Request for comments/suggestions on an improved wound system

[jayhova]

Hit point based systems are unrealistic and in general suck. The idea that you continue to function at nearly 100% effectivness and then someone hits you with a rock and you die is stupid. My suggestions will in all likelyhood for the most part not be implementable under the current engine so I make them with the idea that they could be used later.

First off scrap hit points. A thousand scratches would be uncomforable but wouldn't kill you (though blood loss might). Of course any realistic wound system will require a somewhat accurate hit location system but those alread exist for INF. Wounds would come in 3 basic classes light, serious, and critical. Light wounds would not affect the combat effectivness of the soldier but might result in some blood loss depending on the stress the soldier was under such as running or jogging. Serious wounds would have much higher chance of serious blood loss as well as impairing the soldier's combat effetivness. Critical wounds will kill, incapacitate, cripple, or cause very serious bleeding.

Examples of various wounds are as follows:
Light: scratches, bruises, having the wind knocked out of you. Generaly recoverable and will have a low effect on the soldier in the long run. Moderatly high falls, bullet grazes, hit on armour with an unarmed 40mm, etc.

Serious: Bullet wounds to non-vital areas, hit with a 40mm in a non-armoured spot (stomache, chest etc.), fairly high falls, etc. Results may include sprained ankle, blood loss, partial loss of the use of a limb, possible fatal blood loss if untreated

Critical. Bullet to the head heart or vital organ, very high fall, hit to major blood vessle, 40mm to the head (unarmoured), bullet hits (and shatters) major bone or spine. Results might be death, useless limb, loss of conciousness, massive blood loss, etc.

The point of all this is that a bullet to the brain or heart will always kill regardless of caliber and a graze will cause little damage regardless of caliber. Caliber will have a much greater effect on the serious/critical area. A large caliber serious wound has a much greater chance of dropping the combat effectivness of the wounded soldier.

 

[Demosthanese]

It would be fairly easy to impliment in the current system, but hasn't. Light wounds would affect stamina, serious would hit the health, and then critical would knock the player out of action.

 

[jayhova]

You seem to have missed the point. There is no health. IRL people do not have health points. While people do have a quantifiable amount of stamina they do not have health. You are either fully living or fully dead. Hitpoint systems are unrealistic. Period. There is no way to make them realistic. For instance a guy who has just been in a bar fight is no easier to kill than a guy who hasn't been in a bar fight. If both guys take a 10' fall they are both just as likely to get hurt or killed. The result of shooting them in the leg is the same on both guys. It's not like one dies and the other doesn't.

The only thing a hit point system is good for is tracking blood loss. Blood loss is also not linear in nature. Humans can loose quite a bit of blood before it really affects them.

Edit: a critical wound may or may not knock them out of action. It will seriously impair them and/or kill them soon. The proposed system is effect based. Wounds would have one or more specific effects.

 

[Demosthanese]

You seem to have missed my point. The current system offers a nice way to get a what you are after. With the current system, we have stamina and health. All damage goes to health. As your health degrades, your speed reduces and your weapon wobbles ever so slightly more. Now, let's look at what we can do with this.

Damage goes first to stamina. Small amounts of damage, such as a moderate fall will not have an effect on the health. Larger amounts of damage will leak over into health, once your stamina gets lower.

More serious wounds knock down both stamina and health. Lower health reduces the rate of stamina recovery.

Critical wounds may knock a person out of action permanantly, or temporarily while stamina recovers.

As the player looses health a few things will happen. They will move slower. They will have a harder time aiming. Perhaps one could make them turn slower. Certain weapons would be directly affected, such as the knife which would do less damage, and grenades would not be able to be thrown as far. Significant blood loss could result in the player begining to black out or suffering from tunnel vision.

So, you can have what you want under the current frame work, it will just take something akin to RA to make it work. The reason why hitpoints don't work properly is that no one assignes any ill effects to low health, and there is no meathod of recovery over time.

 

[Pipe_Dream]

cripple

Remember the wrestler Billy Jack Haynes? His dad was a "cripple."

