Aware Stage Combat

Raptorstorm wrote:

If were talking about combat, could there be natural breath weapons?(like breathing fire or acid)

Fire: Physics says, Belgium no. The heat involved would kill, full stop. Lungs (or gills) need to be very thin, wet tissue in order to absorb a maximum amount of oxygen. Fire is bad for lungs, and mucous membranes around the mouth or nose are, after all, mucous membranes. Theoretically, you could not have them, but you'd leave your creature extremely vulnerable for airborne infection.

Acid: I assume you're talking about the face-eating kind, which is a no. Milder acids, however, are a yes, as are all manner of toxins created within the creature's body. There won't be a lot of face-melting, but pain in the eyes and nose (or whatever) of the offending creature that wants to eat the spit-ee is a given.

(Am I the only one on this forum that's been forced to learn all of the organic acids and bases?)

Actual fire would be impossible, but the creature could have a weapon like that that of a bombardier beetle. it has two glands that produce chemicals that ignite on impact, that meet outside of the mouth. Could a face-melting acid be achieved by a system like that?

Brennus wrote:

Actual fire would be impossible, but the creature could have a weapon like that that of a bombardier beetle. it has two glands that produce chemicals that ignite on impact, that meet outside of the mouth. Could a face-melting acid be achieved by a system like that?

Possibly. The thing is, we'd specifically need to hard code that ability in, and it's a relatively low priority.

Alright Then,

Skeletal Combat...

Skeletal Combat is a much better alternative to previous suggestions, I believe, for these reasons.

- Health Bars, they make it possible for your head to be ripped off and live. That isn't realistic unless your creature has that "feature".

- You can't kick/claw/smash (etc:) if your leg is broken, Skeletal Combat can restrict things like that.

- They work more like a living organism, if you get poked in the eye you will most likely not have the splendor to bite someone, the smallest moves will make a difference in game. It makes it that you have to think before you act.

- The creature you are will play a real role in your ability to survive encounter with a "stronger" creature, one that would normally destroy your creature. This way it makes the hunter at risk for mortal wounds (death) as it fights, as well as the hunt-ee' can be dispatched as well. This puts an Aura of realism on encounters.

This is an example of skeletal combat. (I can't post links because I am a newcomer)

Type in "Nerd Cubed Overgrowth"

Click "Let's Play Indie Games - Overgrowth"

Watch until he tells you about Skeleton Based Combat, it really needs to be in this game!

It is simple, real, and practical. It has to be the answer!

I watched the video, and he didn't explain it that much. After a quick google search, I found this thread on it on the Ogre forums, which explains it more.

Well, isn't that the same (more or less) than the complex damage system?

I think that is a more Deus Ex original based combat system. If you don't know what that is, The Deus Ex combat system basically made it still have health bars, but it is divided into one for each body part. Reaching certain health thresholds for each body part would trigger different responses, such as losing control of an arm, slowed movement speed, etc. I would imagine it would be hard to define specific thresholds and their effects, as well as defining specific body parts, in code.

Nonetheless, I do see some issues with the skeletal structure system as well, although from what I know it looks far nicer. I can't decide. What should we do?

To get some discussion going, I'm going to restate my question. What are the pros and cons of each system, and which do you think we should implement?

In my opinion, attacks using a skeletal structure system either do no damage or kill. That would be a big issue, since many carnivores hunt by wounding their prey, then stalking them until they collapse from weakness and detach from the herd. The level of gore from the skeletal structure just meets my gore limit. Some pros to it are that the combat is very intense, realistic, intuitive, and physical. As the guy in the video says, many combat systems feel like you are just slicing at air. This really makes you feel the impact and the collisions.

As i see it, unless i understood wrongly the skeletal structure, they are basically the same. The overgrowth one looks awesome, though.

The combat system in overgrowth is about as good as it gets, but it's also the main focus of that game, which has been under development for several years. Given our ambitions in other areas of Thrive we cannot hope to even come close to replicating it, let alone doing so for arbitrary body structures.

Ah yes I though it would be challenging work. How hard would it be to just replicate the system of identifying key pivot points along the spine and limbs and basing the damage system off of that? We would need the computer to be able to recognize dynamically generated skeletal structures.

In theory, it's trivial to identify limbs which branch off the creatures spine, and even to set up some coordinated movement of them. Setting them up as seperate damagable sections is also simple enough. The real problem is attack 'animations', and identifying which bits of the creature should move, and how, in order to harm something. Also, I have no idea how complex we can go and still expect the cpu to keep up (if we can do procedural animation on the gpu, brilliant, but I'm not sure how).

Then I guess the previously accepted complex damage system is our choice.

There is still a problem about how to tell where critical points are located. For example, our neck and spine. a hit there would instakill us, but how can the computer tell?

I guess that if we simulate the nervous system, we can mark joints from the brain to important organs as critical, but that still leaves out some important places.

I think we need to force most creatures to have some sort of spine, as trying to handle arbitrary body strucures which aren't bilaterally symetrical, and based on a tree-like structure, will be very difficult. There will likely be a head, defined by the clustering of sensory organs (eyes, ears, nose etc.), and the neck will simply be the section of spine attaching it to the rest of the body.

D4RK_VOID wrote:

What if I decided to evolve 20 arms and legs?

Then the computer would identify those 20 arms and legs and assign them each their own damage systems. By the way, Seregon's statements that you quoted were saying why we couldn't use the skeletal structure system.

Maybe when you want to enter combat you could enter "Combat Mode" going from third to first person and have a Natural Selection type combat system.

I though we agreed to have a first person view, with an optional "easy" third person view without sensory overlays, so that third to first person view shift doesent make much sense.

Also, what do you mean by Natural Selection combat system? I googled the forums searching about it and your post seems to be the only mention.

