FO2 Mechanics Overhaul Mod

First, a couple of last energy weapons vids. I adjusted the projectiles so they're invisible when too close to the attacker firing them only after making these vids, so the gatling laser one looks a bit silly.


For pulse weapons, I thought it would be amusing to have an trailing effect: once the projectile reaches its destination (which as you'll see can just be an empty hex), it "chooses" a target from a cone that's constructed behind it. This means you can, with some effort, get to targets behind walls. I'll need to put together something that lets you see the exact hexes an attack can reach for this type of weapon (and burst and explosives obvs):





For plasma weapons, I thought it could be interesting to have splash damage translated as a "puddle" that does damage the next (couple of) round(s) to those standing on it. A possible alt-fire would create a larger puddle, and would be hex-based rather than target-based:





I felt the gatling laser should be mechanically similar to other laser weapons (including rudimentary wall ricochets); looks a bit iffy but eh:





All in all I'm pretty satisfied with the variety in energy weapons now (I've also put in the Spasm Gun from FOT, which'll mostly be about status effects and becomes more effective based on the target's perception and intelligence).


I've also decided to take another look at my to hit formula, which is hopelessly convoluted and would be very hard to integrate with all the new combat features made possible anyway.


Let's restate the main problem with the vanilla to hit formula: it's a system that (when you're being generous) only really worked as intended for a very short period in the early mid-game, when there's an actual decision to be made whether or not to try a high risk called shot or a low-risk uncalled one. For the vast majority of the game, there's no meaningful choice to be made and you transition fairly quickly from no-brain uncalled to no-brain eye-crits (or, for fast shot, there isn't even any type of transition).


The reason for this is of course that as you get better at hitting the enemy, the enemy doesn't get (much) better at dodging those attacks. The devs tried half-heartedly to balance this by implementing D&D-type silliness of better armor making you harder to hit, but this doesn't accomplish much in practice.


Now, given that in my mod, heavy armor makes you easier to hit in most cases, this to hit chance issue would become even more glaring, if not for the following steps that solve everything in my head:


- AP's spent to aim. You get a very large to hit penalty for trying to attack at the minimum AP cost.
- Movement and attack AP's are separated. You can "simultaneously" attack and move, but at a significant to hit penalty for each hex moved.
- Missing one bodypart can result in hitting an adjacent one (especially extremely hard to hit "embedded" bodyparts will often result in hitting, e.g., the head instead).


So now when you have:


- A very good shot: you can spend the bare minimum of AP's and move around while attacking (which, unlike heavier armor, does make you harder to hit), or spend time "concentrating" (the equivalent of the unused AP defense bonus in the vanilla game, except it now doesn't cost AP's, just a to hit penalty). Or you can spend a lot of AP's to aim for the eyes and have an almost certain chance of hitting them.
- A very bad shot: you need to spend a significant amount of AP's to get a good to hit chance, and need to spend the maximum to have a chance of hitting a hard to hit bodypart (and even then probably hitting an adjacent one).


The big advantage of the way it works in my creative mind is that this makes combat decisions such as whether or not to go for the eyes prevalent throughout the game.


I would also like burst (and perhaps explosions) to work roughly the same mechanically as single shots in this regard. In vanilla bursts worked in a weird way THC-wise, with 1/8th of the bullets having their THC calculated "normally" for the intended target, and the rest working with an odd knockout system where a single miss would result in every subsequent bullet in the list missing as well.


I would like every single bullet in the burst to work according to the same rules as for a single shot, which produces a conceptual problem, namely that every burst bullet is treated as an "intended" attack, rather than simply the result of spray, and why would Ian intentionally burst your back?


I'm still not sure how to deal with this, but the general idea I have is that you no longer aim your burst at one enemy, but at everyone within a certain area whose size you can change. Thus, Ian will still probably burst you to bits when you're standing right in front of him, but this will be unintended and the result of bursting many rounds steadily reducing his aim (and thus not mechanically different from him hitting you in the back when trying a difficult single shot at an enemy behind you).


Any thoughts (also on the energy weapons)?