 

[DEFkon]

The problem with simulating a wounding system is that the human body as you say is far too complex to emulate with points, percentages or any other "simple" method. One of the major hurdles that challenges a realistic wounding system is that there is a high level of unpredictability inherent in how each person's body will endure injuries both minor or major. Not to mention the legendary "knock down" argument with reguards to gunshot wounds. I had the chance to speak with a ER surgeon once with reguards to gun shot wounds and i basically was left with the impression that a good deal of gun shot wounds that are fatal do not immediatly incompasitate. As awfull as it sounds a more realistic wounding emulation would be a combination of 50% luck 50% set circumstances because in order to predict with high accuracy the results of a certain injury you'd need to have accuess to millions of variables, and if you could do that on the fly, you could proably also determin whos going to win the superbowl in 20 years or if it's going to rain where you live in 2015 may 2nd, at 10 pm.

 

[jayhova]

I would tend to agree with you there. Fortunatly there are some very predictable areas on the human body that will result in almost immediate incapacitation. A center shot to the brain will incapacitate and a center and slightly left chest will incapacitate very quickly. A hit to the spine will do it too. The end result is that what makes a sniper so deadly is not the size of the bullet he is using but placement. A heart shot and a center head shot will just about always result in a near instant kill. I will grant that most fatal wounds are the result of internal bleeding. This is why there are no medium wounds in the system I am proposing. A wound is either superficial or serious. If you start bleeding and it doesn't stop you will die.

 

[jlamb_vo]

Your system sounds similar to Shadowrun, Jayhova. I like it, because I could swear that I made an almost identical post a few years ago but cannot find it for the life of me

We have implemented a similar system in our RPG conversion for Doom: melee weapons and projectiles carry a power/penetration rating (0-100), and a flesh, moderate, traumatic, crippling, or mortal wound classification. The body is broken into head, main arm, off arm, torso, and legs.

Body armor is by zone, and has a resistance (0-200) and absorption (0-100) rating. After a successful hit, there is a chance (based on resistance and penetration ratings) that the weapon or projectile will be deflected. If it penetrates, the absorption rating can lower the wound inflicted (even negating it). Projectiles will also lose penetration as they pass through material and simply over distance, so we can make pistols and shotguns extremely deadly against close-range soft targets, but are fairly useless against well armored targets (without perhaps making a called shot).

Each type of wound to each of these zones carries a specific penalty, which are cumalative. So characters can get lucky, be shot up quite a bit and still live--but you would basically be completely incapacitated.

In our case, it is a third person, character-skill driven RPG with a form of turn-based combat, so these are all handled by dice rolls, and appropriate penalties/bonuses are also given to wound level based on the margin of success or failure, blah blah. This DOES make it much easier to apply abstract wounds (they just temporarily lower certain attributes, which in turn affect character skills), but I still think something similar could work quite well in a FPS.

 

[jayhova]

One of the things you have to contend with is the situation you have where armour doesn't cover all of the vital areas. While just about any any vest will protect against a shotgun blast, it's not the pellets that hit the chest that are the problem. With a tight choke a shotgun at 10-15 meters will make a pattern that is aproximatly chest wide. This means a shot aimed at the middle of the chest has an excellent chance of putting pellets in the upper chest, throat and face area all of which have a high probability of being fatal or at least incapacitating.

This is the same problem you run into with helmets. While a modern helmet will deflect most handgun rounds and fragments it does nothing against a shot between the eyes.

 

[sir_edmond]

You could remidie the situation of being shot between the eyes with a Lvl II Visor, but lvl2 dosnt stop rifles

 

[jayhova]

Level 2 Visors are in general not standard military issue equipment.

 

[exdeath]

I think a realistic wound system in a game would work like this:

Lets imagine a player spawn at the game. The player char is rested.
The game would check the character, something like:
"There is anything wrong with your char???" NO
After some time (less than 1 second) it would check your char again and check the same thing again. The game would continue doing this test until you are really dead.

Now lets imagine your soldier is runing and is tired.
The game make the check:
"There is anything wrong with your char???" YES HE IS TIRED
"He would die because of that" NO
"Something else will happen" YES, HE WOULD RUN AND WALK SLOWER.
"Something else?"No

Now imagine someone shoot you at your hand.
"There is anything wrong with your char???" SOMEONE SHOT INTO HIS HAND (A THING WITH THE SPEED OF X AND SIZE OF Y AND PENETRATION POWER OF Z GONE TO THIS SPECIFIC PART OF HIS HAND)
"He would die because of that" NO
"Something else will happen" YES, HE WILL DROP BLOOD FROM HIS HAND AND WILL NOT BE ABLE TO SHOT WITH THIS HAND.


