Starbase Progress Notes: Week 42 (2021)

[Thk]

@Kenetor @Fizz @Aha It isn't that your '24x24 cm thin floor plate' should block as much as a '432x432 cm plate' but rather that perpendicularly hitting the broad side of a '48x72 cm plate', '192x192 cm plate', and '24x36 cm plate' should be close to if not identical in protection value. Protection should be per penetrated voxel, such that dividing your '144x144 cm plate' into 4 '72x72 cm plates' to take up the exact same space does not result in meaningful change to the protection provided.
The idea being that each projectile would have a certain 'penetration depth' in a given material.

However, to help avoid unnecessary packing of tiny plates, there still would be a debuff on tiny plates. I would spitball a 10% or more debuff on '12x24 cm plates', but the difference between a '72x72 cm plate' and '144x144 cm plate' be no more than like 1% and the difference between a '144x144 cm plate' and a '432x432 cm plate' be no more than like 0.1%. Such that beyond a certain plate size while it still is better to use singular larger plates the difference is generally negligible. Though with plates below that size, the integrity debuff is relatively steep. It is still important that penetrating 24cm though a '12x24 cm plate' is harder than penetrating 12cm though a '432x432 cm plate' (assuming the same material is used of course)

 

[IronGremlin]

@Kenetor @Fizz @Aha It isn't that your '24x24 cm thin floor plate' should block as much as a '432x432 cm plate' but rather that perpendicularly hitting the broad side of a '48x72 cm plate', '192x192 cm plate', and '24x36 cm plate' should be close to if not identical in protection value. Protection should be per penetrated voxel, such that dividing your '144x144 cm plate' into 4 '72x72 cm plates' to take up the exact same space does not result in meaningful change to the protection provided.
The idea being that each projectile would have a certain 'penetration depth' in a given material.

However, to help avoid unnecessary packing of tiny plates, there still would be a debuff on tiny plates. I would spitball a 10% or more debuff on '12x24 cm plates', but the difference between a '72x72 cm plate' and '144x144 cm plate' be no more than like 1% and the difference between a '144x144 cm plate' and a '432x432 cm plate' be no more than like 0.1%. Such that beyond a certain plate size while it still is better to use singular larger plates the difference is generally negligible. Though with plates below that size, the integrity debuff is relatively steep. It is still important that penetrating 24cm though a '12x24 cm plate' is harder than penetrating 12cm though a '432x432 cm plate' (assuming the same material is used of course)

Lauri has said before that a voxel based damage system was where they initially wanted to take it but that accomplishing that was daunting and so they ended up falling back on part HP as a compromise.

The implication with that comment, if I read it right, was that they wanted to do something fancy like this at some point in the future, but that because it's an incredibly daunting technical challenge, it will take a long time, and therefor is going to end up waiting in line behind some of the big-hitter features.

Couple of things that are super important to understand about this:

1. This is enormously hard to do in a way that's both consistent, like shots damage lands where people see it hit, and also doesn't turn everyone's computer into a fused pile of smoldering silicon.

2. The game doesn't need this half as bad as it needs reasons for people to shoot at each other in the first place. People will put up with a quirky damage model and boxy ships, they will not put up with an empty tech demo.

That doesn't mean "this will never get fixed" it just means that it's a tall enough order, and there are enough other things on FB's plate, that we are very likely to see band-aid fixes to the situation while we get more big ticket stuff instead of us all waiting patiently for FB to engineer a completely new damage model in a game where nobody has any reason to fight each other anyway.

 

[Kenetor]

@Kenetor @Fizz @Aha It isn't that your '24x24 cm thin floor plate' should block as much as a '432x432 cm plate' but rather that perpendicularly hitting the broad side of a '48x72 cm plate', '192x192 cm plate', and '24x36 cm plate' should be close to if not identical in protection value. Protection should be per penetrated voxel, such that dividing your '144x144 cm plate' into 4 '72x72 cm plates' to take up the exact same space does not result in meaningful change to the protection provided.
The idea being that each projectile would have a certain 'penetration depth' in a given material.

However, to help avoid unnecessary packing of tiny plates, there still would be a debuff on tiny plates. I would spitball a 10% or more debuff on '12x24 cm plates', but the difference between a '72x72 cm plate' and '144x144 cm plate' be no more than like 1% and the difference between a '144x144 cm plate' and a '432x432 cm plate' be no more than like 0.1%. Such that beyond a certain plate size while it still is better to use singular larger plates the difference is generally negligible. Though with plates below that size, the integrity debuff is relatively steep. It is still important that penetrating 24cm though a '12x24 cm plate' is harder than penetrating 12cm though a '432x432 cm plate' (assuming the same material is used of course)

Depth of plating is already taken into account

 

[LauriFB]

We have some neat ideas how to make the damage/armor system much better, but as you can see we have a lot of things to do before we get there.

 

[Aha]

@Aha @Fizz fun fact guys, this is exactly how the game launched in CA, and all we say was the massive spam of the smallest plates instead of the largest, this was hugely bad for performance and made even the smallest fighters impossible to kill due to how highly they could be armoured and its massively penalised larger ships because you both couldn't use larger plates as well as not having enough object count to spam small ones.

Yes the armour system is flawed and need replacing but doing it the way you are suggesting has already been shown to be a worse outcome than what we have.

I don't think we are suggesting what you think we are suggesting.
What I'm suggesting is 12cm thick armor should be 12cm thick armor, no matter how wide/tall it is. To avoid what you described it needs what I suggested, a COMPLETE overhaul!
I didn't want to make an actual suggestion on how to fix it here. I'm just complaining that this is absolutely terrible right now and I think it really hurts the game.

 

[Aha]

We have some neat ideas how to make the damage/armor system much better, but as you can see we have a lot of things to do before we get there.

That is good to hear, thank you!

 

[Kenetor]

I don't think we are suggesting what you think we are suggesting.
What I'm suggesting is 12cm thick armor should be 12cm thick armor, no matter how wide/tall it is. To avoid what you described it needs what I suggested, a COMPLETE overhaul!
I didn't want to make an actual suggestion on how to fix it here. I'm just complaining that this is absolutely terrible right now and I think it really hurts the game.

oh I COMPLETELY agree, neither way is very good right now, personally, I think they should just go with material value and depth and just do straight voxel damage, but I think the overhead in voxel info would kill the game, as I understand the voxels are quite memory intensive