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 DAMAGE_TYPE_FORCE, great force or impact, might be more akin to collisions with furniture, vehicles, large bodies of liquids/solids.

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)

Subtypes

Some may have noticed the addition of the subtypes category.

So the deal is that the current damage types written by LL are pretty good, they cover a wide range of games, genres and themes.

There's different communities and individuals that would want to use Combat2, from roleplay to military, games, brand stores and other content creators.

The general damage types are often a bit too broad however, within piercing you have bullets, shells and other munitions. But these can also have specialised types, such as high explosive shells. Likewise it is hard to place some like explosives such as grenades, warheads and other munitions. What does it mean for a submarine which may be negating crushing depth pressure force damage vs a nearby torpedo explosive force? In a simplistic naive system where both are forces, the crushing depth negation may end up making explosive forces like torpedo be completely ignored instead of being treated as different layers (constant pressure vs spontaneous impact).

This is why I'd separate out explosive and crushing as being subtypes of force.

-- Nexii Malthus 07:26, 10 August 2024 (PDT)