A realistic wound system would problably work like that.
Of course it would be a little (or alot) more complex, taking into acount things like bullet speed, penetration power...
The problem is the power needed to make those checks to all chars at a very fast rate.

 

[STELLAR 7]

An assish response

That's an inefficient way of thinking about it. There's really no need to check the player's health status on a continual loop unless you plan on implementing a dynamic system where health is altered over an interval of time. Examples of this could be bleeding or burning which have been done before. Even drowning is a form this. But these systems can still be considered external factors that can be monitored by their own objects and call the function to hurt the player autonomously.

 

[andy_kosela]

A realistic wound system means for me that basically one bullet will incapacitate you, just like in real life. It may not kill you, but you will be needing a medic as soon as possible -- that's for sure.

Even a shot to the arm should not mean that the player will be aiming slower etc. That's a complete arcade gaming for me. If you want a realistic system make it realistic, meaning resembling real life.

 

[exdeath]

That's an inefficient way of thinking about it. There's really no need to check the player's health status on a continual loop unless you plan on implementing a dynamic system where health is altered over an interval of time. Examples of this could be bleeding or burning which have been done before. Even drowning is a form this. But these systems can still be considered external factors that can be monitored by their own objects and call the function to hurt the player autonomously.

You are right I forgot about that.
This is alot easier. Just check the player when something happens.

When I said that the game should check the player in a continual loop. The idea was to check the entire player. Like if a doctor saw the player at the exact time and sad if he is dead or not and if he is not dead what is happening with him.
But this works without continuous loop.

 

[jayhova]

It's important to remember that a hit doesn't guarantee a wound. If a bullet hits your armor it may have an effect no greater than getting hit by a golf ball. The bullet could impact your equipment or weapon. The bullet might hit a fleshy part of your body. Today I saw a picture of a man shot by police in New Orleans who was standing with his shirt off. You could see the wound both entry and exit in his side. http://www.propublica.org/images/nola/stories/tp_mccann_570x400_091215.jpg Bear in mind also that blood loss of less than 20% has no ill effects on performance i.e. drop in blood pressure.

 

[andy_kosela]

jayhova -- our simulation systems are still too primitive to take into account *everything* you write about. I heard about people who were shot in the head and lived, so such cases also happens. But IMHO it's much more closer to every day reality to implement in a simulation that *each* bullet should at least make you unable to fight. Take notice also that most bullets from military grade weapons are also doing extraordinary damage from fragmentation, take for example 5.56 round from M4. They are really deadly.

I recently tested wound system in VBS2 and it doesnt look too good to me -- it takes usually two rounds to take down the suspect, when the first round hits leg or an arm. It is also interesting to note that AI agent doesn't seem to be at all concerned that he was hit with 5.56 round. To me that's not even funny, that's an arcade way of doing things.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJJATNdcZ04

PS> I'm not even writing about VBS2 material penetration here, but you can see it's very poor. Infiltration is much much better in this field.

 

[exdeath]

It's important to remember that a hit doesn't guaranty a wound. If a bullet hits your armor it may have an effect no greater than getting hit by a golf ball. The bullet could impact your equipment or weapon. The bullet might hit a fleshy part of your body. Today I saw a picture of a man shot by police in New Orleans who was standing with his shirt off. You could see the wound both entry and exit in his side. http://www.propublica.org/images/nola/stories/tp_mccann_570x400_091215.jpg Bear in mind also that blood loss of less than 20% has no ill effects on performance i.e. drop in blood pressure.

Yes I know that a hit is not always a wound. I just posted the basic idea, in the game, this idea would be way more complex.

 

[jayhova]

Fragmentation is far from instantaneous. Bullet fragmentation only happens after the bullet has traveled a significant distance through tissue. In cases where the bullet has traveled less that 6" through tissue this just doesn't happen. This was the case of the man in New Orleans. In that case the man was shot with an AR-15 and walked to the helicopter to be evacuated some time later. It would be inaccurate to say that cases of soldiers continuing to fight after being wounded are rare.

 

[jayhova]

jayhova -- our simulation systems are still too primitive to take into account *everything* you write about.

Hit point based systems are unrealistic and in general suck. The idea that you continue to function at nearly 100% effectivness and then someone hits you with a rock and you die is stupid. My suggestions will in all likelyhood for the most part not be implementable under the current engine so I make them with the idea that they could be used later.