The idea of "Battle Damage" was talked about as a QoL improvement for CoH For years. With CoT being a new game there's always a chance it'll happen.

Things like dirt and scuff marks could probably be doable for any costume item but it gets more difficult to handle things like dents in metal or sparks because then you'd have to have "smart" costume items that know whether they ought to act like spandex or robot metal. Then let's say you're playing a cyborg with living skin on the outside - how does the game know you ought to have "robot-like" damage instead of "flesh-like" damage? It'd actually be pretty complicated to make sure it all looks right.

It might be a bit easier to have something like this be a way to permanently "decorate" costume items with skin overlays because then you could apply permanent scratches/dents in metal pieces or holes in clothing as it makes sense without the game needing to dynamically figure out what kinds of details applies to your character.

Regardless I doubt we'd ever get anything that looks like "blood" because that would probably affect the "T for Teen" rating the Devs of this game have said they want to try to maintain.

GhostHack wrote:

as for the "blood" Loth.... consider the "bleeding" effect skin that Champs has.... it still has a Teen rating. Now, it's not exactly "spurts of blood" but some sort of blood could definitely be possible

It's been a couple of years since I played CO and I don't think they had any "bleeding" effects back then so I wasn't aware of that.

I suppose the Devs of CoT would simply have to decide what version of "bleeding" they'd want to support and/or if it really would have any ramifications for the game's overall rating. *shrugs*

GhostHack wrote:

yeah... it used to be part of "aura of the bestial" and whenever you inflicted the "bleed" status on an enemy...
now it's just part of the bleed status effect.

Well even if having "bleed" type battle damage effects are not strictly problematic for the game's rating it'd still be an issue for all the characters out there for which "red blood" coming from wounds wouldn't make any sense such as robots or energy beings. Heck, you might even want to RP that you're a Vulcan in CoT and it'd make more sense for you to have green blood, not red.

Basically I think having battle damage is easier in a FPS when everybody running around is basically a normal human. In a game like CoT where characters can be all sorts of things that aren't "red blooded" or even made of flesh it becomes a lot more difficult. That's probably one reason why CoH avoided blood completely.

TBH, it might be easier to avoid blood damage all together in CoT, not just for ratings concerns but for all the times it wouldn't make sense to be there in the first place. They can still do "dirt and scuff-marks" that'd be more universally workable as battle damage.

TERA goes the opposite direction (kinda sorta) in having some types of weapons (using specific attacks) incur visual FX. Warriors in particular are prone to the "flint and steel striker" sort of thing, with some of their attacks just being a whirl of sparks happening as your character moves so fast they practically blur. In addition, a lot of mobs are programmed to "splatter blood" on the ground in response to these attacks in various colors (some are red blood, some are black blood, and so on). There's also an additional option to make blood [i]splatter across your screen[/i] (as if it were a camera caught filming too close to the action) when your character takes damage (splashes the screen only in red).

GhostHack wrote:

[that was in my first reply, Lothic ;P]

Right but my summation that having blood-based battle damage might be more trouble than it's worth wasn't. ;)

Redlynne wrote:

TERA goes the opposite direction (kinda sorta) in having some types of weapons (using specific attacks) incur visual FX. Warriors in particular are prone to the "flint and steel striker" sort of thing, with some of their attacks just being a whirl of sparks happening as your character moves so fast they practically blur. In addition, a lot of mobs are programmed to "splatter blood" on the ground in response to these attacks in various colors (some are red blood, some are black blood, and so on). There's also an additional option to make blood splatter across your screen (as if it were a camera caught filming too close to the action) when your character takes damage (splashes the screen only in red).

I'm certainly not going to say we couldn't have some variation of all of this for CoT. But like everything else we'll see how much time and effort the Devs want to put into something like this.

Frankly I still believe there are so many different kinds of critters in a game like this (both PC and NPC) that we'd really need many different kinds of combat damage effects if we wanted to properly account for when seeing blood (sparks, smoke or whatever) is appropriate or not. Combat is not always going to be red-blooded humans versus red-blooded humans.

Having FX and skin overlay options for every MOB (PC and NPC) trigger off of certain attacks versus certain targets would require some (maybe not much but some) extra animation/DB overhead during combat. That extra overhead is something the Devs might not want to mess with, at least not at Launch.

srmalloy wrote:

I don't think so; it makes the costume designer more complicated. What you would need to do is have an additional Boolean field for each body segment (i.e., chest, right arm, left arm, etc.) for 'Display Combat Damage' (defaults to 'No', so you can just ignore it if you don't want to deal with it), then have a second value for the type of damage to show. This would be something like a drop-down pick list, and would default to a value based on what you'd picked for the costume part on that body segment -- so if you had an armor piece, you'd have 'armor' damage -- scuffs and dings and burn marks -- and if you picked a jacket piece you'd have 'clothing' damage -- rips, bleeding, scorch marks -- and if you picked a cybernetic piece you'd have 'robotic' damge -- dangling cables/wires, sparks, and the like. You'd be able to change the damage effect from the default, so you could have a character with a jacket that, when damaged, shows robotic damage effects, or a jacket that's a Trompe-l'œil painted on armor and shows armor damage effect, or even a jacket that's a holo-projection to hide the actual armor underneath and doesn't show any damage.