 

Too bad there's no net projectile... Tho with some type of spear gun, you could have two spear projetiles running along the side of the cone, sweeping up everything in between, which would carry the suggestion of a net, this way you could even stick people to walls.... hmmm, should look into it.

Apparently FOT has a speargun, which I don't think looks terribly good, but whatever: http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Spear_gun

 

More youtube vidz coming up to please my many fans.


First up is some intense grenade stuff. I remember reading somewhere that grenades in FO have wall bounces; well they don't (if you "miss" a critter standing right in front of a wall, the explosion just clips into the wall without hitting anything, which looks stupid). Now they bounce merrily. To help understand which hex you're aiming at, you can give yourself a preview of the path, as you'll see (I'm using some placeholder blood object for it, have to put some rudimentary art together for it, which I really don't feel like doing):





Next is molotovs, which really should work in a different way mechanically from grenades, so no shockwaves sending people flying. Sadly there's no real fire effects in FO, but I tried making a wavey cone that sort of behaves in that way (so when you throw the molotov against a wall, the flammable liquid "bounces" back):





Finally just another demo of the aiming aid, only now with a burst cone (the "flickering" is because all the blood objects have to be destroyed and rebuilt every time the cursor changes place):

 

Does this destructible enviroment effect look somewhat serviceable?





With the extreme inflexibility of Fallout's map construction it's never going to look great and/or be widely applicable (e.g. I can't really do anything about roofs and tiles), but I'm so in love with the idea of a super mutant smashing the chosen one through a wall with his power fist that I felt it might be a fun addition. Plus with the AI hiding behind cover it'd be nice to be able to destroy said cover of course.


Anyway, I should leave all this fun effect stuff for what it is for now. So here's a rant on the aiming system I want to put in place:

Spoiler

A word on where I'm at with the THC formula in my head. And it's a doosey let me tell you. A real doosey.


I'm thinking of going all-in on simulated bullet-paths, which I'm convinced is the only way to bring both targets and non-targets under one and the same mechanical umbrella. I wouldn't do this out of simulationist concerns (as you'll see in a bit), but because I want there to be a relatively transparent system that ties everything together and which the player can adapt to easily. Not separate rules for bursts, single bullets and explosions that we have to trust to make sense, but ordnung.


Again, why is this important outside of my systemic fetish nobody cares about? Because otherwise you get what Fallout does, namely that as you become better at hitting an intended target in, e.g., a burst, you also become inexplicably more likely to hit an unintended target (say, a team mate). That's why I think there needs to be one unifying THC mechanic that accomodates all possible subjects, so that it all works more or less intuitively and the player can try and use it to his advantage consistently.


The idea would be that every time any projectile, and that means anything that could potentially damage a critter - whether it's a bullet or an explosion's shockwave - enters a critter's hex, there's a certainty that it hits. This is because the THC system would become entirely hex-based: if you hit a hex, you automatically hit everything on it as well. This THC isn't modified by anything: if a projectile and a critter are on the same hex, there's a collision.


So, for a critter to avoid getting hit, one of two things has to happen:


1. The projectile doesn't reach the critter's tile. This means the the projectile either has to have taken the wrong path, or have overshot or buried into the ground. Every projectile, even if overshot, buries into the ground eventually when it reaches the limit of its range. In what is the least intuitive part of this formula, overshooting becomes an important tool: if you want to hit a target standing behind a teammate, you don't want your projectile to pass through your teammate's hex to get there, so you need to "lob" the bullet over his head into the enemy.


Thus, the act of aiming completely changes: instead of shooting at a target, you shoot at a hex and everything on it. You then decide whether you want your projectile to neatly follow the path to its target, thus hitting anything on its way (best used for projectiles that pass through obstacles, like lasers), or whether you want to hit that enemy and that enemy alone, which involves a harder shot the more hexes you want to "skip".


Called shots are still a part of aiming, and involve a higher chance of hitting the targetted body part, but also of missing the targetted hex: shooting for the legs involves a higher chance of shooting into the ground (i.e. the hex in front of the target), for the arms it's one of the hexes next to the target, and for the head it's the hex behind the target (i.e. a higher chance of overshooting it).


