This was great to see !!! Thank you
The original post is terrible! Awful I say! Why oh why can we only up-rep it once!? I demand this be fixed!
(Well, someone had to post some sort of complaint or FD would think we'd all gone soft!)
(Well, someone had to post some sort of complaint or FD would think we'd all gone soft!)
Excellent OP, this is really appreciated and the image also very helpful! It would be cool to see the same type of image for all the ships! 
Currently we observe modules, when targetted by gimbals, getting damaged from basically any angle where it is not obstructed by just another module. You say there is a bug where the distance a beam/bullet may penetrate is calculated incorrectly (too long), can we expect that, with the correct calculation, that hitting a particular subsystem actually takes effort to fire from the best angle? For example against an Anaconda, imho targetting the power plant shouldn't be enough, you should also have to align yourself so that you are facing perpendicular directly onto the hull closest to the power plant, and otherwise only do very insignificant damage to it at all. In other words, can we expect the volume of the ship itself, where it does not contain any particular module, to also effectively obstruct modules, especially internal ones?
And one thing I am now wondering is, you describe it as if armour would be applied first, before anything else, and therefore also protect modules. This has not been our observation, and it has become the general consensur that armour is entirely useless against an opponent who targets the power plant for the kill. Could you please double-check whether there might be a bug somewhere that either miscalculates something, or gives the armour too little actual protection in the first place?
While what you describe definitely is not the case, this is a fantastic suggestion. The more shot-up your hull, the more damage spills over to any modules in the path of the beam/bullet. This is genius, please, FD, you should consider this!
Currently we observe modules, when targetted by gimbals, getting damaged from basically any angle where it is not obstructed by just another module. You say there is a bug where the distance a beam/bullet may penetrate is calculated incorrectly (too long), can we expect that, with the correct calculation, that hitting a particular subsystem actually takes effort to fire from the best angle? For example against an Anaconda, imho targetting the power plant shouldn't be enough, you should also have to align yourself so that you are facing perpendicular directly onto the hull closest to the power plant, and otherwise only do very insignificant damage to it at all. In other words, can we expect the volume of the ship itself, where it does not contain any particular module, to also effectively obstruct modules, especially internal ones?
And one thing I am now wondering is, you describe it as if armour would be applied first, before anything else, and therefore also protect modules. This has not been our observation, and it has become the general consensur that armour is entirely useless against an opponent who targets the power plant for the kill. Could you please double-check whether there might be a bug somewhere that either miscalculates something, or gives the armour too little actual protection in the first place?
While what you describe definitely is not the case, this is a fantastic suggestion. The more shot-up your hull, the more damage spills over to any modules in the path of the beam/bullet. This is genius, please, FD, you should consider this!
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Thanks for the information Brett and Mark. As you can see, we on the forums lap up this sort of detail.
One further question though, with this excellent hull damage model which has clearly taken a lot of thought, is there any plans to change the current SCB stacking meta which makes all of this work obsolete?
There seems to be an agreement on the forums (as much as there ever can be), that combat would be improved if the hull damage part of the combat was extended (less damage to critical components, so no instant PP kill) and shield damage part greatly reduced (no shield potion spam).
This would make the combat experience much more visceral as it was back in alpha. With components failing during combat and short windows when shields were down to apply damage to hull and subsystems before the shields came back on line.
Anyway to repeat, thanks for the detailed info. Anything like this you can share is always greatly appreciated.
One further question though, with this excellent hull damage model which has clearly taken a lot of thought, is there any plans to change the current SCB stacking meta which makes all of this work obsolete?
There seems to be an agreement on the forums (as much as there ever can be), that combat would be improved if the hull damage part of the combat was extended (less damage to critical components, so no instant PP kill) and shield damage part greatly reduced (no shield potion spam).
This would make the combat experience much more visceral as it was back in alpha. With components failing during combat and short windows when shields were down to apply damage to hull and subsystems before the shields came back on line.
Anyway to repeat, thanks for the detailed info. Anything like this you can share is always greatly appreciated.
Mark Allen
Programmer- Elite: Dangerous
Glad the information is interesting to players! Just going to address a few specific points:
it's not scaled up for viewing - some of them are larger than intended and they're probably being scaled down across the board for the changes I mentioned anyway. depth is still important though, in the screenshot I've added several spheres are buried inside that aren't visible (for the purposes of demonstration turning on depth sorting makes it a lot more readable), remember that if you can penetrate far enough you can hit from any direction as well, so those spheres poking out the top could be shot from the underside if you're using something that pierces well. If you fire a shot from the correct angle to hit a near-surface module, yes penetration depth is more or less irrelevant.
