Weapon Hit Chance

from Sins Forums

For my WIP Babylon 5 mod I wanted a bigger emphasis on weapon hit and miss chance. Unfortunately I seem to have hit a a roadblock; from my early testings it seems that the game converts a hit chance lower than 1 (=100%) simply into a damage penalty.

Now it can be that I am just insanely lucky and basically all weapon fire by a stroke of insane fortune hits the targets every time whenever I'm watching, but I very much doubt that. As it stands when one of my modded ships fire a main beam weapon for say 1500 damage at an unshielded target (0% migitation), and that weapon has only a 30% chance to hit, every shot fired seems to hit but only for roughly 400 damage.

Now my question is, is there any known workaround to actually allow weapons to truly miss (or perhaps it is tied to a certain value I'm unaware of, say below a 70% chance to hit the game starts reducing damage instead of actually missing?). I would love to see dynamic battles where the entire enemy fleet can be destroyed in seconds by a twist of fate as every enemy weapon hits its mark, or turn out to be virtually untouchable because the enemy weapons keep missing.

Then something else someone may be able to help me with; I am trying to adapt the Meteor Strike vs Planets attack to be fireable from a capital ship. In itself I managed to do this, but when the meteor fires from the ship it hits the planet on a random spot, often flying through the planet and hitting it on the other side. Obviously this looks silly, and I tried everything to fix it. Even when the only thing I change is the Raze Planet projectileTravelEffectName to projectileTravelEffectName "Ability_MeteorStrikePlanetTravel" the meteors still strike the planet randomly. So I figured the randomness must be in that Ability_MeteorStrikePlanetTravel.particle file, but I have great difficulty figuring out what exactly in that file determines where the meteors land. Any pointers to this would be greatly appreciated.

modding
9,972 views 7 replies
Reply #1 from Sins Forums Top

For the most part, accuracy is just another damage modifier. You can't make weapons miss graphically anyway....

I recall reading that abilities can have chances of success, but I don't know how that works.

Reply #2 from Sins Forums Top

Use a missile effect but make the travel particle a beam?

Missiles do "miss" so that's your best bet. Think autocannons do too.

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Reply #3 from Sins Forums Top

Missiles will always hit eventually.

"Projectile" class weapons can 'miss' traversing targets graphically, but that's an error in the prediction code. They are actually hits as far as the game is concerned (the shield effect goes off even) and you can't control when the misses happen.

Reply #4 from Sins Forums Top

Ah, okay.

Reply #5 from Sins Forums Top

And besides, realistic accuracy would cause enormous lags.

Consider Supreme Commander: all projectiles are physical objects, not just graphics. In larger battles (100 units vs 100) it will kill my X2 @ 2300mhz.

Now imagine the same with 1000 vs 1000 Sins ships, with all of them firing multiple shots.

Reply #6 from Sins Forums Top

There are lines in the Gameplay.constants file that say they are about accuracy.  However, like most of Sins's coding, no-one really knows what they do.

Reply #7 from Sins Forums Top

Quoting cszolee, reply 5
And besides, realistic accuracy would cause enormous lags.

Consider Supreme Commander: all projectiles are physical objects, not just graphics. In larger battles (100 units vs 100) it will kill my X2 @ 2300mhz.

Now imagine the same with 1000 vs 1000 Sins ships, with all of them firing multiple shots.
End of cszolee's quote

Ah, but there's a big difference between having to run a physics simulation to measure impacts, and simply rolling a metaphorical dice and seeing if it succeeds. The latter, while cheating, would not appreciably take any effort to use.

Given that there are bonuses to accuracy and the like, and as far as I'm aware they don't automatically grant a bonus to damage (The Akkan's +tohit does not seem to automatically grant +115% damage, for example), it may bear looking into.

Suggestion: Try shooting at Fighters with something easily visible like a pulse laser, and see if it always hits or not. They theoretically have an accuracy attached to them. Also try a map with the... uh, is it debris fields that grant a penalty to accuracy? If it ends up being a penalty to damage afterall, then global settings are likely to be the same.