[WIP] Flt Boat Damage Model Redux

[LukeFF]

Originally Posted by akdavis

I hope that you and LukeFF can integrate your work sometime in the future. Some of the best stuff going in my opinion.

I hope so. Observer's work of combining the two engines/motors in each compartment is a stroke of brilliance and should put to rest the complaints about the engine damage people have had up to this point.

Needless to say, I'm very curious to see his modded UPC files.

[tater]

This is brilliant.

BTW, I noticed that the dead guy is actually not on the deck, he's below. What I did in my tests/experiments was that when I set "battle surface," I simply manually moved all my "below" deck watch crew to damage control.

I love the idea of diesels that can be damaged but not destroyed (or VERY difficult to destroy). Operationally I think that the boat should never be unable to make way due to diesel engine damage.

Awesome work!

tater

[tater]

Regarding enemy deck guns, one idea might be to make an alternate set of small open mount guns for merchants and maybe subchasers and other small craft. These guns would be far easier to destroy. Real warships would have enough crew that even if you swept their guns clear for a moment, they'd be remanned in no time. Bottom line is duking it out with a DE/DD should be insanity or suicidal desperation.

Can't wait to get my PC set up upstairs (my "man room" is a gutted mess pending remodel).

tater

[Ducimus]

Good work, and damn brilliant thinking. I'll try to offer some more constructive comments later. Late night last night, im not really "with it" right now.

[Observer]

Originally Posted by tater

Regarding enemy deck guns, one idea might be to make an alternate set of small open mount guns for merchants and maybe subchasers and other small craft. These guns would be far easier to destroy. Real warships would have enough crew that even if you swept their guns clear for a moment, they'd be remanned in no time. Bottom line is duking it out with a DE/DD should be insanity or suicidal desperation.

Can't wait to get my PC set up upstairs (my "man room" is a gutted mess pending remodel).

tater

I think this could be handled a couple of different ways. Perhaps the easiest is to duplicate the equipment and zone it depending on the application (warship vs. merchant). One other point is that zones can be "destructible". This means that when the zone HP=0 then the object is destroyed. Case in point is the fleet boat rudder. I've adjusted this for the Gato, but I think it may need to be applied to the DG/AA guns. I don't want the DG/AA gun to be able to shoot (by the player) after they have been reported as destroyed, though it may fix the problem by just linking the equipment to a zone.

[Observer]

Originally Posted by tater

BTW, I noticed that the dead guy is actually not on the deck, he's below. What I did in my tests/experiments was that when I set "battle surface," I simply manually moved all my "below" deck watch crew to damage control.

The same is true here (manual movement), I just didn't want to have them take the DC spaces, though I thought about it. The other part is that this represents a proof of concept about adding compartments and crew. I've long been frustrated on how to do this. I thought I had all of the right input but it didn't work, and I couldn't find the missing element. I finally figured it out when I noticed the very bottom entries in the files Ducimus posted.

This is the key:

[UserPlayerUnit 1.FunctionalSubsystem 38]
ID= CrewBerthing
NameDisplayable= Crew Berthing
FunctionalType= CrewMembersGrouping
IDLinkFunctionalSubsystemSlots= CrewMemberSlot_BerthingC1, 0,CrewMemberSlot_BerthingC2, 0,CrewMemberSlot_BerthingC3, 0,CrewMemberSlot_BerthingC4, 0,CrewMemberSlot_BerthingC5, 0,CrewMemberSlot_BerthingC6, 0,CrewMemberSlot_BerthingC7, 0,CrewMemberSlot_BerthingC8, 0,CrewMemberSlot_BerthingC9, 0

BTW, I moved the dead guy below, though he was down on the deck in external view, I just didn't take a screen shot of it.

[Observer]

Originally Posted by LukeFF

I hope so. Observer's work of combining the two engines/motors in each compartment is a stroke of brilliance and should put to rest the complaints about the engine damage people have had up to this point.

Needless to say, I'm very curious to see his modded UPC files.

In reality, they were always combined, just not in the same way that I did it. In the original, the #1 ME was linked to zone 22 (this is a special zone) while the #3 ME was linked to zone -1. Remember that -1 (from above) means that the zone inherits the damage of the compartment (in this case zone 201). The problem is that there is only two "special" zones for the diesel engines: zone 21 and 55 (DieselEngine1 and DieselEngine2 respectively). When the #1 DE (linked to zone 21) is destroyed the Stbd DEs are lost.

These "special" zones are important, and are specially hard coded so that they do not require the definition of "Category=Engines Room" in the zone definition.

I originally had the idea to add new zone definitions for ME #3 and #4 (link equipment to damage zone), however this didn't work because they wouldn't move the ship unless they contained the "Category=Engines Room" designation in the zone definition. This in turn presented problems because the "special" electric engine zones contain the "Category=Engines Room" designation and won't work properly without it. Suffice it to say I tried every permutation and combination I could think of to make this work and it would not, at least in a believable fashion.

I also tried adding an extra 21 and 55 zone to the Gato with links to the applicable equipment entry. This became a "one to many" data problem and would not represent the individual engine damage properly. This in turn resulted in repair problems for the engines. I even tried some more creative "zone in zone" behavior I've used in other areas, but this proved to be more trouble than it was worth.

In the end, I settled on one big zone linked to one combined equipment file. It's a compromise I'm still not crazy about. I rationalize it by saying it's an abstraction, though the one part I do like is the reduction of speed when damaged. The damage resistance is based on high HP, and still requires balancing. Armor can't be used without some modification to the zone since the DE zone is inside of the ER compartment, and the armor check is only conducted once.

I even toyed with the idea of repairable destroyed equipment similar to the "bulkhead" equipment, but this seems to be unique to the bulkhead equipment item, and given the on screen space limitations, I don't know that adding four new compartments is really practical.

Whew. I hope that helps explain.