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I would like there to be some form of battle damage, maybe enemies must be white and score a crit, but that'll leave a mark on your costume for a period of time, maybe twice or three times as long as it took to make it happen. I personally enjoy looking beat up sometimes.
By the same token, it would also be nice to be able to reset or turn this off. Just a weird though.
This would be good but it would also put alot of stress on server machines. In theory it is no different than putting on another costume but that alone means doubling the costume desgins and giving an extra timer for each player who was in combat recently.
The server part's probably solvable because most of it could be offloaded to the client. The client is already being told how many HP the various mobs have (so you can see it when you target them), so it could look up an "outfit" based on damage level. For the simplest case. If you want to have per-location damage, that gets harder.
But it pales in comparison to the real cost of such a thing: developer effort, especially art, animation, and QA. (E.g. "Dude's arm is a mess but he's still using it to hold a super heavy grenade launcher?!" and "Why am I seeing blood come out of a robot?")
[i]Has anyone seen my mind? It was right here...[/i]
It'd be great if this new game could support "costume battle damage" but I'd have to agree with you on this.
As you say the local game client could keep track and display battle damage to your own costume and NPCs that you can see relatively easily. The hard part would be having the game servers have to use extra bandwidth keep track of everyone else's (both PCs and NPCs) current level of battle damage and keep that information synced up on every player's screen. Sure the game could be designed not to worry about that, but it would look kind of weird if you were in a heavy firefight and you were the only person getting your costume ripped/shredded.
Then of course there's the problems with you mention with "blood coming from robots" and the other inconsistencies that would be hard for a current MMO system to account for. Basically I think "costume battle damage" is one of those things that might not be practical to do yet, at least until future software/hardware advances allow for it.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
Best I can tell, most games already do that. It's part of the traffic that shows your damage to targets, theirs to you, and the status of the folks on your team. That way, when you select a target, there's no delay while the client fetches that from the server; the client already knows it.
Of course, that only covers HP. If the "battle damage" were something more detailed than just "mob looks like this when HP between 25 and 50%", e.g. "bleeding from right arm", then you'd need more data to be pushed from the server to the client and it's less likely to happen. (That's also where the inconsistent modeling problem comes from; the server would have to include a bunch of info in the "damage details", whereas a simple HP threshold looking up a per-mob "damaged" costume is completely client-side, but means the art folks have to make several versions of everything, and your machine needs to have enough VRAM to preload all of it or you'll see stuttering as it loads the different damage textures during the fight.)
I have no idea how practical all that is on the technical side. The Unreal Engine might have support for it already. It's the "we only have so many artist hours" part that's the real show stopper, IMHO.
[i]Has anyone seen my mind? It was right here...[/i]
Love the idea; agree with worries about load on the engine.
Could solve inappropriate damage animations by having damage animation be selectable in the Avatar Builder: select dripping liquid, choose red for blood, brown-black for oil, etc. But that might be even MORE load on the devs.
Oh well, I'll keep this on my "someday" wish list.
Spurn all ye kindle.
I think we can generally agree (since neither of us really know the exact details of a game that hasn't been created yet) that if we were to have a fully realistic "costume battle damage" feature that accurately synced and displayed every PC's and NPC's appearance to every other player that there would be SOME extra cost in terms of server bandwidth to support it regardless of what the clients could do to help. That's an extra runtime cost that the Devs of CoT may either be unwilling or unable to justify.
And as you say even if they could completely rely on the local clients to do the "heavy lifting" to support this capability then there would likely be a significant resource hit against the game's ability to keep the graphics humming along without lag. Remember that CoH had its arbitrary limitation of having to wait 30 seconds to change costumes which was explained by the Devs of that game as a necessary timeout to prevent lag in situations where a group of people might try to spam a bunch of changes all at once - a situation EXACTLY like the one we're discussing here with multiple instances of battle damage happening simultaneously near each other.
Hopefully the Unreal Engine can solve/mitigate not only the semi-silly "costume change timeout" CoH suffered from but by extension help allow some limited version of costume battle damage that wouldn't cost too much time in either Dev art development or runtime resources. I could easily accept something like this as an QoL "upgrade" that wouldn't be ciritical to have on Launch Day.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
There are games (like l4d2) that have the characters limp when they are down to wee health. It is a pretty handy way to alert the folks nearby that someone is running on almost empty.