Seregon wrote:

I think we need to force most creatures to have some sort of spine, as trying to handle arbitrary body strucures which aren't bilaterally symetrical, and based on a tree-like structure, will be very difficult. There will likely be a head, defined by the clustering of sensory organs (eyes, ears, nose etc.), and the neck will simply be the section of spine attaching it to the rest of the body.

Cephalization will most likely be forced in some way.
As I've said before, we needn't really think about combat very hard- for the most part, animals do not engage in complex fights- they have one or two defenses or attacks and if those fail, they're screwed.

NickTheNick wrote:

Then the computer would identify those 20 arms and legs and assign them each their own damage systems. By the way, Seregon's statements that you quoted were saying why we couldn't use the skeletal structure system.

What I meant was we would have a massive amount of health. If the enemy takes down 6 of your arms who cares? You have 14 more to attack... This would be sort of over powered, considering not all our creations will be humans with 2 legs and arms. So I guess this is the flaw for the Dues system... (Unless there is more to it)
For Seregons quotes I might have made an mistake (since there was a lot of quotes listed there).
I went back through Seregons and I couldn't find anything against skeletal besides attack animations.
I thought adding a spine, brain and important organs (which if damaged would be an instant knock out) a good idea.
Oh and also this:

Seregon wrote:

I think we need to force most creatures to have some sort of spine, as trying to handle arbitrary body strucures which aren't bilaterally symetrical, and based on a tree-like structure, will be very difficult.

Very difficult for tree like structures... Why can you not add a spine or chest bone to a tree like structure? It has to be facing somewhere... Unless you decide to just become a plant and sit there all day. Skeletal can be applied to any species. If you think of it, on Earth I dont think anything that is as big as us to see them with naked eyes has some sort of a spine.
Here is an example from one of my fav games: 'Maokai' (From: League Of Legends Riot Games)

Spoiler:

D4RK_VOID wrote:

What I meant was we would have a massive amount of health. If the enemy takes down 6 of your arms who cares? You have 14 more to attack... This would be sort of over powered, considering not all our creations will be humans with 2 legs and arms. So I guess this is the flaw for the Dues system... (Unless there is more to it)
For Seregons quotes I might have made an mistake (since there was a lot of quotes listed there).
I went back through Seregons and I couldn't find anything against skeletal besides attack animations.

First of all, please keep your posts in the original colour.

Secondly, you have to realize how hard it would be to actually grow 20 arms and legs. Of course there is a reward of each limb being more expendable, but a shot to a vital area such as a head or a chest or wherever it happens to be is still a killer, no matter how many limbs you've grown, hence the pain and damage thresholds. By the way, it is spelled "Deus".

If you read Seregon's first post on the matter, you would see that it reads:

"The combat system in overgrowth is about as good as it gets, but it's also the main focus of that game, which has been under development for several years. Given our ambitions in other areas of Thrive we cannot hope to even come close to replicating it, let alone doing so for arbitrary body structures."

NickTheNick wrote:

D4RK_VOID wrote:

What I meant was we would have a massive amount of health. If the enemy takes down 6 of your arms who cares? You have 14 more to attack... This would be sort of over powered, considering not all our creations will be humans with 2 legs and arms. So I guess this is the flaw for the Dues system... (Unless there is more to it)
For Seregons quotes I might have made an mistake (since there was a lot of quotes listed there).
I went back through Seregons and I couldn't find anything against skeletal besides attack animations.

First of all, please keep your posts in the original colour.

Secondly, you have to realize how hard it would be to actually grow 20 arms and legs. Of course there is a reward of each limb being more expendable, but a shot to a vital area such as a head or a chest or wherever it happens to be is still a killer, no matter how many limbs you've grown, hence the pain and damage thresholds. By the way, it is spelled "Deus".

If you read Seregon's first post on the matter, you would see that it reads:

"The combat system in overgrowth is about as good as it gets, but it's also the main focus of that game, which has been under development for several years. Given our ambitions in other areas of Thrive we cannot hope to even come close to replicating it, let alone doing so for arbitrary body structures."

Hold on. I have been told many times that thrive is never going to be finished. Always new things added. So whats the problem with this? We can at least have it in the game in its later stages. Besides... If microbe is not even close to finishing... We have a lot of time to think about aware stage and perhaps another programer will join us.
Also you didn't have to add: "By the way, it is spelled "Deus". " It was obviously pressed in the wrong order by accident. No need to make it obvious for others to see.

Although you are correct that more complexity can later be added, you are incorrect in assuming that we should be discussing the most complex system possible. We need to strip systems down to the bare working minimum so that there is some chance of them being implemented at some point. We need to be discussing systems which are intuitive, simple, and global. "Combat" shouldn't even really cross our minds. Rarely do you see two animals get into a complex fistfight. Most contact altercations between two animals end quite quickly- the defender either runs away, immediately hurts the attacker enough to discourage it, or itself is hurt and then dies. There will be no long, drawn out fight sequences.

~sciocont wrote:

Although you are correct that more complexity can later be added, you are incorrect in assuming that we should be discussing the most complex system possible. We need to strip systems down to the bare working minimum so that there is some chance of them being implemented at some point. We need to be discussing systems which are intuitive, simple, and global. "Combat" shouldn't even really cross our minds. Rarely do you see two animals get into a complex fistfight. Most contact altercations between two animals end quite quickly- the defender either runs away, immediately hurts the attacker enough to discourage it, or itself is hurt and then dies. There will be no long, drawn out fight sequences.

Hmm, so then why not do the simplest battle theme, and/or pretty much do this with every other stage? Then once completed start planing out the more complicated, more fun, more realistic battle elements? So overall there should rarely be any discussion here, since its going to be something simple that we can complete? (Excluding the core element discussions)