2. The critter's not in the tile when the projectile gets there. Whenever a projectile does come into contact with the hex a critter is standing on, that critter will make an attempt to "escape" to the safest adjacent unoccupied tile temporarily (and play the dodge animation on a success). Of course, temporarily occupying this (relatively) safe tale could also result in the critter being damaged: standing close to the center of an explosion means that every adjacent tile will get hit with a shockwave, so there's simply no way of escaping it. The same goes for a burst that fires bullets into every adjacent hex: the best the critter can do is dodge towards the hex with the least amount of rounds present.


This seems to me to be something of a unified field theory of THC: everything is treated on the same mechanical basis, whether it's a bullet, a shockwave, a rocket or even a punch. There's also no longer the problem of differentiating between targets and non-targets, and attacking hexes or the objects standing on them.

 

Try checking the bandicam thing advertised at the top of my videos .

I removed the link to my current version because it was buggy as hell and I'm redoing pretty much everything anyway.

Yeah, it's horrible and I'm changing it to be a bit like the new molotov grenade effect (but with the plasma explosion effect).

I've changed a significant amount of my thinking on this subject already, see my next post.

 

I think I've finally, finally thought of something to do with books. It might seem like something that's super minor, but I hate the way books work in FO with a passion because it basically renders a lot of character building choices moot from the get go. Here I am trying my best to make skills like first aid and outdoorsman more interesting, and nobody'll ever build a character around them because they can just use books instead, the inconsiderate future motherfuckers. So, what these books'd do now is function the other way around: you need to have a certain amount of a relevant skill to be able to read them to begin with, at which point they give something that's essentially a mini-perk. The book effects listed below always occur on a consistent rotation basis so that, e.g., to read your first Dean's Robotics, you need 40% Repair and get an extra ST for all robot companions, the second one you need 80% and get an extra PE point for them, and so on. It's maybe even more gamey than the original, but whatevz:





Another thing is the combat skills. I've always disliked compartmentalizing a crpg's weapons along a handful of different skills, because it irrevocably leads to arbitrary separations that piss the player off (I'm an ace with my 10mm pistol but can't hit a brahmin 1 foot away with a laser pistol, etc.) and rarely leads to any interesting gameplay choices other than forcing the player to sell certain weapons. The idea I have is to change the 6 combat skills to these:


- One-handed HtH (includes punching for unarmed)
- Two-handed HtH (includes grappling for unarmed)
- One-handed ranged
- Two-handed ranged
- Passive combat (attacking without moving at the same time)
- Active combat (attacking while moving)


While this might seem to still compartmentalize to a significant degree, I want to reintroduce a mechanic I had in an early version of my mod, namely the ability to switch from a two-handed to one-handed grip for each weapon, so that if you're strong enough, you can wield any weapon one handed. Because you'll never get the required strength to do something like single handedly wield a minigun, I want to make one-handed weapons more interesting by letting you "dual wield" to an extent (hey, check the loading screens for FO2 if you don't think it fits the setting ), as in that like with movement, the action points for firing weapons carried in your different hand slots is also separated (though of course like with movement also with a significant THC penalty).


Passive combat would give a steadily increasing THC bonus for every turn spent attacking without moving (this includes rotating to shift your aim), while active combat would decrease the penalty for attacking while moving.


Let me know how utterly misguided I am in all of this.

 

I think I've finally settled on the replacements for the combat skills. No more weapon-type restricted skills, tho as will become clear I haven't gone all out in this. The new skills apply to all possible attack types:

Control (ST): Decreases the THC penalty for making consecutive attacks within one turn, and in the case of burst attacks, subsequent rounds fired.
Maneuvering (AG): increases your dodge bonus from hexes moved, and decreases the THC penalty for attacking while moving.
Marksmanship (PE): determines how accurate an attack is. While most important for long range attacks, even punches can benefit from a certain amount of pinpoint precision.
Concentration (PE): Determines the dodge bonus you receive from unused AP's, and the THC bonus from attacking without moving (which includes rotating to adjust your aim) for consecutive turns.
Finesse (LU): Influences the result of a damage roll, and the frequency of status effects (e.g. knockouts) and armor piercing.

