each has different StructuralIntegrity levels, though the differences aren't really enough to make much of a difference. Regular flesh has an integrity of 30, Shelled and Kevlared has 40, and Armored has... 70, I think. Like I said, I had to get it up to about 250 before the regular pistol and SMG rounds were rendered ineffective, so these different numbers don't mean much. Still, it seems like maybe the idea that the developers had was similar to what I'm talking about... and either they haven't balanced it all out fully, or they're gonna scrap it and go somewhere else with all this.

Also, do you think it'd be possible to Sticky my last post if I started a new thread with it? For future generations and such. I feel I gave a much needed concise explaination of things. Feel free to disagree.

Shotguns at less than 10 feet will rip a human to shreds, REGARDLESS of how armored they are. It's just too much lead hitting you at once. But, then, a pistol bullet under 3 feet will also penetrate body armor, or at least the Kevlar most police forces have.

Dragon skin, a titanium, ceramic and Kevlar composite body armor, can easily take hits from a 7.62 millimeter round, far more than even the standard US issue body armor can.

However, your average helmet will not only not stop a rifle bullet, the impact of a mere pistol bullet will render the wearer unconscious, dead, or severely concussed.

The armoured flesh actually does make a difference if you're trying to attack them with diggers. (Concrete has an SI of 75.) It's actually more of an inconvenience when you're trying to dig through their dead bodies, as it just so happens... For example, Metal will stop a Heavy Digger, but not an AK. (So they can't dig into the brain room, but they can sure shoot through it.) Mega Metal isn't any better at that point.

Hah. People seem to forget that nothing CC will load successfully is unstable.

Case in point, in the search for a stronger material, people spectacularly overlook:



It's freakin' number 3 in the material page, people.

Yeah, CC doesn't really factor range effects. Hey, you could have the gun fire another projectile with a very sort lifetime, maybe that'd simulate it. I'd have to work out the details though. It seems kinda hack-ish when I'm going for realism.

Yeah, all that happens to bullets in CC over time is a very gradual slowdown and lag to earth, if their lifetime variable lasts long enough for that to happen.

My research continues!

Alright, last night I was messing around with shotguns, based on what was mentioned about shotguns since my last big post. I'm happy to announce that I've found a clean way to simulate short-range shotgun blasts. It'll take some more explaination though...

Okay, an actor is made of different parts, as you may know. For this subject, each part has three important values: JointStrength, JointStiffness, and GibImpulseLimit. These stats determine how much force (not damage) a part can take before it gets blown off or apart. Now, which stats are important depends on what part it is. The main body of an actor has GibImpulseLimit as its important stat, as it doesn't have any joints it depends on. (in fact, it has no JointStrength or JointStiffness stats) So basically, how much force the body can take is dependant entirely on the GibImpulseLimit value. For a clone, its set to 1800. If you set it to something like 100 or less, you'll notice that the moment a clone lands from falling from a rocket or dropship, his body immediately explodes. So, unfortunately, you have to keep this value pretty high, too high for the body to be force-gibbed even by a short-range shotgun blast.

This, though, is made up for by the way the head and limbs are handled. For the head and limbs, GibImpulseLimit is actually unimportant, beyond some cosmetic effects. (explained in a second) For extremities, JointStrength and JointStiffness are the important things. The lower the JointStrength and the higher the JointStiffness, the less the part can resist being knocked off or gibbed by large forces. I guess the reasoning her is that the stiffer the joint is, the less it can roll with an impact. So, these are the stats you want to fiddle with to make the head and limbs destructable by large bulk forces. Now, the GibImpulseLimit still has a minor effect: if its high and a limb gets blown off, then it gets blown off cleanly. Like, the head detaches from the neck and goes flying, helmet and all. If its low, the limb just explodes. But if the Joint stats are too strong, then it has no effect even if the GibImpulseLimit is set to 10. (the pre-loader doesn't seem to like it when its set to less than 10) Basically, the GibImpulseLimit for extremities only determines what happens to the part AFTER it gets blown off, so its rather moot as far as the well-being of the actor goes.

So, this works out pretty nice for realistically handling some dude with, like, Type IV body armor, like I described in my previous big post. Sure, the guy is impervious to most individual shots, but a full shell's worth of shotgun shot in the face will blow his head clear off, and short-range shots to arms and legs have similar effects. Of course, if fired at from a distance, the shots are spread out over the body too much, or not enough shots even hit. But, the guy still gets knocked around quite a bit if a good few hit him, which can prove disorienting. An upward shot can actually launch him into the air. The only real problem here is that shots to the body don't really have an effect beyond rolling him around, but usually the guy's arms and gun are in the way of his torso anyway. And we all go for headshots anyway, right? This setup makes a heavily armored dude really tough to hurt, but even some grunt with a cheap shotgun can put an end to the armored guy's rampage with a close-range shot, and of course explosives are always effective. So, they don't completely dominate.

So, what do you think of that?

Very, very nice.

You are actually probably one of the first people in the history of Cortex Command to really explore ballistic effects and how they can be changed to make things more realistic.

If you put as much care as you do for research into a mod, I can almost guarantee it would be awesome.

Do you have IRC? I could help you with any questions you have on modding. (If you plan to start modding for CC)

Actually, I'm seriously considering making a hardcore "realistic" mod for this game. It has everything required to do so, its just that nobody really knew it. Actually, thats basically what I'm doing. The "combat clone" guy is probably akin to what the type II armor guy (stops everything up to powerful handgun and regular rifle rounds) would be like... which actually isn't strong enough.

But anyway, yeah, I'd love to chat. I've always had an interest in guns and stuff, if not simply so I could generate an accurate, realistic game. I also have a complex system of melee combat that I've worked out (though not programmed or anything), though that doesn't really apply to this game. But, long story short, I love applying physics to games. Its intuitive and fun, if you don't make it TOO complicated.

Unfortunately, I'm not on the net much these days. A bit over a week from now, I'll have a stable connection, as well as a brand-spanking-new computer. I should be good to go. I'm willing to talk to some folks who work on or mod this game. I really REALLY enjoy the system because it reflects a lot of things I've thought of applying to games myself. (like FPS-style gameplay with pinpoint aiming and realistic guns and headshots etc, but 2D) Now I just wanna give it a good re-tooling.

As for now, we'll have to stick with the message board.

Edit: by the way, thanks for the comment. I really appreciate somebody noticing how much I care about this sort of thing. It's what drives me to design games.

Wow. I should have checked this thread before. That's some really cool stuff you're getting into here. I personally haven't gotten into working on actors yet, but that's probably what I was going to do next. This is really going to come in handy.

Also, does anyone know the limit to how many limbs can be attached to an actor?

Hurrah,
That last set of news will save me time figuring out how to make it so robots don't explode when a side thruster lightly grazes their head.


What's that got to do with my post? O.o I was just pointing out that the diggers don't penetrate as well as the bullets do, which makes for hell when you're trying to drill through a mountain of corpses made of high SI materials. (Admittedly, nobody who knows how to change goldcosts ever drills for gold anymore, but still...)