Template talk:LSL Constants/Custom Damage Types

Impact types

I'm still thinking about what could be useful damage types and there's bunch of fairly similar ones and I'm wondering about the difference in their classifications is the duration, scale of it and/or intent.

There's DAMAGE_TYPE_BLUDGEONING, DAMAGE_TYPE_FORCE and my proposed DAMAGE_TYPE_EXPLOSIVE and DAMAGE_TYPE_CRUSHING.

Bludgeoning makes sense more for medium to small and/or handheld blunt objects. Like a club, hammer, sledgehammer, etc.

Whereas a great force or impact might be more akin to collisions with furniture and vehicles.

I added the crushing type because I felt that high pressure such as from a hydraulic press, deep water or geological depths wouldn't be momentary but constantly applied, and this damage type would only need to be applied on pressure and resistance changes. So if someone equips a diving suit and then dives into ocean via airlock at significant depths that would be a pressure change, pressure damage would be applied once due at that depth location and the diving suit would negate it appropriately. On the other hand a tank falling or driving over a person may also be potentially considered crushing, it would feel weird to describe it as bludgeoning or an impact.

Explosive is on the other side of the coin, an impact of great force. Something may have great resistance to pressure forces but be weak to explosive impacts, which therefore would not make sense for force resistance. Well, a submarine might be able to handle explosions very well in absence of ocean pressure and on the other hand suffer damage when an explosion is combined with ocean pressure to overcome the hull integrity, but since we don't have a damage-over-time / constant damage system to allow such layering/combinations it might be better to differentiate these types.

So I think force is perhaps not a good type as it's too broad.

A lot of damage types will probably come down to finding a good taxonomy.

My two pennies (explosive and crushing) for what it's worth.

-- Nexii Malthus 07:06, 21 July 2024 (PDT)