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Well, there's always the TERA answer of splattering "blood" on your screen when YOU get hit as an obscuration method making it harder to see what's happening. That would be entirely client side, would just be a 2D "splash" on the lens of the "camera" sort of effect, and with use of a color wheel and a Light/Dark slider and a Transparency slider you could manage just about anything from "blood" (red) to "motor oil" (black) to "divine ichor" (white) to "vulcan blood" (green) to whatever else you imagination desires. It would be a completely local effect happening only on your screen, so there would be no server load at all, and it would just be a "paint splatter" effect and therefore something relatively simple to produce as far as the Art people are concerned.
Mind you, not everyone would go for it, since it would effectively be a "gore factor" kind of thing ... but some people would, and it wouldn't have a huge impact on how OTHER people play the game, nor do much of anything to server performance ... {shrug}
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I'd have no problem with this blood splatter indicator in CoT, even if it had to be optional so that people who didn't want the "gore factor" could keep it off.
But for what it's worth this "costume combat damage" suggestion is yet another one of those long desired wishes that was talked about back on the CoH forums periodically for years. From what I understand people don't just want this as a better visual combat indicator of their character's near death status as much as just something that would be adding "realism" to the game. I guess the idea is that if someone hits them with a flamethrower they want to see the tips of their capes burnt the way they would be "in real life".
Fundamentally I agree with the idea that it would be cool to have from a realism point of view. I simply once again believe it might be a little too costly in terms of art and runtime resources to worry about as a top priority.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
It's probably just too difficult, is the general consensus? I figured that would be the case, technically you could treat each costume piece as having damaged states and undamaged states, in the graphical file, like panels in a gif being isolated and referenced, then overlayed on the figure (I don't know much (Anything?) about game design, this is just how my mind thinks it should work...) This could make robotic or mechanical suit items damage like they're 'meant to' spandex could tear, robots could be crunched. It just seems pretty infeasible though given what every one's said?
Well all we know for sure at this point is despite people wanting something like this in CoH for years it never happened. People suggested this idea dozens of times in the CoH forums and the general feedback from the Devs amounted to something along the lines of "Well, we'd love to do that... someday".
From that we can assume this would not be trivial to implement, even for CoT. But we are dealing with a whole new technology with the Unreal Engine so if anything it's probably "more possible" in CoT than it ever was in CoH. Again I wouldn't hold my hopes up for it too much, espeically as something that would make it in by Launch Day. But who knows maybe eventually they'll finally figure it out later on down the line.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
Of course! Bear in mind that the client/server interface [i]already[/i] has to synchronize the following parameters of every mob in range, for every player in range:
[list][*]identity
[*]current animation
[*]position
[*]facing
[*]movement
[*]current target
[*]hit points
[*]other observable statistics
[/list]
So something that just uses a stat that's already there will be little to no server load, but fancier stuff could bloat that list to unmanageable levels.
Close, but not exactly. When a character switches costumes, the costume data needs to be shipped out to every client with that character in range, and those clients have to load texture data and whatever else like you describe. there's really no way to predict what those are going to be ahead of time and get them into VRAM early.
But in the case of, say, a mob with four different models (one for each 1/4 range of HP), it's obvious what to preload: all four of them.
Now if there are far more than a few options (the arbitrary damage model), then we're back to the situation you describe, unless someone does a bit of work to create a state machine: e.g. we're using the model for status N, which has only a few "neighboring" statuses (the mob is very unlikely to go from "left arm blown off" to "left arm is back but right is blown off").
It all depends on how crazy the devs want to get.
That [i]would[/i] be awesome.
[i]Has anyone seen my mind? It was right here...[/i]
A way in which I can see it working is by applying another "skin" or mask on top of the normal costume, with most of it being transparent, and having the combat damage on top.
Each costume piece could have their own relevant "damage" skin, and damage gets applied that way.
Hell, I guess that you could make pieces of ornate armor fall off if you really wanted to do it this way (although that would take some fiddling I would imagine, with textures/transparencies).
Downside: Doubling up on everything that is loaded... one normal (costume piece), one extra (damage costume piece).
*shrugs* tis a solution, but not necessarily going to be *easy*.
Exactly what I was talking about, with todays imaging software you can layer several imagines in the same file, with precise enough texture and polygon mapping you could just have them change the image files revealed layer to one up or down, some are just an overlay, some will even show in the bumpmap, I wouldn't really care if it matched damage type at all, just the material that's being damaged.
