Will guns and bullets do realistic damage? Body armor.

Originally Posted by Allan Davidson

Does somebody know how CE3 deals with bullet damage and bullet penetration? There is a integrated feature in the Free SDK that allows Devs to use some built-in bullet physics? It would suck to built something like this from scratch.

More important, there must be a balance between realistic bullet physics and packet exchange, BF4 had bizarre problems with net code during 4 months due to the heavy package exchange between players and server.

Maybe the best in this situation, is only spread by the server the point of origin and point of hit by the shot, the collision/physics should be calculated by each client to prevent overload of data from the server.

agree, the bullets can appear as very detailed physics objects just by the client and not by the server, reducing the amount of props at the time in a place.

[Allan Davidson]

UJust imagine a tank shell flying across 1km of the battelefield, then hitting the wall of a safehouse. The bullet trajectory, the impact on the wall, the penetration through the object, the props inside the house flying away, ragdolls being throw, the main pillar exploding, the building colliding, and smoke puffs.

Even if we had THIS level of detail and realism in PR2, imagine the amount of data that has to be shared between the server and the clients, would be something insane. That's why I still think is better only to share shot information (eg: T-90 APshell, origin at z2.5674 x491.7760 y121.7893, direction x12.87789? y-98.78650?) and hit detection (eg:hit at object LPG67, hit location xyz, incoming direction xy). Then every client will calculate the bullet trajectory, speed, deviation, sound generation, damage, penetration, collisions and etc...

But this method turns out to have 2 problems. The first one is the client precision, every client receive they same information, but the achieve different results from collisions and physics simulations. The second one, is related to ping, people with higher pings will maybe see events 1 second later, for example, you see an enemy behind a glass window and then you shot him, you know that you killed him, but your client will share only the shot information. When the server receive the information, if the enemy moved in this middle time, it will state that you missed. Unless you client state that you made a successful hit in an enemy player and share this information too, but again, due to the latency, players will find it strange, because they will die in a place that he was more than half second ago. The same applies to vehicles.

Oh, and talking about vehicles, please, don't do a "general" health system for vehicles, it really sucks to take 2 shots in the left and get damage everywhere, like in BF4. If you take shot in the left, only the left side of the vehicle should be damaged and have armor disabled.

[Brainlaag]

Originally Posted by carmikaze

This could be handled with a certain random factor, the first hit will always knock you down, if you get shot a second time, the possibility will rise that the second bullet will penetrate your armor, if you survive the second shot by luck, the possibility of the the third shot to be penetrating will rise more and so on and so on - a simple formula would do the trick.

Would be nice if the knockout animation could be handled by ragdoll, and the only preset animation would be the "get up on the feet" animation of the player.

I don't like arcadey bullet damage either...

As said, modular damage. You divide the whole body and armor into individual modules, each with their on properties (getting hit in the lower leg slows you down, the arm influences your ability to keep a steady aim). For the armor you simply add a percentage depending on the size of the module of the armor. Let's say you subdivide the vest in 6 subgrids, each grid can take 2 (so 50% damage for an average 7.62 round hit), or whatever, shots before it fails and gets penetrated.

Originally Posted by Allan Davidson

UJust imagine a tank shell flying across 1km of the battelefield, then hitting the wall of a safehouse. The bullet trajectory, the impact on the wall, the penetration through the object, the props inside the house flying away, ragdolls being throw, the main pillar exploding, the building colliding, and smoke puffs.

Even if we had THIS level of detail and realism in PR2, imagine the amount of data that has to be shared between the server and the clients, would be something insane. That's why I still think is better only to share shot information (eg: T-90 APshell, origin at z2.5674 x491.7760 y121.7893, direction x12.87789? y-98.78650?) and hit detection (eg:hit at object LPG67, hit location xyz, incoming direction xy). Then every client will calculate the bullet trajectory, speed, deviation, sound generation, damage, penetration, collisions and etc...

