Projectile-VS-Projectile interaction changes

[Song]

Currently ingame, the way the game handles projectiles hitting other projectiles is.....mixed.

Beams can be blocked by any solid thing.

Solid things can be blocked by beams or solid things that have higher damage than their shot HP.

Particles cannot be blocked by anything except shockwaves, and can block incoming missiles (not sure how damage is calculated for particles, but it's probably similar to how beams do it)

Shockwaves block *everything* and cannot be blocked.

Radius fragments cannot be blocked, and have really weird effects on the solid stuff that they block. They do not block beams.



In addition to this, a lot of the "solid" projectiles are ludicrously easy to shoot down. One can take out the mighty APA blast with a tiny kinetic slug.

I believe that a more useful system would be for all projectiles to be assigned a hitpoint count of some sort. Possibly a seperate "intensity" indicator for beams. When a projectile hits another projectile, the two roll for damage against each other. This is deducted from the HP/intensity count. This is basically the same as the current system. However: damage would be dependent on shot HP. So the "winning" shot would keep going, but with reduced HP.....unless neither shot had any HP after applying damage to the other. Minimum damage would be about 30% of original damage when the projectile has 1 HP remaining...this ensures that if a shot hits, it's going to do damage.

For more fun, shot HP could be automatically calculated if not specified in the XML, based on the level and average damage (this means that low ROF high damage things have high shot HP) of the weapon/missile. This would be an improvement on the current system, which I think just defaults to 1HP.


Eg.

Alice fires a weapon at Bob, who returns fire. Their projectiles collide. Alice's gun deals 50 damage on its roll, and has 30 missile hitpoints. Bob's weapon rolls a 10, and has 5 missile hitpoints. Alice's projectile (or beam) destroys Bob's projectile (by reducing missile HP to below 0), but takes 10 points of damage. On hitting Bob's ship, the damage roll is reduced by whatever function this system would use (logarithmic, maybe?), due to the damage done to the projectile by the earlier interaction.



....Obviously, radius and shockwave (and particles) should still be unblockable, but with this system they would simply do their damage to incoming projectiles, which would then continue with diminished strength rather than outright destroying them instantly. And beam-on-beam stuff should obviously not do anything to their 'HP' (intensity?) count.


(Footnote: It would also be cool if passing through a target [like a katana bolt] also reduced shot HP by a certain amount based off the passthrough chance. But that would complicate balancing a lot.)

[RPC]

Seconded. I think as long as we have shot HP calculated by damage done and reduce damage by shot HP reduction we would have decent shot interactions. Maybe make a ministry bug report linking to this topic?

[PM]

Also add noMissileHits for times when you really do not want a missile object to get shot down (or block other missiles) regardless of interaction. (This is mainly special effects that are spawned as missile objects.)

It would be nice for radius effects to support interaction, and able to hit anything, including beams.

Shockwaves block *everything* and cannot be blocked.

They can passthrough everything, but their constituent missiles, which only have passthrough of 80 by default, can be absorbed, even though the image is not. For example, if the shockwave tries to hit a ship on the other side of a large planet, there is a good chance the ship will not take any hits, despite the shockwave touching it, because the planet absorbed the hits.

Shrike, did you try adding hit points to your beams? Standard beams do not have hitPoints, but that does not mean beams cannot have them.

[Song]

Also add noMissileHits for times when you really do not want a missile object to get shot down (or block other missiles) regardless of interaction. (This is mainly special effects that are spawned as missile objects.)

Also a good idea. Might also be good if these are ignored by ICX..that way xenophobe/positron lancers will stop breaking ICX.

Shrike, did you try adding hit points to your beams? Standard beams do not have hitPoints, but that does not mean beams cannot have them.

No, I haven't. I'll probably do that as a stopgap measure for my new stuff in SM&M++. However it's very much a vanilla problem....a lot of vanilla weapons (particularly slow-firing beam weapons like the heavy ion blaster and the rasiermesser lasers) have very severe problems as a result of getting instantly shot down by anything....I could fix that by over-writing everything, but it'd be very clunky.