8 replies to this topic

[Johannes Falkner]

I was looking through several technical readouts and was struck by the inapplicability of the conventional humanoid hitlocations and damage progression model to some mechs. As a case in point consider the Nova/Black Hawk.


http://www.sarna.net/wiki/Nova

The conventional model has the arms lost if the side torso is destroyed. The Nova would be in a lot worse shape if it lost a side torso, it should lose the leg and arm.

Another category is the quad mech. The rules already make an exception for quads with both "arms" treated like legs.

There are some other categories that also may be considered as needing different hit location setups. Consider the Yeoman picture (I know the pic does not reflect internal allocation). Arm or Torso hit locations?


http://www.sarna.net/wiki/Yeoman

What do you think, should standard hit locationsbe used? Always? Are there exceptions?

[Nik Van Rhijn]

I can see the hit mesh being different from the visible surface if the dev's find that something like the "nose" on the Dragon or the Catapult makes them too "squishy". Having said that, you then have the problem of not having your hits register on what your aiming at. It's the pronlem of mech which were designed for appearance and use on TT having a real problem in being useable in a PC game where you can hit where you aim. The only way round it is changing the armour values for overlarge hitboxes to make them more "tanky".
This would take out the election of mechs based on their profile/difficulty to hit.

[Dihm]

I'm sure this is being taken in to consideration during the creation of the concept, as well as the actual in game assets, for the mechs.

[Rhinehart]

The table top limitations were designed for just that: Tabletop. For a PC game the Devs shoud feel free and I'm sure they are looking at the system that will provide the best realism, balance and fun factor. Personally I think each mech should have it's own unique hull map based on chassis and equipment but not being a programmer I have absolutely no idea how hard that would be to include. Suffice it to say, I think the Devs can handle designing whatever is needed just fine.

[Damocles]

HTAL is all you need

[CeeKay Boques]

HTAL is all the DATA you need displayed on the hud... but its not all the Hit Locations you need... I'd like to see tons of hit locations (already read not going to happen) but they did say hit DETECTION will be complex so maybe "hit boxes" are out dated, and some other component does damage modeling, but yes, on "My Torso AND Arms are a missile rack" mechs should have special consideration for they armored and take damage. Shouldn't be hard for a sweet dev team like this!

[Dirk Le Daring]

The mech is going to have hit points/armour points, naturally where they are is dictated by the chassis. It will be up to the Devs to distribute them in the propper way according to the chassis. It is then up to us as to where our shots strike.

This is an assumption, but not the bit about us shooting.

Edited by Dirk Le Daring, 22 March 2012 - 04:14 PM.

[Siilk]

Rhinehart, on 22 March 2012 - 02:52 PM, said:

The table top limitations were designed for just that: Tabletop. For a PC game the Devs shoud feel free and I'm sure they are looking at the system that will provide the best realism, balance and fun factor.

Pretty much this. The more hit locations we would have, the more realism we would get.

[Johannes Falkner]

So far, I like the idea of combining the hardpoint (and omni when we get there) configuration data with hit locations and armor. I would see us having a single metric like armor tonnage to adjust with auto-allocation of armor across the weapons and body of the mech. Maybe give the allocation algorithms a couple of different priorities (Torso, limbs, weapons first, etc.). Then you could target discrete weapons and influence your salvage and the duration of the battle.