You'll now also have several other skills to use during combat:

Leadership(CH): Decreases the amount of upkeep needed to maintain team mate morale, ensuring they don't sit out tough fights hiding in cover, or lose heart after a bullet grazes precariously past their private (tuluse so I was thinking of making near miss barks affect morale, rather than thc or AP).
Stealth(AG): If a combatant can't see who he's aiming at, he can't hit him (in fact, they won't even be drawn on the map, like in the fog of war effect of the HD mod, though I might only have it apply in combat mode by default), so spending additional AP's to enter sneak mode even in the midst of battle could be useful.
Traps/Explosives(PE): While you'll of course usually want to set traps before combat begins, you could, if unseen by the enemy (say, because you're sneaking), place traps during as well. Also affects the likelihood of timed grenades going off when intended (and shortfused ones not going off in your hands of course).
First Aid(PE): As long as you have enough "permanent" health left, you can use the First Aid skill during combat to heal HP's and even crippling effects during combat.

Nearly all other skills will have an indirect effect on combat, such as Science(IN) and Repair(IN) reducing the upkeep costs for equipment to avoid most kinds of critical failures, etc.

Now, I hear you ask, "Jim, dear friend, isn't Finesse precariously much like a damage stat, and Marksmanship an accuracy stat?"

No, no, no dear friend, I'd say. First, due to the way it works Finesse only yields good results for attacks with wide damage ranges. In practice, this means using precision weaponry (e.g. laser weapons) in a precise way (e.g. hitting a hard to hit bodypart such as the eyes only increases the max damage of an attack, widening the range). If you were to use a very unfinessed attack, such as a sledgehammer to the torso, which could have a minimal damage range of, say, 30-32, then the difference between min and maxed out Finesse would at most be 2 damage. Second, due to the way the new simulated bullet paths work, each attack takes the shape of a cone: because this cone is of course narrowest right in front of the attacker, even an extremely poor marksman can hit a fully static target right in front of him most of the time. So, high marksmanship will be mostly useful for snipers trying to hit far away targets (or melee characters who want to reliably hit hard to hit bodyparts on (static) targets).

Next, I hear you ask "but won't these types of combat skills make Skills overshadow Attributes completely?"

For two reasons, I'd say no: (1) Attributes will have a far greater effect on the starting value of skills associated with them, and, more importantly (2), each attribute has an effect closely associated to each combat skill related to it:

PE: While you could max out Marksmanship to shoot the testicles off a mosquito at 40 yards, you still need PE to be able to see that mosquito so you can attack him to begin with.
LU: Luck affects the frequency of critical failures, and the delicate precision attacks best suited for Finesse are those that can critically fail most often (relatively little can go wrong while hitting someone on the chest with a club).
ST: while you could max out Control to limit the penalties of recoil, you'll still need the high carry weight that comes with ST (which only applies to equipped items now) to be able to wield heavy weapons which most suffer from recoil (e.g. the heavy Bozar sniper gun, or the minigun) effectively. In the case of melee it additionally affects the damage output for (mainly blunt) attacks.
AG: While you could max out maneuvering to get the most out of each hex moved, you still need AG to give you the most hexes to move.

Finally, I hear you murmur "Hmm, this whole every stat potentially useful thing does strike me as being awefully Sawyerist."

While I agree with his detractors that the outcome of Sawyerist balance seems too homogeneously bland, I find nothing wrong with the theory of every stat being potentially useful to every build. I believe that the key to making such a move not ending up bland is by still making each stat significantly tailored to a specific combat situation. For example, while I severely dislike the idea of a uniform damage stat, such as Might in PoE, because it seems to homogenize every type of attack, regardless of the situation, I do like the Finesse idea because it only results in the best outcome if the player uses precision attacks, meaning the player still has to try and play according to the strengths of his character.