Might not be that bad; you'd only need the delta texture for the parts that actually changed. E.g. if it's an arm wound, nothing is needed to modify the other parts.
Further, this could optimize the "way too detailed" model; each "damaged" piece could be used by one or more damage "states", removing a lot of duplication.
[i]Has anyone seen my mind? It was right here...[/i]
Just to be clear you seem to be focused mainly on how the game would be handling the NPCs in a large fight situation. The game would have to handle not only NPCs (granted as you say they would be a little easier to handle with stock models than PCs in this situation) but would ALSO have to handle all the PCs in the area as well.
Consider your response here in light of the situation where you might have several dozen PLAYERS all fighting in close quarters, not just NPCs. That's where the problems of transmitting constant multiple costume changes can make something like this extremely problematic.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
Yes I would agree that with some very clever planning the Devs might be able to optimize/streamline the process of "layering" damage on top of the initial, undamaged models.
But not only would you still have some degree of (as you say) "doubling up" of the data needed to implement this but by coming up with what would amount to "generic" versions of damage you'd lose some of the unique detail this feature could otherwise provide in its best incarnation. What I mean is let's say you come up with four "layers" of damage. Whenever you hit those thresholds you're always going to see the same progression of damage regardless of the specific fight situation. Now this hardwired version of battle damage might be fine for the NPCs. But frankly it might start to look weird when applied to PCs. Why is it that my cape always tears the same way when I reach 80% HPs? Why would my glove always get ripped when I hit 60% HPs? and so on...
I'm not saying this wouldn't be a good compromise in order to implement something like this in general. I'm just saying that anything short of realistically randomized damage (especially for the PCs) might eventually look a little more silly than intended or worth.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
From the OP...
Requiring PC damage effects to be highly randomized, rarely if ever repeating the same pattern, is moving the goal posts a long ways from where the OP started. Can we start with the simple solution, and build on that? Perfection is the enemy of the good.
[i]Has anyone seen my mind? It was right here...[/i]
Randomized damage effects would completely ruin the feel, facing a laser drone and I suddenly have claw marks? It just shouldn't work that way, making it damage specific would complicate it and require possibly as many alternate skins, or generic overlays as elements of in the damage spectrum. Another possibility is to specific material in costume creation along with pattern and object shape, similar to how CO does it in the costume generator, but that would only help make material specific damage easier. Given the size of games these days however, I'd rather the massive space (For those with low end harddrives like myself) be used with something I care about, not voices, so damage mark files would be awesome...
When I said "randomized damage" I obviously didn't mean something like "see a laserblast one second and then see a claw mark the next". Come on people.. use some common sense here.
Obviously what I meant (and I can't really believe I'm having to explain this) is that let's say you take some damage in one combat and you see some rips in your cape as some battle damage. Then let's say that fades away and a minute later you enter a second combat. This time instead of seeing the SAME EXACT rips in your cape you see some damage on your arm. THAT kind of random.
And yes as I myself pointed out having this kind or realistic battle damage would obviously be harder to implement than some kind of generic "layered skins" combat damage. Why did you both have to tell me something I just told you?!?
The reason I mentioned it is that this is EXACTLY what people have always claimed they wanted with this kind of thing back in the CoH forums. Sure LeadWanderer might have had a less ambitious version of this idea in this thread, but this type of suggestion has been flying around in various forms on these forums for years. Sorry for picking up where the conversation left off.
Yes the "perfection" of randomized battle damage might be a long way off assuming it ever happens. And yes as I agreed doing a limited "layered" system would probably have to be the compromise to ever see something like this in CoT. I was simply pointing out that a LIMITED version of this might actually start to look more annoying/unrealistic (at least on PCs) than not having it at all. I believe it would start to look weird if let's say my arm always got hurt in the exact same way every time I took the same amount of damage. Don't you think that might start to become weird and off-putting after the 100+ time it happens?
P.S. And if I wanted to be extra critical about this I could even say I think doing this battle damage on NPCs might have very little value except for maybe the big bosses that didn't die within a few seconds. On lower-level type critters this extra battle damage would almost be pointless based on how quickly they tend to die.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
It seems people mostly focused on server load side of the story except a couple of people pointed out real problem. You need new graphics and such for each costume if you are going to do this which means doubling the costume design time for same amount of costumes.
Mow I don't know about anyone else but I would prefer that time being on spend on something more useful or satisfactory like desgning new costumes instead or new powers even.