Vehicle disabling

[Erendil]

Originally Posted by Malorn

What you describe could be achieved with a single health bar. Its just bigger and at a certain point the vehicle becomes disabled and starts on fire. When that happens depends on how big the 'disabled' health bar is vs the normal health bar. Just stitch them together.

You seem to dislike having a false sense of health where you see a health bar and it's not really the health you have because some of it will mean you are disabled.

That seems reasonable to me to show players exactly how much health before their vehicle will be useless rather than hiding it inside a health bar.

But on the other side of things, its also important to show hostile players exactly how much health is required to blow something up. I assume there will be an advanced targeting implant or something similar that shows health of targets. The opposite is true for blowing something up as being in i - you don't care about disable, you just want to know how close something is to being dead and having two health bars is deciving as to what it might really take to destroy the tank.

I don't think a two-colored health bar would be deceiving. You could have green on one side, red on the other. While in the green you still had control of the vehicle. Once in the red you'd lose control and the vehicle would start to slowly take burn damage, and at 0 it'd explode. Seems pretty straight forward.

EDIT: doh semi-ninja'd by Xyn. Xyn, I'd much rahter have one single two-color bar than have a second one appear once the vehicle got disabled. I think it'd throw ppl off a bit too.

Originally Posted by IronMole

Planetside used to have vehicle disabling on aircraft (lost control at certain damage) until they changed it to the bailing mechanism.

Before late 2005 ground vehicles used to get disabled too once you reached <10% armour. You'd suddenly lose all control of the vehicles movement and you'd slowly roll to a stop. I think you still had control of your weapons/turrets though.

And it sucked for exactly the reason Malorn mentioned. It was hard to tell on the armour bar at what exact point you'd lose control, so often you'd think you still had a little "life" left when suddenly one stray bullet would cause you to lose control. It felt like the game was almost taunting you since if you had just a tiny bit more health you could've escaped. But once you lost control you were as good as dead since in PS1 a stationary vehicle is a dead vehicle. Losing control just prolonged the agony, largely due to the uncertainly of being able to tell at what point you'd actually get disabled.

[EVILPIG]

I'm all for the ability to damage components that will affect a vehicles performance. I don't want this if it will affect game performance due to excessive hitboxes. I think a happy medium is for random systems to be affected when a vehicle gets under a certain threshold. 25% seems more appropriate to me.

[ArcIyte]

Originally Posted by EVILPIG

I'm all for the ability to damage components that will affect a vehicles performance. I don't want this if it will affect game performance due to excessive hitboxes. I think a happy medium is for random systems to be affected when a vehicle gets under a certain threshold. 25% seems more appropriate to me.

I 1-shot ammo racked an IS-3 in my Pershing last night

I'm pretty sure it would just be irritating in PS2. I would support hitboxes for knocking out the treads, but that's about it.

[Tamas]

NO.

It's a bad concept to begin with. The only acceptable thing is that when left with <10% HP it may start to "burn" - aka slowly looses it's remaining HP. Even damaging tracks/engine/turret is a far better idea (temporarily disabling or reducing effectiveness).

The way BF3 works is stupid to say the least and I played since BF 1942 (first game). Auto regen if above 50%, if below - disabled and slowly burning - want to fix it? Fix it to 100%.....

If what 10-15% is the mark where disabling should occur and the fix should be at ~20 %.

[MrBloodworth]

Look, if you want to play BF3, go play BF 3. Around here, we use jammers, and have unique game play. At least we did.

[Zulthus]

Oh god no... that was one of the worse mechanics in BF3... one shot in the wrong place from a missile and your tank was basically useless. The good ol' damage meter is fine IMO.

[Blackwolf]

PS1 had disabling in it didn't it? I believe once a vehicle dropped below 10% health it moved at a crippled speed, smoke poured from it, break lights would blink sporadically, and various other things would occur. I'm not sure if they took it out completely or not though. I just remember that it was at one point in the game.

Personally I loved it. It was a badge of honor driving a Magrider that looked more bullet hole then armor.

