Penetration and Collisions.

[ecksile]

OK so Penetrations and Collisions. Penetrating bullets is it possible? I would think in the world of the wastes most the wooden houses would be pretty fragile for sitting there for 200 years all burnt and taking rain that doesn't exist in the game but could of existed before you came along..anyways is it possible to throw some bullets through different kinds of materials in the game? I had seen someone had made it so lasers penetrate people but what about materials? I also cant remember if the Sniper rifle can penetrate people by default? Would I have to just edit something in the ballistics properties?

 

Now for collisions. Ive noticed some things that irritate me in the waste land like not being able to shoot bullets at people on the other side of cars through the cars window openings. Or shooting and hitting invisible corners on buildings and other various objects that you can clearly see through. Also not being able to walk through certain gaps (that your not touching on any sides) that you just cant seem to get through. Your clearly crouched enough and skinny enough to fit but the game just hates you and wont you let you pass. Is it fixable? I was gonna look into the games meshes for walls and trees and such and see if it was from extra vertices with transparent textures? Or is it the bounding box? Also idk if anyone else has noticed but people/creatures/raiders whatever can shoot YOU through a fence but you cant shoot them through it...

 

So last but not least just wondering if its fixable or if its just another great bug of the havok engine. Thank you for your time and have a good night :thanks:

 

OH! P.S. Gore mod? Split people in half? Blow them up including torso and have guts fly everywhere? Better head amputation that doesn't look like their jaw line is still there? More gore like in Soldier of Fortune or House of the dead where you can blast holes through people? Melt people with acid and make it look like their just a steaming pile of blood, flesh, and bone? Is it possible???

 

KTHNXBAI<3!

[SpeedyB64]

The collision system the game uses is quite old at this point, it uses alternate meshes in the nif files of the object, usually they are simplified versions of the original mesh so they take less processing. The problem is, to do what you want would require someone to recreate the collision mesh for each object and make it more detailed.

 

The player's collision is basically just a capsule shape, it doesn't change no matter what you do, you MIGHT be able to edit it but I haven't messed around with the character meshes much.

[Cakester]

The collision system the game uses is quite old at this point, it uses alternate meshes in the nif files of the object, usually they are simplified versions of the original mesh so they take less processing. The problem is, to do what you want would require someone to recreate the collision mesh for each object and make it more detailed.

 

The player's collision is basically just a capsule shape, it doesn't change no matter what you do, you MIGHT be able to edit it but I haven't messed around with the character meshes much.

 

You can use any shape for the collision of a custom creature. But the less sophisticated the collision, usually the better performance. However if you are very careful you may be able to get some pretty complex collision without to much of a tax.

[Baelkin]

I think all hit detection is done using model collision boxes depending on the type of the "actor" in question (ie. everything that isn't just the groundplane in the game), and since collision is pretty simplified on most models you encounter situations where you can't shoot through car windows and so on.

 

The reasoning behind using this kind of collision is that it's much less resource demanding compared to making accurate collision - for instance if you wanted completely accurate collision on a model of a car wreck so you can shoot through windows and whatnot, you'd need a quite complex collision box compared to just making a collision box that approximates the shape of the model. It's the same reason you sometimes can't put smaller objects into larger ones in-game, even though the space graphically looks like it's there.

 

As for penetrating bullets I think such a feature has to either be coded as part of the engine, or you'd have to somehow make the bullet projectile ignore collision on certain types of actors. For instance if you could separately disable collision on environment actors but not creature actors, then it'd probably be possible but how you'd do it in Fallout 3 I have no idea.

 

Lastly, due to the way the game engine s programmed, making a mod that allows you to blow holes in people is pretty much out of the question without finding some way of rewriting the entire way hit detection and BSDismembermentInstances work. The reason it's possible in Soldier of Fortune is because that's the way the game is programmed. You might be able to define more dismemberment parts in Fallout 3 than what's actually necessary allowing for more complex decapitation/blow holed'ness, but it'd require utilization of not-so-commonly used extra sets of arms and body decapitation entries than normal. For instance, a normal setup actor body model (armour, clothing, creature, whatever) would use a decap "zone" for each arm, leg and head on the model allowing the game to split that limb in half on a decapitation event, and if I remember correctly, you can basically setup any model to use more than two arms, legs, torso segments and so on, which would allow for more complex decapitation. This would however have certain implications when you use VATS as there would be far more parts to aim at than usual as VATS directly feeds into a model's decapitation information when determining the limbs you can fire at.