But this method turns out to have 2 problems. The first one is the client precision, every client receive they same information, but the achieve different results from collisions and physics simulations. The second one, is related to ping, people with higher pings will maybe see events 1 second later, for example, you see an enemy behind a glass window and then you shot him, you know that you killed him, but your client will share only the shot information. When the server receive the information, if the enemy moved in this middle time, it will state that you missed. Unless you client state that you made a successful hit in an enemy player and share this information too, but again, due to the latency, players will find it strange, because they will die in a place that he was more than half second ago. The same applies to vehicles.

Oh, and talking about vehicles, please, don't do a "general" health system for vehicles, it really sucks to take 2 shots in the left and get damage everywhere, like in BF4. If you take shot in the left, only the left side of the vehicle should be damaged and have armor disabled.

Wouldn't the constant pinging back and forth between the server and client make lag a decisive factor at times?

Originally Posted by Brainlaag

Wouldn't the constant pinging back and forth between the server and client make lag a decisive factor at times?

True, this method, while good and realistic, would make a lot of ping, and in the other way around, ping would make firefights very annoying as bullets for the clients are not the same as for the server.

[Allan Davidson]

Yes, that was the second problem that I said. But since this is no COD/BF4 when the server deals with 2000 shots per second...

[Gamekiller48]

Another problem: if the outcome of a shot is calculated client-sided, chances are, that hackers will manipulate their files to always return "shot missed" to the server.
I think what some of you have in mind is not possible in a realtime-calculation, so a better solution would be hitboxes on the armour, that trigger pre-calculated physics-states (would eliminate differences between physics-caluculations on different clients, would work a lot faster and could be handled server-sided: shot hit hitbox number 30, client receives info that it has to trigger the damage-model stored in slot 30)

[Spectrium]

Whatever you do, please make realistic damage to sharpshooter rifles. It's really annoying when you see the guy who you hit his head just Resurrected by necromanc.. uhm medics. When lowered damage couple with medics the game starts to annoy people.

The rule is simple: If you get "7.62 special purpose" to your head you are DEAD.

You need to give more firepower to weapons to make equal supression between real "one" life against gaming "spawnable" life.

[PLA]

Also, other things that REALLY bugs the hell out of me in Battlefield 4:

Bullet velocity,
For example:

M40A5 - real muzzle velocity: 777m/s --- in BF4: 480 m/s

SCAR-H - real muzzle velocity: 714m/s --- in BF4: 410 m/s

M240B - real muzzle velocity: 853m/s --- in BF4: 610 m/s

MK11 - real muzzle velocity: 783m/s --- in BF4: 550 m/s

M16A4 - real muzzle velocity: 948m/s --- in BF4: 650 m/s

Why DICE?

Other gun damage,
For example:

The .50 cal (12.7mm) vehicle machine guns - 25 damage vs infantry

25mm High Explosive Shell from Infantry Fighting Vehicles - 70 damage vs infantry

7.62mm Minigun on Helicopters - 8.5 damage vs infantry

30mm cannon from Jets and Anti-Air vehicles - 17 damage vs infantry

20mm cannon from Fighter Jets - 6.25 damage vs infantry

Compare that to the M40a5 - 7.62mm - 100 max damage vs infantry at point blank

Why DICE? Are you telling me that it takes six 30mm rounds to kill me but only one 7.62mm sniper round to kill me? How do you have a 20mm round from a fighter jet do only 6.25 damage when a 7.62mm sniper does 100 damage?

[ShockUnitBlack]

IMO body armor (or any weapon damage modifiers for that matter) screws with balance and would mess the game up. We've seen this happen in dozens and dozens of games before. PR2 shouldn't make the same mistake.

[Brainlaag]

Originally Posted by ShockUnitBlack

IMO body armor (or any weapon damage modifiers for that matter) screws with balance and would mess the game up. We've seen this happen in dozens and dozens of games before. PR2 shouldn't make the same mistake.

Vests are not supposed to be a damage modifier but only prevent actual damage with a certain durability (see insurgency for some sort of reference).