Again a system like this is certainly possible but would it be something the Devs would want to put this much effort into providing?

A "player pre-defines how battle damage will look on them" system doesn't account for the NPCs or those players who don't bother to define their own battle damage "patterns" for every costume they make. In those cases default battle damage done to those players (or lack threreof) will very likely still look strange/inappropriate to OTHER players regardless of what it looks like to you.

This is the real hidden problem with something like a "battle damage" system. If a game doesn't account for it at all (like CoH) then everything reacts the same generic way. As soon as you introduce this seemingly simple improvement it's very easy for it to get overly complicated and not be handled the right way (i.e. blood on robots) and such.

GhostHack wrote:

The biggest thing... to me... is that it functions like forum RP...
...er, lemme esplain.
so, in free-form forum RP combat (when it's done right), the attack is initiated, but not completed. It is up to the VICTIM of the attack, to determine the degree of success of the attack.
battle damage is the same. It's not really up to the attacker, as to 'how much' damage occurs.
in game mechanics, this means that every 'level of damage' is entirely at the descression of the person being attacked.
functionally, it's just a system of 'auras' with dozens of elements that must be set by the player to determine how their character is going to look when s/he gets into a fight....
it has no real bearing on the combat mechanics, it's just a collection of thousands of permutations that the player defines for themselves, given "action N" occuring on them...

Again I'm not against a "player defines his/her own battle damage" system in general. Just pointing out this would have to somehow be applied to all (or at least most) NPCs and imperfect defaults would have to be established for PCs that don't bother to choose their own effects. Basically it'd look weird if only SOME PCs have battle damage effects but no other PC/NPCs do.

Sadly I'm concerned this overall concept would be saddled with a lot of problems people may not have considered. I haven't even touched on (yet) how you'd sync up what your battle damage might look like to other players and vice-versa. It would almost be like all local PCs and NPCs undergoing continuous costume changes in front of each other dynamically during combat and we all know CoH imposed 30 second timeouts on costume changes precisely to prevent overwhelming the network with costume change data. *shrugs*

srmalloy wrote:

Lothic wrote:
A "player pre-defines how battle damage will look on them" system doesn't account for the NPCs or those players who don't bother to define their own battle damage "patterns" for every costume they make. In those cases default battle damage done to those players (or lack threreof) will very likely still look strange/inappropriate to OTHER players regardless of what it looks like to you.
You wouldn't be defining a 'pattern' for the battle damage; you'd be defining a type of battle damage; what gets applied to your appearance would depend on what the server picked from its library of battle-damage overlays for that type of damage. So if the game files had,say, ten overlays for 'armor' type damage for the chest, when the game applied the overlay, it would pick one of the ten overlays randomly. If you got beat up again the next day, you'd likely get a different overlay. This lets the variety of damage effects for a given type expand as the art department creates new overlays and adds them to the game data files. It would also be possible to have each overlay as a series of overlays showing the body segment getting more and more pounded as the character's health dropped, although I suspect that that would suck too many Art Department resources to be implemented, at least initially.
For NPCs, if the devs wanted to have battle damage appear, they could just set the 'show battle damage' flag on a body segment to get the default damage overlay type for the costume part; they'd have to pick the damage type if they wanted it to be other than the default -- for example, the Nemesis Automatons would have the 'Robotic' damage type selected in place of the normal 'beaten up clothing' effects.
If a player didn't want to see battle damage overlays, they just don't set the flag; if they're happy with the default type of overlay for each body segment, they only have to set the flag for that segment. It's only if they wanted a different type of damage overlay than the default for the costume piece that they'd actually have to choose a damage type.

Yeah when I used the word "pattern" I didn't mean the actual visual representation of the graphics. I meant the total manual choices for which type of damage would appear on which body parts. In that sense the "pattern" is your overall colection of choices for your character.

And while you addressed some of the more minor issues involved with implementing this you still didn't cover how the game would be handling what in effect would be multiple "costume changes" happening on every PC and NPC in a given combat situation. If COH didn't even allow standard costume changes to happen without a 30 second timeout timer how is CoT going to handle syncing up multiple overlays dynamically and randomly flipping as battles transpire?

Basically I'll once again make the point that I believe "battle damage" may open up a can of worms with consequences and complications that are still questionably far more trouble than they may be worth. Remember that for instance the average minion-level NPC only survives maybe 3-5 seconds against an average team of players - why do we need to worry about "battle damage" for them when it might only be visible on the screen for a second or two?

LaughingAlex wrote:

Well, not asking for THIS level of carnage but still decals bring battles to life, no matter the graphics :).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=niLBL44VOxc
A note: This game is actually a fairly old game in the video, and the decal limit was very limitless and had little impact, surprisingly. You could literally tell what happened in a battle just looking at the ground without ever having been at the spot.

While your vid was fun to watch the "bodies getting blown apart at death" effect is not exactly what's being discussed here. We're mostly talking about graphical costume changes to characters as they take increasing amounts of damage during combat, not what happens to them when they get killed outright.

It would likely be relatively simplistic for CoT to adapt CoH's "ragdoll death physics" to have it show newly killed bodies being blown apart and splats of blood on the ground. But even though there might be a few villains out there who'd love to be able to do that to their victims I'm going to safely guess that this kind of carnage wouldn't fit in with the goody-goody heroic types. ;)