Topic: Health

[contingencyplan]

Discussing the visor display gave me another question: How will we implement player health in the game, esp. in the FPS mode?  I'm not particularly in favor of a strictly health-points system, even if we have certain areas inflict more damage when hit (e.g., headshots, leg shots).  I think we could do something like Systems for the person him/herself: the legs provide the Service of movement, arms provide the service of aiming, etc.  When those get shot, they are typically damaged / disabled, and thus limit the abilities of the character.  The head / heart provide "life support" (literally), so if they're hit, you get deadded.  ;-)

What do you think?
~Brian

[Morgul]

Interesting. Orriginally, I had been playing with an idea of endurance and fatigue. (Personally, I *HATE* hitpoints.)

Basically, the way it would work is like this:

You would have some stat similiare to constitution. That would determine your total endurance. Now, every actuion you do causes some level of fatigue... the more often you do it, the less it generates, to a point. Your endurance is the amount of fatigue you can handle... So your max fatigue is your endurance. Now, the more damage you take, the lower your endurance becomes. When your fatigue reaches your endurance, you pass out... if it exceeds it by a great deal for long enough, you die.

Now, imagine combining this with the systems idea... or even just the basic infrastructure. Hrm... It would be interesting...

[Morgul]

In thinking about this, I think almost everything should be based on the systems model. It would simplify things, and reuse a bunch of code. It would also allow for damage, etc to be calculated on almost evey object.

However this begs the question: How do we do fast geometry modification? (aka, blowing off pieces of things, or putting holes in other things?

[Noonien]

Has anyone ever played MechWarrior? It's the best system I've seen overall as far as health-and-stuff goes. Basically you ave different parts of the body (head, torso, arms, legs, and feet) each with their own stats and regeneration times. It'll take longer to heal a leg naturally then it would to heal a head and so on. Say your arm gets blown off, for the moment yes your stats will be low until a given amount of time passes. Without replacing that arm, and after getting used to it, other parts of your body would bulk up to make up for the missing limb. So while having an overall HP system is bad, having a HP system per body part sounds like a good idea to me.


--Master of the Obvious

[fehknt]

I just want to provide emphatic support for the system providing a service, and if the system gets damaged/disabled, then the service is degraded of ruined.  And some things would have backups, that may not be as good... like if your right arm gets blown off, you may be able to get it replaced later, but for now, you can get away with using your left arm, although you may (I'm seeing a possible perk here for ambidexterity) be worse at doing things with your left arm only, and of course, things that require two arms/hands are impossible.

[Morgul]

Right now, the plan is for ship systems to provide a service. (Services are basically pools, like the service 'power' would be a pool of terawatts) As far as player's being a list of systems, and providing services... I like the idea to a degree. I still think that should be combined with a fatigue/endurance model (make the heart/brain be the system that provides the endurance service? That way, 'destroy' those, person is dead.)

What do you think?

[topher]

For the ship based system i like the idea of systems pools.  Then if i get jammed by an enemy Electronic Warfare ship by targeting system goes.  I can then as the captain of my ship redirect resources towards counteracting it or fixing a damaged system.

[Morgul]

Exactly! That's how I want it to be if I'm the captain of a ship.

--Chris