Damage Mod for Traffic

Damage Mod Addition

Adding destroyable subsystems is not planned until traffic, but I wanted to write down the main ideas now.

The purpose of the damage mod is to slow down autorepair and to not repair destroyed subsystems forcing the player to repair ships in some other way.

The behavior will be different from the Damage Mod coded by Flamineo.

It will work like this:

Subsystems have a number of hit points. They also have a percent of hit points where they stop working (typically 50%). This is coded into the Flux engine and controlled by the INI files.

Normal autorepair will repair hit points of damage to subsystems slowly bringing them back to full health. This is the behavior that we all experience in the standard game.

The Damage Mod will replace the autorepair system. It will also give back hit points to repair subsystems. However, if a subsystem has below 10% of hit points left, it will not repair the subsystem. The subsystem is considered “junked�.

Repairing junked subsystems requires a repair ship. The repair ship docks to the damaged ship and then conducts the repair. A repair ship deducts a “spare part� from the player’s inventory to “replace� the junked item. The hit points of the junked item will be returned to maximum and the damage mod will see it as repairable again. (Notice that this does not involve adding or removing subsystems from the ship. It just changes hit points. This makes it very simple to code, but the game play effect is the same).

These spares are sold as generic parts. They are cargo items, not actual ship systems. The reason is that AI ships may have many, many types with subtle differences, but we have a very limited inventory system.

The damage mod will be applied to all ships in the game. It will be possible to injure or destroy AI ship subsystems. This will allow new tactics against cruisers etc.

For those familiar with the current Damage Mod, some features will be removed. The concept of “containment� will be removed. The damage mod will no longer deduct items from inventory, the repair ship will handle that. The damage mod will not have a limited supply of repair points. It will repair systems until they are all “junked�. These changes drastically simplify and focus the damage mod.

Effort needed to implement these features.

First, a cargo type for each major kind of subsystem will need to be created and made available for sale. For instance PBC Parts, Beam Parts, CPU Parts, Reactor Parts, etc.

Second, code needs to be added to save the current damaged state of all ships in the game.

Third, repair ships need to be added as pog objects. And player hirable repair ship wingmen need to be created.

Fourth, the damage mod must be trimmed down in features to match this design.

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