So what I hope to achieve is some kind of compromise between the old weapon-type skills and weapon-independent skills. Yes, Marksmanship is better suited to sniper rifles, Finesse to laser weapons, Control to burst weapons, etc. But what I want to achieve is that unlike with the old combat stats of FO (and those of other crpg's with weapon-type based combat stats) you don't get pigeonholed into using a specific type of weapon, which doesn't result in any interesting tactical decisions whatsoever in my opinion. The player couldn't use these stats to support his preferred playstyle, but just his preferred weapon choice, which I think is far less interesting. So what I want is that the player still has the option throughout the game to use a weapon that doesn't perhaps fully supports his build effectively. E.g. a Control build can use non-burst weapons, but should still try and attack as often as possible in a turn, a Marksman can still use a short-range weapon, he just needs to play to the strength of his precision to hit a specific bodypart, etc.

Hopefully these new skills will allow for a wide variety of builds such as a Control+ Maneuvering run and gunner, a Concentration+ Marksmanship long range sniper, a Finesse+ Marksmanship limbs crippler, a Control+Concentration static heavy gunner, a Finesse+ Maneuvering run and slicer etc.

 

Here's a little LoS experiment I've been trying out that I'd like some feedback on. Critters only being drawn on the map if they're in the player's LoS is something that has been introduced as part of the HD mod's fog of war feature a while ago, but when I tested it out it worked... weirdly. It seems to work independently from the game's obj_can_see logic, and just plain looks jittery.


So, first thing I did was put together a LoS system that I was happy with: the player can see everything he can potentially shoot in front of him in a 180 degree angle. Everything behind him he can't see because of the problem of not having eyes in the back of his head. Now, because this would lead to an extremely jarring system of critters popping in and out of view and an utterly disoriented player incapable of understanding what's happening behind him, I thought it might be interesting to introduce hearing in some way. The idea I had is that whenever somebody isn't in your line of sight, but you can hear him (say, around a corner), then a "ghost" of that critters appears on the place where you think he is. If the player can't hear him (say, because he's sneaking or walking on a non-noisey surface), then the ghost stays in the place where the player last heard or saw him.


In the video below I put this in practice as the player not actively listening while moving around (which is why all the "ghosts" stop at that moment). The ghosts skipping around does look quite silly:





One thing I like about this system is how it could combine with the new hex shooting: you think an enemy is standing just around the corner and that rolling a grenade there will send him sky-high, but maybe you simply didn't hear him move away from there.

 

Dude, this fucking thread isn't called "How do I record Fallout 2?" I didn't know the answer to your question and didn't feel like going into a long off topic talk on the subject.

Also, my mom always said I was like super important, so are you calling my mom a liar?

 

Because I was still a bit vague on the subject of the new combat stats (mostly because I wasn't entirely sure how they'd work), here's a bit more now that I feel I've figured out how to reinvent the wheel (warning, advanced ms paint art ahead):

Spoiler

- Marksmanship: this is essentially all of the old combat skills wrapped into one: with a large amount of marksmanship you'll be able to hit pretty much any static target at whichever distance, though you don't even need any marksmanship to reliably hit a static target standing right next to you. The reason for this is that if you don't move while aiming, and your target doesn't move while aiming, and it's your first attack in the turn, then you'll always attack in the direction you're aiming at.




Thus an extremely poorly aimed attack follows a broad (width the same size as its length) three-dimensional cone. This makes the target just 10 hexes away shown here already extremely hard to hit (as the attack won't just follow any of the shown paths, but could also hit the ground or fly off into the sky). For the target right in front of the attacker, however, the chance is even relatively good of a hit, given that this is the point where the cone is at its narrowest:



Even a horribly aimed attack will hit anywhere in the grey area.


The higher your marksmanship, which you can also increase through additional AP's spent aiming, the more exact your aim, which in theory could increase infinitely (though in practice you'll just need 200 to reliably hit an exact bodypart from 50 hexes).