 

It is also possible to make custom decapitation models which gets added on decapitation, so if you wanted you could pretty easily add bones sticking out of the decapitated limb or having the spine stick out of the neck at a head decapitation or pretty much whatever you'd like (Turn the end of a limb into a chicken drumstick or whatever), all you'd need to do is model those parts, set them up correctly as decap parts in your 3d editor and then designate them as the decap parts for the model in NifSkope.

 

As for making it look like you are melting people with acid or other grueling "fatalities" I don't see why it shouldn't be possible since you can make people melt into piles of goo with plasma weapons and piles of ash with laser/fire weapons. How you'd go about doing it and getting them to work through the GECK I can't say, but I can't think of anything technical that would make it impossible, except maybe the GECK only supporting a certain amount of animations/models for special deaths. If that is the case, you could probably use FOSE to work around it as think that has been done with re-loading animations.

[Phoynix]

if by penetration you ment say fire a sniperrifle and blow though 5 people in a straigh line, yes the game supports this.

I have yet to work out how to get a tracer to work with it hower, basicly you have to use a empty projectile file at this point.

[ecksile]

"Lastly, due to the way the game engine s programmed, making a mod that allows you to blow holes in people is pretty much out of the question without finding some way of rewriting the entire way hit detection and BSDismembermentInstances work."

I don't see why you couldn't make it another decap that is just modeled to look like a whole is blown in a person using transparent parts on the textures?. Or perhaps a just a different hit decal. Hmm..

 

"This would however have certain implications when you use VATS as there would be far more parts to aim at than usual as VATS directly feeds into a model's decapitation information when determining the limbs you can fire at."

Then what about melee blade weapons in vats you can only choose the whole body rather then just a single limb. Also i remember reading somewhere that you have to add the attack able limbs in vats. I'm not sure if they meant fix the dismemberment in the model or not though.

 

I'm not question you knowledge as you have played with the decap on models more then i have for your armors. I haven't gotten a chance to look into any of these ideas yet i was just posting to get a basic idea if it should even be attempted so please excuse my ignorance. My knowledge is based off the source engine so I'm used to a little bit more perfection in the engine.

 

 

PS. how do do the little quote boxes is a secret?

[Baelkin]

I'm not question you knowledge as you have played with the decap on models more then i have for your armors. I haven't gotten a chance to look into any of these ideas yet i was just posting to get a basic idea if it should even be attempted so please excuse my ignorance. My knowledge is based off the source engine so I'm used to a little bit more perfection in the engine.

 

 

PS. how do do the little quote boxes is a secret?

 

I wasn't really thinking that you were questioning anything and for the most what I wrote above is just based upon how you'd normally implement a model and the standard capabilities of the game engine. Don't take it as a fact as it could be wrong due to my lacking complete knowledge of how the engine works, it's just a hypothesis based on conjectures.

 

I'm not saying that making what you want is impossible, it will just take some creative thinking on your part using the features that already are available in the engine as we don't have a proper SDK to modify it like you have using the Source engine.

 

As for the quote boxes you have to insert a quote end tag at the end of whatever you want to quote like this:

 

[quote]I like pie. [/quote]

[Skree000]

afaictell, the source engine uses a material-based penetration system.

 

if you made a level and textured the walls as glass or paper, youd be able to shoot through the whole level.

 

 

this is a simple check that the raycaster does when you fire a projectile. If the surface it intersects is listed as solid, it only penetrates x distance, like why you can shoot thru corners a few inches even in concrete for example.

if it detects a surface listed as permeable it goes through it.

 

These are penetration amounts that are predetermined in a list so the game knows how far the bullet can pass before it is considered stopped. (why you can only shoot through 5 heads with an awp for example and not 6 or 7)

 

the penetration amount works in tandem with the force of the projectile.

 

in Fo3 we have half of the forumula, our projectiles have a 'force' value which is used to determine knockback amounts.

 

The only missing piece are the flags on the materials to determine that it's made of, and a list of penetration amounts for those materials.

Oh and the code logic to hook it up

 

for multi-material meshes such as a wooden board nailed to a concrete slab, youd expect the bullets to pass through the wood farther than the concrete, so this would have to be done in the nif itself, yup, using collision volumes to define the shapes.

 

since geck doesnt use bsp, its pretty crippled in its ability to easily implement this. Since each and every mesh in the game would (as mentioned above) require an extensive overhaul.

 

Personally i would put this off as a pipe dream unless you get someone really hardcore into programming, as well as an army of artists to go through each asset one by one and set things up right.

 

This is the kind of thing that would need to be planned out from the start. going back to redo everything now would take id say over a year.