White Legs taking .50 BMG rounds to the face...

[Hassknecht]

Simulating ballistics would be overkill.
Most games do simulate a correct trajectory with bullet drop and so on, but the damage done by it is calculated by hitboxes and hitpoinst.
It's the most reliable system and it works.
There are some nice realism mods for the STALKER games. They make headshots deadly if you don't wear proper armour. It makes enemies easy to kill, but they can also kill you with ease, so it balances out ingame.
However, that wouldn't work in New Vegas, as it would need a proper movement and control suitable for fast paced shooters, and the engine just can't deliver that.
Also, it would mean a dependence on the players skill, which in turn would mean that people who are bad a shooters couldn't roleplay as a trigger-happy psychopath.

 

[requiem_for_a_starfury]

But on those games your character is already defined for you, in FO you define your character.

No in those games your character is defined by the player's skill. Just like in FNV outside of vats.

That's why the guns efficiency is attached to your skill, not to the guns or his proprieties itself.

Which doesn't work in first/third person or with real time combat.

Don't most games still use a sort of hit box system, and not simulate bullets flying through the air, and tearing holes into a chunks of meat and bone?

What they don't do is use a level/hitpoint system that allows characters to shrug off a .50 sniper round to the face. Playing New Vegas is like playing an early fps not a modern RPG.

Never mind that you'd also essentially have people (yourself included) dying after one or two bullets without immediate medical treatment.

What's wrong with that?

Then have all that running at the same time as the rest of the world, which is also handling the effects of everyone running around and breathing, bleeding, having their hearts pumping blood, and all the other shit that is happening at the same time?

Works well enough in Stalker Call of Pripyat and Just Cause 2.

Simulating ballistics would be overkill.
Most games do simulate a correct trajectory with bullet drop and so on, but the damage done by it is calculated by hitboxes and hitpoinst.
It's the most reliable system and it works.

No the damage is calculated by hitboxes and healthpoints, there's a big difference. Also the health of a hitbox is small usually the equivalent of the damage done by one large caliber round and when destroyed the character is dead.

There are some nice realism mods for the STALKER games. They make headshots deadly if you don't wear proper armour. It makes enemies easy to kill, but they can also kill you with ease, so it balances out ingame.

Headshots are deadly in the vanilla games anyway.

However, that wouldn't work in New Vegas, as it would need a proper movement and control suitable for fast paced shooters, and the engine just can't deliver that.

Who said anything about using gamebryo? Or to put it another way if the engine couldn't handle playing like a modern shooter, why make it look like a shooter or use that engine?

Also, it would mean a dependence on the players skill, which in turn would mean that people who are bad a shooters couldn't roleplay as a trigger-happy psychopath.

Which also means people who are good at shooters get to totally work the system. In Deus Ex I reduced my rifles and pistols skills to untrained and put all my points into environmental, swimming and lock picking and still played a sniper, in New Vegas my second character was a no vats good natured fast shooting sniper with strength 9, perception 1, endurance 9, charisma 1, intelligence 10, agility 3 (with intensive training and implant) and luck 9. The only skill points I put into guns and energy weapons were from books, I got bored with that character by the time I reached Vegas, it was too powerful.

If you want roleplaying where player skill doesn't matter you don't have real time combat. None of which takes away from the fact that computers can handle far more calculations far faster that most humans and don't need to be tied to dice rolls and simple formulas designed to be easy to calculate without a computer. Unless the developer is trying to simulate the experience of pen and paper gaming.

 

[Wintermind]

Maybe the developer simply wants to keep the option for PnP gaming open to players, and not massively remove the game from people's ability to use it as a basis for some PnP fun.

I'm also pretty sure that Just Cause 2 doesn't bother to determine all the wonderful internal workings of the body, and just makes a bunch of hitboxes working around. Thank you for ignoring the main point of my post.

I'll say this again; if you want to have any pretensions to realism, don't throw out shit about caliber X hitting body Y and Zed happening. Especially the goddamned mythological 'fifty cal'. In a more realisitc video game, you'd have to mount, brace, etc, lay down, and take a careful shot. And you wouldn't bother hauling around that heavy ass rifle and it's heavy ass ammunition unless you were planning on shooting in excess of a thousand yards, and typically shooting through something else and/or shooting a car.

