Post feature Report RSS Progress Report - Time, Stealth and Pain

Another progress report covering Time of Day, Weather, Stealth Mechanics, Health and Damage mechanics and more!

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Hello Everyone!

Another week and lots more changes! I decided to keep working until I get the mods tweaked, balanced and finished.

Time of Day and Lighting
I've been going over the sun position to stop it from, well stopping in the middle of the day!
Sunrise has been moved from 4am to 5:15am and Sunset has been moved from 9pm to 6:30pm giving much more realistic day cycles!
Night time has had a full re-working of lighting to make it proper dark, and NV essential.
Foggy-ness has been increased significantly and includes full cloud adjustments for more weather variety

Stealth Mechanics
AI mechanics related to Audible and Visual Detection have been redone from the ground up to create much more realistic perception.
Movement speed is very important for remaining undetected, as well as keeping quiet!

How Detection Works
Each unit carries a "Detection Meter" that ranges from a value between 0 and 50.
Every time a unit sees another, a value is added to the seen units Detection Meter.
If any value is added to a unit's meter it becomes "Suspected", if it is seen again, the unit becomes "Detected". The meter can be increased even after being detected so that the more the unit is seen, the longer enemies will search it's last known position to try and see it again once lost.

Sound plays a big role in detection also, especially your characters voice, ensure you set him to whisper (ROE - Fire on My Lead or Return Fire) if you don't want the PLA hearing him shout "Rifleman, 200m!"
Crouched movement is alot quieter than Standing, and the AI will hear you walking around unless you crouch.

Suspected Vs Detected
When a unit becomes "suspected" it is not yet known. a position is recorded where the unknown unit was suspected, but no information about the unit's army, type etc. The AI will look at these positions (or move to look at them) and then look around, before returning to what they were doing.
Once Detected, as long as the unit is visible its position is known to all enemies, along with its type in realtime. Once sight is lost, a marker is left at the last seen position representing the unit, and will last until that units "Detection Meter" reaches 0.

Movement Mechanics
Adjustments have been made to how you move (see the above video for an example).
Walking (which is actually jogging) is slightly faster, and Sprinting is faster also, but Fatigue will build much faster meaning you can actually run shorter distances in quicker time.
Crouching has also been adjusted to make crouched "walking" much slower (enough that you are not heard by the AI, and slow enough to make crossing open space in this manner time consuming). Sprinting while crouched gives much more speed, but also increases fatigue and sound beyond detection limits

Health and Damage
The Amount of Health each body part had was set so that the damage dealt by bullets killed realistically, but this meant the visual damage that can be applied to units rarely actually got applied by the game. I have reworked the system so that each body parts Health value represents the % of blood in that body part, with the number of simultaneous wounds a weapon can make controlling the severity of damage dealt by different ammunition.
The result is much greater range in both actual and visual damage to units. From light "scratches" to heavy grievous wounds to full on dismemberment!

All weapon impact forces have also been revamped so that when a shot connects, it looks like it
To go with it, explosive weapons have been adjusted so that they don't all-up vaporize the targets (its pretty gruesome! hence the lack of SS)

Finally taking shots to different body parts affects the Ai in different ways. Light shots to the arms won't do much, but bigger hits will cause the Ai to fall over. Shooting them in the legs will do the same thing. Severe leg damage will prevent them from standing entirely!
Big hits also cause concussion which prevents the Ai from doing anything for a few moments and all weapons cause a lot more suppression.

Island War itself has been the testbed for all these changes, and the new features mentioned in the previous update are working really well and stable now as well as more tweaks to behavior for better gameplay. Weather is the final hurdle before release, with a few fixes to Dawn and overall fog thickness to finish it off!

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arizxna_kvsh
arizxna_kvsh

This game has some amazing limb dismemberment but you only ever see it from 50 cal weapons, explosives always end with the same hip gore
Does this make explosives result in more gory variations other than the usual missing hip?

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jamesdickinson963 Author
jamesdickinson963

oh yes! I shot a SMAW at a group of men, 1 vaporised (I think I hit him direct) his two friends went flying, one with a leg missing, the other without a head or arm. 3 others nearby were knocked down, one incapacitated and the others just bloodied a bit

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Olku_
Olku_

Already better than Arma :P

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arizxna_kvsh
arizxna_kvsh

**** yeah boi you got me on the edge of my seat

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Guest
Guest

looks like it might be worth playing OFP2~ !

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hoak
hoak

Outstanding mod!

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Le_Serious
Le_Serious

My favorite OFDR trailer ^_^

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jamesdickinson963 Author
jamesdickinson963

You know I never saw that one, and its pretty awesome!

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Le_Serious
Le_Serious

Yeah ^_^

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