Bear in mind, both representaions do really help in situations like Starcraft where you have dozens of units to babysit. If you didn''t have a numerical representation of damage, AND the graphical (even though the graphical is calculated off of the numeric and not location), Imagine how hard decision making would have been in that game.

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Original post by Inmate2993
Bear in mind, both representaions do really help in situations like Starcraft where you have dozens of units to babysit. If you didn''t have a numerical representation of damage, AND the graphical (even though the graphical is calculated off of the numeric and not location), Imagine how hard decision making would have been in that game.

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But if you had an FPS, a damage system would be very neat. Instead of "instant health bonuses", you could have like bandages which would tender individual wounds (made from bullets, knife slashes, etc) which then would heal over time. If you were shot in the right leg,you would have to use a bandage on the wound and wobble around looking for more before you bled to death.

Well, thats an FPS, and proably really difficult to calculate. Point is that for somethings, it doesn''t call for anything else but a single dimension variable representing health. I mean, if you take an RPG, you''d think, sure, more then just one HP thing. Now add 20 controllable characters. Do you have the time to figure out whose hurting from what?

Didnt games like resident evil have stuff like that where as you got more injured you limped and walked more slowly. losing blood at times.


Or what about doom with a head all smashed up =)


[edited by - ACAC on May 14, 2003 6:29:38 PM]

In my game Lugaru, people have several health statistics; temporary damage, permanent damage, bleeding and blood loss. If any of them go above your damage tolerance you are unconscious. If permanent damage or blood loss go to high you die.

Getting punched or kicked deals a lot of temporary damage, and 1/4 as much to permanent damage, and some attacks can give you internal bleeding which can drip down your nose and mouth. Getting stabbed causes your bleeding level to go up, and every frame your bleeding decreases but bloodloss increases until you are no longer bleeding... it takes a few seconds to stop bleeding.

Damage regenerates fairly quickly but can never be better than the permanent damage level, permanent damage rises (despite the name), but very slowly. Bloodloss only recovers for the player, not for enemies.

These factors are all numerical but you never have to keep track of them, and you have no health bar. The screen just throbs darkly a bit when you''re bleeding too much and you get ''doublevision'' if you are near being knocked unconscious.

I think this kind of system makes it ''feel'' more realistic, because it does away with silly health packs and automatically expresses the fact that one massive punch or a quick combination of hits is more likely to knock you out than less concentrated attacks, eliminating the issues in some games where sometimes you step on someone''s foot and they die because you maxed out their damage meter.

I think giving permanent leg damage etc. is a bad idea unless you compensate for it in the game somehow; i.e. if you have another realistic team-based shooter, you shouldn''t have to actually kill everyone on the other team. People bleeding to death or paralyzed or otherwise severely wounded should be counted as dead. Little is more boring than spectating some limping soldier waiting in a corner

BTW I don''t think that actual damage system is as important as having it feel as if you''re really doing damage. I think that''s why SOF2 is so popular; you shoot someone, a hole appears. While (unlike my game ) blood doesn''t actually drip down them from their wounds, this is a huge step from almost all other games, even ones with supposedly great graphics, where people are either entirely intact, or smeared on the walls. There must be in-between stages; perfectly clean people lying in huge blood puddles just looks weird.

I suppose I should show a screenshot of my game in progress to show what I mean:
http://wolfire.emuscene.com/Finish.jpg
Yes, he''s a freaky rabbit person.

While it doesn''t get anywhere near the polycount or texture detail of new games, I think what they don''t take into account is the ''feel'' of the game. If you stab somebody, they should bleed. If you kick somebody hard enough, they should fall over, and the screen should shake a bit from the impact on your leg.

I think one of the fps games that best approaches the ''feel'' of getting shot is the Navy Seals mod for q3.