- Control: So, why would you need any other skills if marksmanship is my main THC decider? Well, for one, you could try to attack more than once during a turn, or fire multiple rounds in one attack using a burst. Because all attacks, including melee ones, have "recoil", these subsequent attacks are made at an increasing marksmanship penalty. The control skill is used to diminish this penalty, down to 0 at the maximum of 200% skill.


- Concentration: Another issue is that, while your aim might be pixel perfect, it can be the case that the target isn't where that pixel is anymore, because he's moved. Suppose I have a perfect shot straight in the center of a target that has moved one hex to the side that turn; my ostensibly perfect shot could land anywhere along the path the target has travelled, already at such a small amount of movement greatly dimishing the chance to hit:




The pinpoint attack could, if poorly "concentrated", hit any of the black squares shown, as this is the path the target travels.


Even if the target hasn't moved during that turn, there's a possibility he'll try and evade my attack at the last moment, in which case I'll have to adjust to hit him. In both of these cases, whether it's the target having moved hexes, or him trying to evade at the last moment, a roll is made of the attacker's concentration against the defender's maneuvering skill. Both attacker and defender can improve their chances by the former spending additional AP's to aim (which doesn't just increase marksmanship, but concentration as well) and the latter leaving AP's unspent during his turn. The better the outcome of the roll for the attacker, the closer his attack is to the final destination of the defender.


- Maneuvering: The attacker may also wish to move while aiming, two actions which are no longer separated. If he does so, then he incurs another marksmanship (and concentration) penalty for each hex moved, or each distance rotated. Maxed out Maneuvering reduces this penalty to 0.


- Finesse: this skill is the only one that doesn't affect the THC-formula, just how high the damage roll will end up.

tl;dr: if you're a melee character and you're approaching a ranged opponent, don't run straight for him and give him an easy shot, but approach him in a beeline.

 

So, I've been thinking, right.


First I was thinking about Attacks of Opportunity, what with the whole peek around the corner exploit becoming only more frustrating once the AI is (hopefully) smart enough to exploit it. First I thought using them in the limited way that (I think) most systems do: you save up AP's to "interrupt" an enemy that enters a certain area/LoS. The fear I have with that is that on the one hand it rewards passivity: the complaint (tho I'm not entirely sure if founded) about optimal JA2 play consisting of lying down in front of a door and interrupting the fuck out of anyone getting near, which'd not be much better than the exploit it's meant to fix.


The "solution" to such passivity would seem to apply the principle of AoO's more rigorously: why couldn't the attacker being interrupted interrupt back, etc. This seems to me would seem to lead to a clusterfuck of interruptions that undermines what makes turn-based so elegant in the first place: the total asynchronicity means that I'm sure that what I plan for that turn is executed to the letter, with only the occasional RNG complicating matters.


This in turn led me thinking that maybe, just maybe, turn based isn't exactly the best fit for what (I think) Fallout represents. Turn based is the idealized armchair general's version of combat. I could improve on Fallout's turn based system, but such an improvement will simply involve making the game more tactical, and almost inevitably more static, less chaotic and less risky. I mean, I can add more decisions during combat, but all of these are more or less risk-free: you can decide to spend more AP's aiming, but taking additional time to aim will never leave you doubting whether the enemy will strike first. You can pick up an unexploded grenade thrown at you and throw it back, but you know it'll never blow up in your hands. At least, not within your turn: within this turn everything happens "perfectly".


In this sense I agree to a degree with the people who defended Fallout's combat against the Grunkerites that Fallout possesses a "lethality" that you would lose by making the combat "better", i.e. more tactical. It's just that I think Fallout implemented such lethality in the most banal way possible, namely through wild damage ranges that could result in a sudden crit blowing even the toughest critter away. Instead, this lethality should come through unpredictable AI, less foreknowledge by the player about the success of his actions, and a wide range of possible combat actions and events.


So, in short, I'd like to try out implementing phase based combat (you and the AI first execute a dry run of all your actions, which are then executed for everyone simultaneously, with Sequence indicating the time between planning phases). Will probably fail spectacularly/pathetically!