You're welcome. Hull re-inforcements & Armour at the moment primarily increase your total hitpoints (which indirectly reduces penetration chances - after taking the same punishment your hull health is higher which is factored into step 3). At one point they did also block internal shots, but we removed this before it was seen externally as we didn't have any way to telegraph to the attacker what was going on and it just looked like damage was going nowhere, the number of bug/exploit reports would have been immense! It's a common question - this is something we're planning to address when we review the penetration chances/distances on weapons but I don't have any specific details/ETA to discuss.
As for releasing layouts of all the ships, 'tis not my decision - Should probably wait until designers have had the chance to do the rebalances mentioned before publicising anything that we know's going to go out of date.
It's all based on the physical hit location/direction, what you were targeting when the shot was fired has no effect. It's been raised whether we should nudge things based on what we think your intent was, personally I like leaving everything down to the mechanics though.
I do like doing little soapboxes like this when possible. I do stick to areas I know about in detail (in this case because I went through the discussions with design and wrote much of the code), which somewhat limits what I can rant about.
Happy module hunting Commanders!
-Mark
it's not scaled up for viewing - some of them are larger than intended and they're probably being scaled down across the board for the changes I mentioned anyway. depth is still important though, in the screenshot I've added several spheres are buried inside that aren't visible (for the purposes of demonstration turning on depth sorting makes it a lot more readable), remember that if you can penetrate far enough you can hit from any direction as well, so those spheres poking out the top could be shot from the underside if you're using something that pierces well. If you fire a shot from the correct angle to hit a near-surface module, yes penetration depth is more or less irrelevant.
You're welcome
. Hull re-inforcements & Armour at the moment primarily increase your total hitpoints (which indirectly reduces penetration chances - after taking the same punishment your hull health is higher which is factored into step 3). At one point they did also block internal shots, but we removed this before it was seen externally as we didn't have any way to telegraph to the attacker what was going on and it just looked like damage was going nowhere, the number of bug/exploit reports would have been immense! It's a common question - this is something we're planning to address when we review the penetration chances/distances on weapons but I don't have any specific details/ETA to discuss. As for releasing layouts of all the ships, 'tis not my decision
- Should probably wait until designers have had the chance to do the rebalances mentioned before publicising anything that we know's going to go out of date.It's all based on the physical hit location/direction, what you were targeting when the shot was fired has no effect. It's been raised whether we should nudge things based on what we think your intent was, personally I like leaving everything down to the mechanics though.
I do like doing little soapboxes like this when possible
. I do stick to areas I know about in detail (in this case because I went through the discussions with design and wrote much of the code), which somewhat limits what I can rant about.Happy module hunting Commanders!
-Mark
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Why was a graphical or sound effect signifying that the damage had been entirely consumed by armour (similar in principle to how a shell that glances off armour in World of Tanks is indicated) not acceptable?
This please, or have various effects:
Reflected laser shots on mirrored hull
Ricochet on composite
Am I right though that the sound does change? When I really damage a small ship I can hear extra crackling sounds, I assumed this tells me I'm scoring critical hits.
And I love these dev posts. Informative and entertaining!
However, the Empire will be after Mark Allen for giving away secret information.....
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Not wanting to shoot myself in the foot let the cat out the bag but hey ho..
In my Cobra with multi cannons I could rip through any shields including anacondas NPCs.
Also military shield gives best overall protection over Mirrored and reactive.
NPCs seem to behave differently in how they can be at 0% and still Frameshift out whereas cmdr hit 40% and everything starts to go to hell in a hand basket very quickly..
Cockpits are made of sugar glass ... I never fly so fast as when one of those go
In my Cobra with multi cannons I could rip through any shields including anacondas NPCs.
Also military shield gives best overall protection over Mirrored and reactive.
NPCs seem to behave differently in how they can be at 0% and still Frameshift out whereas cmdr hit 40% and everything starts to go to hell in a hand basket very quickly..
Cockpits are made of sugar glass ... I never fly so fast as when one of those go
Wow thats interesting to know.
I kinda like that there is a lot more dev-interaction now ^-^
I kinda like that there is a lot more dev-interaction now ^-^
So like Railguns work now?
Better get the bromine ready when they extend the visible damage modelling from the Anaconda to other ships then
.
Please please please put this back in
Perhaps we need a ping! noise when we hit an internal bulkhead, like a bullet ricocheting off armor
R