Ramcourse
12-20-07, 08:48 PM
I happily wiped my old GWX install from my disk for GWX2, without stopping to think about how much I'd been tweaking and modding it. Now I'm trying to get the game back to where I like it. Thus far, I enjoy the ships and planes, and knowing the IX/3 turm has been fixed makes me rest easier.
One thing I haven't been able to tweak to my liking, however, is the way the ships behave when damaged. I've been tweaking that since vanilla, and in the old GWX I also did some serious changing, but in GWX2 it doesn't seem to go as easy as I remember.
In the previous iteration of GWX, all that was needed to get the ships to sink to my specs was to lower the flooding time and crash depth, increase the flotability and the critical flooding parameters of merchants' bits in the Zones.cfg file. This would cause the ships to slump quickly after torpedo impact, then tortuously die as their failing compartments pulled them down.
In GWX2, the standard response to impact is a slight settling in the water without much loss of maneuverability. Hitting bow or stern will not tilt the ship far either way. Listing is also rare. When I tweak, I don't change this behaviour much. As an experiment, I set the flotability of the keel of a small tanker to 700, critical flotation to 0.6 and its flooding time to 300. A keel shot then caused it to give the 'She's going down' signal, but very slowly settle, and just float for an hour, before suddenly breaking in two with huge fireworks. This is somewhat contrary to expectations.
I can only conclude that my knowledge of the damage handling is lacking. Since I don't have the knowledge to inspect the code as to what it's doing, this is what I deduced the workings of the damage system to be:
The ship is handled as a floating box, of appropriate beam, length and tonnage. In this box are smaller boxes, corresponding to the hit zones. If one of these zones is struck by damage, this damage causes flooding if it surpasses a threshold damage level. This level is something I haven't found so far. The flooding causes the hit zone to start weighing down the floating box that is the ship. A fully flooded hit zone weighs the ship down linearly connected with its flotability (probably a percentage of the gross ship displacement). The speed at which this happens is governed by the flooding time, perhaps modulated by the amount of damage. After a hit zone is flooded by a certain percentage (critical flooding) it is considered destroyed, and the 'She's going down' signal is given. Any hit zone submerged below its crash depth starts taking damage, until it too is destroyed.
Given my experiment above, this cannot be true. I'm then very interested to learn how the damage system does work, and how I might tweak it. Who can help me?
One thing I haven't been able to tweak to my liking, however, is the way the ships behave when damaged. I've been tweaking that since vanilla, and in the old GWX I also did some serious changing, but in GWX2 it doesn't seem to go as easy as I remember.
In the previous iteration of GWX, all that was needed to get the ships to sink to my specs was to lower the flooding time and crash depth, increase the flotability and the critical flooding parameters of merchants' bits in the Zones.cfg file. This would cause the ships to slump quickly after torpedo impact, then tortuously die as their failing compartments pulled them down.
In GWX2, the standard response to impact is a slight settling in the water without much loss of maneuverability. Hitting bow or stern will not tilt the ship far either way. Listing is also rare. When I tweak, I don't change this behaviour much. As an experiment, I set the flotability of the keel of a small tanker to 700, critical flotation to 0.6 and its flooding time to 300. A keel shot then caused it to give the 'She's going down' signal, but very slowly settle, and just float for an hour, before suddenly breaking in two with huge fireworks. This is somewhat contrary to expectations.
I can only conclude that my knowledge of the damage handling is lacking. Since I don't have the knowledge to inspect the code as to what it's doing, this is what I deduced the workings of the damage system to be:
The ship is handled as a floating box, of appropriate beam, length and tonnage. In this box are smaller boxes, corresponding to the hit zones. If one of these zones is struck by damage, this damage causes flooding if it surpasses a threshold damage level. This level is something I haven't found so far. The flooding causes the hit zone to start weighing down the floating box that is the ship. A fully flooded hit zone weighs the ship down linearly connected with its flotability (probably a percentage of the gross ship displacement). The speed at which this happens is governed by the flooding time, perhaps modulated by the amount of damage. After a hit zone is flooded by a certain percentage (critical flooding) it is considered destroyed, and the 'She's going down' signal is given. Any hit zone submerged below its crash depth starts taking damage, until it too is destroyed.
Given my experiment above, this cannot be true. I'm then very interested to learn how the damage system does work, and how I might tweak it. Who can help me?