quote: Original post by Jotaf
Also, how would a system like this be displayed? I'd love to see a game that displays the individual wounds of each character in the character model's skin, but maybe that's a bit too far away.

Not really. Updating a skin can be done quickly with a render-to-texture operation. The only significant cost I can think of, is having to store a separate skin for every character, but unless you are planning hordes of similar-looking enemies, that shouldn't be a problem.

Losing limbs and such isn't a problem either. (I've modeled and programmed it myself, although not with models of real humans.)

[edited by - EasyRaider on April 1, 2004 4:26:43 PM]

health points
life points
alive points
power points

geez dude, use your brain there must be a million different things you can use.

You''ll find an excellent study of damage and health systems here: http://bay12games.com/armok.htm

It''s just a semi-workable tech demo at the moment, but the level of damage modelling is enjoyably ridiculous. Ever wondered what''d happen if you used a teleportation spell to tear out a man''s kidneys, or flayed the skin from a rabbit? Armok will tell you!

NOTE: I pre-emptively nominate anyone pointing out that the game is ugly, or confusing, or unfinished for a I''m Really Good At Stating The Obvious Award. I know it''s a mess. Your task is to realise why it''s a very interesting mess.

NecroMage: You''re right, but it''s one of those realistic stuff that really wouldn''t matter. It would be very hard for that to happen in the game and even if it did, it wouldn''t really add much

I said that stamina could be a kind of a shield because I don''t wanna reduce the combat system to just making moves like a combat game or (worse) make it heavily based on probabilities/randomness. The shield in Halo added a lot of strategy simply because it was not linear like most shields in games (I can tell you how it works, it''s really simple) so I thought it would be a nice feature. I dunno, there must be so much more to combat than that... do we really have to find a combat expert to have interesting combat in games? =P I was thinking about a way to elaborate on that concept of stamina as fuel (a valuable "resource" in combat), but maybe that''s a bit off-topic?

And I think that the reason why games don''t model wounds is not because of the technology, it''s because it would make players realize the obvious: that characters can run around with huge scars in their heads and still move like they''re ok =)

Super Foul Egg those guys are kinda sick =p they wanna have stuff like ripping someone''s intestines out and using them to strangle someone. Whenever someone is hit in the chest, it''s safe to assume that there''s some probability that it hits a vital organ or that it misses completely. There''s no need to get into more gory details BTW I read everything on that site and I couldn''t find anything that isn''t neatly abstracted by most of the ideas in this post.

Hmm I had this thought... About character performance dropping after some threshold. Instead of having a threshold, a kind of an exponential function (like a^b) could be used to figure out the probability of failure based on damage taken (like there would be a higher probability of missing an attack if there''s arm damage, low stamina, low consciousness...). So there would be a kind of a "safe zone" for all of these variables, after that it is more and more likely that the character will not do things right. Would this work?