Why not also complain about how there is no bullet penetration or ricochets in the game?

Oh and there really isn't any established science of what happens when bullets hit people; and there won't be until we get our next fascist, genocidal dictator with a penchant for SCIENCE!

 

[Hassknecht]

Of course there is a lot of science about bullet penetration.
Requiem, what is the difference between hitpoints and healthpoints?
Or what did you mean?
All I said was that STALKER calculates bullet trajectories to simulate bullet drop and ricochets and so on. That has nothing to do with how the damage done is being calculated. The bullet flies and when it hits a hitbox, it checks the damage and penetration ratings of the weapon the bullet was fired from (and probably loads of other stuff, too) and BAM, damage done.

 

[requiem_for_a_starfury]

Maybe the developer simply wants to keep the option for PnP gaming open to players, and not massively remove the game from people's ability to use it as a basis for some PnP fun.

There's only two reasons that Fallout 3 shoehorned in the old mechanics the developers were trying to win over the old fans and that there's a general consensus amongst many role players (casual and hardcore alike) that rpg = stats.

I'm also pretty sure that Just Cause 2 doesn't bother to determine all the wonderful internal workings of the body, and just makes a bunch of hitboxes working around. Thank you for ignoring the main point of my post.

That was the main point of you post? Who else said anything about modelling bodily functions?

I'll say this again; if you want to have any pretensions to realism, don't throw out shit about caliber X hitting body Y and Zed happening.

No one, well definitely not me, is talking about making an ultra realistic shooter sim. I am talking about a game that has consistency and updates the genre.

When FO3 was in development the developers said about going first person was how the original developers would have made Fallout if the technology was available at the time. Totally ignoring that were were 3d games and first person games around before the isometric view or that the original game was going to be a licensed GURPS game. Then all the fps fans and thirteen year olds came and said great first person is so much more immersive. And at the end of the day by using mechanics designed for a different viewpoint they made a game that's even more outdated than the original.

Oh and there really isn't any established science of what happens when bullets hit people; and there won't be until we get our next fascist, genocidal dictator with a penchant for SCIENCE!

Isn't there? Are you sure, you're not a defense attorney by any chance?

Requiem, what is the difference between hitpoints and healthpoints?

Health points are just that, in Stalker if you shoot and destroy the head or torso hit box the character will drop down dead. In New Vegas the hit boxes have a separate condition but unless you get a critical just destroying the head hit or torso hit box won't kill the character (unless they are really low level). That's because the Fallout series uses hitpoints, hitpoints are a combination of factors, not just health. The first few hitpoints you get when creating a character can be considered your health, but the rest you get when leveling are considered to be a combination of stamina, maybe a little health for the first couple of levels, will to live, and the accumulation of adventuring experience. This all gives the character the ability to dodge and deflect damage but doing so wears them down. Only critical hits and the last few hitpoints are really considered damaging an opponent, hence stimpaks are stimulants and in the originals at least don't heal damage. This works in pen and paper gaming and with isometric games because you don't see the bullet hits in great detail, but is jarring in first person.

 

[agiel7]

Fucking... dude, Hassknecht! I've been listening to a metric shit-ton of Deathspell Omega lately. I'm practically going through Paracletus twice a day now. Horns to the fucking heavens man \m/

Anyhow, now that The Witcher 2 is the cRPG darling for PC gamers at the moment, I'm wondering if CD Projekt's design philosophies could be applied to future Fallout games (not that Bethesda is going to listen to us anyways). Granted, it's a bit contentious just how deep the actual combat is is The Witcher 2, but there's still a bunch of really cool mechanics at play while that's gong on, the fact that you can't really chug health potions mid-combat Diablo style and that the stuff you drink have toxicity ratings.

Much as we're sad to admit, Bethesda is not going to see the financial benefit of returning Fallout to its isometric roots, which had some advantages in making it easier to accept abstractions of the player's actions compared to the first-person perspective of Fallout 3 and New Vegas. I think despite Bethesda's massive financial backing, they can learn a thing or two from The Witcher 2, which shows that you can make a deep and involving RPG with fantastic production values.

 

[Lexx]

I'm wondering if CD Projekt's design philosophies could be applied to future Fallout games

No. I don't want a Mass Effect Fallout and I bet I am not alone with that.