I voted no, but if it was 10% then it would make more sense then. 50% is stupidly lame though.

[Xyntech]

Originally Posted by Zulthus

Oh god no... that was one of the worse mechanics in BF3... one shot in the wrong place from a missile and your tank was basically useless. The good ol' damage meter is fine IMO.

Well there will be locational damage on tanks in PS2, so one well placed shot in the wrong place will still fuck you up pretty bad. Hopefully that one shot will never ever be enough to kill a tank though, that is just wrong.

In any case, disabling or no, a vehicles health should be balanced as to the time that the vehicle is fully operational, and I believe that all tanks should be able to survive at least two shots no matter where they are hit or by what, many more than two shots in most cases.

Disabling like BF3, no. Some form of disabling that has more to do with an alternative to instantly blowing up when your base hp is extremely low or runs out, fine by me. Damaging systems beneath your locational armor seems like the most interesting of these ideas to me considering we already will have locational damage.

At least the community seems to be pretty universal on the fact that we don't want anything like BF3. The devs seem pretty responsive to overwhelming outcry of that sort, so at least I think it's safe to say that we won't have tanks becoming any kind of disabled at 50% health, or if we do get that, we can damn sure get them to change it with prolonged outcry.

[Blackwolf]

Originally Posted by Xyntech

Well there will be locational damage on tanks in PS2, so one well placed shot in the wrong place will still fuck you up pretty bad. Hopefully that one shot will never ever be enough to kill a tank though, that is just wrong.

In any case, disabling or no, a vehicles health should be balanced as to the time that the vehicle is fully operational, and I believe that all tanks should be able to survive at least two shots no matter where they are hit or by what, many more than two shots in most cases.

Disabling like BF3, no. Some form of disabling that has more to do with an alternative to instantly blowing up when your base hp is extremely low or runs out, fine by me. Damaging systems beneath your locational armor seems like the most interesting of these ideas to me considering we already will have locational damage.

At least the community seems to be pretty universal on the fact that we don't want anything like BF3. The devs seem pretty responsive to overwhelming outcry of that sort, so at least I think it's safe to say that we won't have tanks becoming any kind of disabled at 50% health, or if we do get that, we can damn sure get them to change it with prolonged outcry.

Would be cool if damage done to the tank depended on it's source.

Never made sense to me that small arms fire could eventually destroy a tank, even with AP bullets. And to actually cause it to explode?

I think that location as well as munitions used should factor in. In order for a bullet to cause a tank to explode, it would have to manage to punch through very weakened armor right where the ammo is stored. In order for this to kill the crew, the tank would have to be poorly designed (probably TR, I doubt the TR would care if their immortal soldiers died with their tanks, favoring cheaper tank designs over crew safety).

[sylphaen]

Make it optional ?


I voted no. Of course, I would not be against it if the mechanic they add to the game improves gameplay and fun.

[NewSith]

I want disabling to be tied to locational damage, bfr-style.

[Brusi]

Originally Posted by NewSith

I want disabling to be tied to locational damage, bfr-style.

+1! I voted for other, as i think you should be able to disable movement with a few well placed rockets to the tracks.

Not sure about disabling air vehicles, unless it automatically happens when they are really low health.

[RodenyC]

Keep like PS1.Throw a jammer at a Vanguard disable there weapon system.Allow them to move and all but no firing.

[Xyntech]

Originally Posted by RodenyC

Keep like PS1.Throw a jammer at a Vanguard disable there weapon system.Allow them to move and all but no firing.

I'm all for that, but that's not really the topic at hand. This is about whether a tank loses some functionality and/or loses all functionality once they have been damaged a certain amount.

There is no reason you couldn't have a PS1 system where jammers disabled weapons but allowed the vehicle to drive away, while additionally having vehicles stop being able to drive once they took a certain amount of damage.

If they do have disabling, I just hope that it is clearly marked in some way (differen't colored part of the health bar, etc), and that it is only when the vehicle has lost the vast majority of it's health already.

[Bittermen]

Shouldn't this be in the idea vault?