Damage scaling

[Talonos]

Well, it goes hand-in-hand with what I'm working on: Custom state labels in decorate. So you could have a Death.Cow state in an actor and gave a missile a Cow DamageType and make the actor show its cow death when it gets struck by that missile.

So, I figure that if we are able to make our own damage types, it would make sense to be able to define how much they damage enemies.

For example, a flamethrower could work wonders against a zombieman, but flamethrower vs. Afrit wouldn't be very useful. A freeze-gun would be, though.

How about a new property, Damagescale.<Damagetype> <percent scale>

So, for Afrit:

Damagescale.fire 0.1
Damagescale.freeze 1.5

Makes him almost immune to fire, takes another half again damage from freeze weapons.

This could also be useful if you include a normal type. For example:

Damagescale.normal 0.0
Damagescale.fire 0.0
Damagescale.freeze 0.0
Damagescale.cow 3.0

Would make a monster that is immune to everything (Including weapons that have no damage type, such as the pistol) except for cows. The player can find a room full of enemies and they can laugh at him and run him off until he finds the cow cannon, which will allow him to get past them. I mean, stupid example, but it illustrates my point.

Randy? How hard would this be to put in? Any chance it can make the next version, or the version after that?

[Cutmanmike]

I still can't get over cow damage...

[Graf Zahl]

Sounds good. But there should also be a DamageScale default setting that gets used for all damage types that don't use a specific setting. In other words: Any sub-damage type inherits the value from its parent type and the default is the parent for everything.


How hard is it to put in? The biggest part is storing the scaling values. The code for states is type specific and has to be rewritten to accept floats instead of state pointers. Aside from that: one multiplication and one zero check should be enough.

[Cutmanmike]

Sounds like a good deal to me. However, it would be even nicer if we could change the player's damage scales etc too using ACS or decorate. Ice (or cow if you like) armor etc would be possible then.

[David Ferstat]

I still can't get over cow damage...

Haven't you ever heard of the bullista?

[Phobus]

I'm thinking along the lines of FF:X, whereby the fire weapons/attacks actually heal the fire enemies (-Damage?) as an extra when you say all of this.