Long term suggestion: Visual feedback of weapon performance

[Song]

As a possible far-future suggestion, it might be interesting to experiment with altering hit effect graphics to mirror how the weapon is performing, so that players who don't necessarily know what armors have what resistance (or what enemies use what armor) can still know reasonably quickly if their gun is performing well against an enemy they're fighting for the first time. Damage scaling is already used on projectiles, and in 1.7 weapon effects can be changed entirely based on that system....a similar(ish) system might be useful for each standard hit effect to swap between different effects. It would have to detect armor resistance (or possibly the percentage of damage the weapon is doing?) and adapt/change/scale the effect to match.

In an ideal, super-hard-to-do implementation, this would be based on the armor (Eg. Reactive armor has small explosions when hit by kinetics). But this would be A: Too complicated and B: Unintuitive in some cases. So a simpler approach would be better. I'm just not entirely sure how.

I thought I'd throw this out for discussion and see what others think. This may be technically feasible right now with the use of script, but handling it for a core implementation would likely be a considerable job. That, plus the rather vague nature of this idea, means I don't have any intention of ticketing it right now, unless some firm ideas come out. I'd love to hear what other people think of it though.

[JohnBWatson]

That's a good idea. It seems fairly simple to implement: just procedurally generate hiteffects based on a set of values, and scale those values with the damage done to the armor.

In fact, I believe that some weapons may already do this. I could be remembering incorrectly, but laser and particle weapon fire seems to have more intense effects when it does more damage.

In the case of weapons that don't do this, it can be done easily enough by scaling the size and number of particles generated in any procedural effects. Explosions created by a weapon's impact could similarly be scaled with damage, especially considering that they are likely to become procedural in the next version.

[sun1404]

I think the laser hit effects just scale with the weapon's damage, right along with the beam effect. What we want would be scaling based on how effective it is on the particular armor it hits.

[JohnBWatson]

I think the laser hit effects just scale with the weapon's damage, right along with the beam effect. What we want would be scaling based on how effective it is on the particular armor it hits.

Seems like we could just replace the 'damage' in that code with 'damage/resistance'.

[regurgi]

Mhm. It would be sufficient to make a 'weak' animation for each type of weapon fire, and if damage/resistance is low enough, play the animation.

Basically just stuff pinging off, really. Lasers, kinetic, particle are all easy to imagine, blast & thermo not so much. It doesn't need to look exactly realistic, (ex: matching the color of the laser fired), as it would be an understood visual symbol.

[JohnBWatson]

Mhm. It would be sufficient to make a 'weak' animation for each type of weapon fire, and if damage/resistance is low enough, play the animation.

Basically just stuff pinging off, really. Lasers, kinetic, particle are all easy to imagine, blast & thermo not so much. It doesn't need to look exactly realistic, (ex: matching the color of the laser fired), as it would be an understood visual symbol.

Building a separate animation for each of them would be a much more difficult task than adjusting a value in the procedural effects that appear to already be in the process of being implemented.