Anyone for a trip to mars?

[TrooperScooperMKII]

Actually, IIRC the pressure difference isn't as important as we think (or rather, it wouldn't make much of a difference in the minute or so you have pre-mortem from other causes..) the big thing is not holding your breath (which is why you pass out quickly....) as skin is strong enough to withstand the (relatively) mild pressure difference. I mean 10 meters down is twice the pressure of atmosphere, and you can get quite a bit further than that in diving.

 

the thing with temperature is that in a vacuum it takes a LONG time for heat etc. to transfer out... you lose consciousness in 15 seconds or however long it takes for the oxygen already in your body to be depleted. Exposing a body part (eg a hand) is actually not too terrible, there was a guy who went up 15 miles in an open gondola and lost pressure to his right hand, went through with the mission (his hand became limp and hurt a lot) but when he came back down he was fine.

Vacuum

 

Just want to add that the big thing in physics/life etc. is CHANGE not quantity, eg we're all speeding along at 1000s of mph on earth's surface etc but unless that suddenly stops we're fine. I suspect the issue with the pressure chamber is the rate at which the pressure dropped rather than the pressure itself...

also I think that it's not a linear effect, i.e. going from 80 degrees to forty degrees air temp is probably more noticeable/dramatic on what you'd want to wear than going from -20 to -60.

Edited September 8, 2012 by TrooperScooperMKII

[devinpatterson]

the thing with temperature is that in a vacuum it takes a LONG time for heat etc. to transfer out...

 

Yeah true, vacuum is an excellent insulator. Maybe I won't worry about the cold ratings for the martian wasteland. I still want to include it though for the cyro facility. I love the idea (kind of like crysis warhead) where it is so freaking cold you literally are dying by the second.

 

you lose consciousness in 15 seconds or however long it takes for the oxygen already in your body to be depleted.

 

Yeah, sucks because if you take a big breath, your going to have serious damage to your lungs when the vacuum hits. Although I guess if your a freak like those guys on the power team that blows up hot water bottles like a baloon, you might have the diaphragm and the auxiliary breathing muscles to compress 1 atmosphere in your chest.

 

Exposing a body part (eg a hand) is actually not too terrible, there was a guy who went up 15 miles in an open gondola and lost pressure to his right hand, went through with the mission (his hand became limp and hurt a lot) but when he came back down he was fine.

Vacuum

 

Yeah I can't check it right now (for some reason it's down for me ATM), but wasn't there a guy that passed out at the 2 minute mark. Granted he was probably a astronaut and had ridiculous lung capacity/fitness, but it does show a wide range depending on the individual. That's why I was thinking if we go off of health, and change the dead money script to be a set hp loss per a second (instead of the way it's set up to be a fraction of your hp/sec) it would allow higher level characters to survive an extra half minute (or whatever we set the hp loss at). It just seems more appropriate in view of a heroic story line.

 

So if any of you saw the bottles as weapons thread you might have noticed Weijiesen clue'd me in to MPS's and made a little mini-tutorial. I'v been playing with them a bit and I think I have a good setup to show when the suit has loss it's pressure/integrity. I'm going to change the mps to be more white and a little more transparent as well as adding a hissing sound (escaping gas), but this is the base for of the special effect. The video is a test for the burning tribe fire/oil bomb on the ghost warriors mod, but it gives an idea;

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UAoX5H8PO7o&feature=youtu.be

 

 

So we place this effect on the suit when it hits 0 health and it will look like your O2 escaping. It will be a obvious sign that your in deep sh*t and need to take action. It's also a lot less intrusive than throwing up a msg box, plus it looks a lot cooler.

 

I'd also like to use it when robotic bosses or mini-bosses are down 50+% of their health, have em start smoking up a storm. Then maybe when there down to 10% health put the fire effect (from "She" in Honest Hearts) on them (and of course 0% health is kaboom). I think it will make a good progression where you can physically see your wearing the boss or mini-boss actors down and making progress.

 

Ideally I'd like to make it niviscontroller node so we can turn it on and off with a simple playanimation command, but if that isn't possible I can rig it to a meshless item that's equipped when we need it.

 

Also the smoke will be good for a lot of our other mods, like (mini)bosses in sunset (bill, mark VI's etc), burning tribe members that have their flaming fire gecko skin armor, and maybe ed-e when he's low on hp (for the hardcore that don't have instant healing after a battle.

[devinpatterson]

OBTW how do you guys feel about the pressure breach for suits being at 0 health? We probably won't know until we actually do some play testing, but maybe it makes more sense to have the pressure breach when a suit is at 50% or something....

[TrooperScooperMKII]

It depends on how the suits handle in game, maybe a casual progression eg. air consumption rate increases as the suit's health decreases, and at zero you have just enough time to screech bloody murder and dash/kangaroo walk to the nearest airlock. :sweat:

Oh yeah wasn't knocking the temperature or air or anything, I mean even if this wasn't, well, Fallout, the suits should be protecting against temperature/rads etc to a greater or lesser extent, and some might be better than others (or have only part of their systems working properly...)

[devinpatterson]

It depends on how the suits handle in game, maybe a casual progression eg. air consumption rate increases as the suit's health decreases, and at zero you have just enough time to screech bloody murder and dash/kangaroo walk to the nearest airlock. :sweat:

 

That might be possible. I'm going to be using NVSE's GetEquippedCurrentHealth for the armor/suit, because it's my understanding that when armor reaches 0, it's not automatically removed, but it can't be equipped until repaired. I could be wrong about that, it's just from memory...don't remember my character being in his underwear when my armor was shot.

 

so I was going to use the function and if it equals 0 health, have the smoke/mist activate. But it returns the actual health of the armor, so I could make 4 or 5 levels depending on the armor health and 4 or 5 differnt sized of smoke/mist clouds from just a little whispy all the way to smoke/mist pouring out like crazy. The only thing is, there is like over a dozen suits (when you include them all) and the script would have to check which armor your wearing then against each one having 4 or 5 different levels of health....because each armor has radically different health. 12+ blocks of 4 or 5 if/else statements, not a big deal, maybe an extra 15 minutes of typing. As long as it doesn't affect performance, and I doubt something like that takes up more than a 1/10 of 1% of a cpu's cycles, probably less.......

[TrooperScooperMKII]

Yes, that's the thing that worries me, how difficult it would be to model it.

Given that these suits are more astronaut enviro-suits than space trooper power armor (at least initially) combat would probably be... undesirable... to say the least.

[devinpatterson]

Yes, that's the thing that worries me, how difficult it would be to model it.

 

Oh, I'm not going to do any new models from scratch (for the suits). Most will have re-textures (color and insignia) with some small(ish) edits to the meshes. For instance bigger O2 tubes on the T51B models (ie T51d), maybe more emittance on the all purpose science suit visor. Enough to make them different, but still recognizable as US fallout technology.

 

Given that these suits are more astronaut enviro-suits than space trooper power armor (at least initially) combat would probably be... undesirable... to say the least.

 

Yeah, some suits have under 200 health.....best to have some suit repair kits or extras handy if you come under heavy fire, frequently.

Edited September 9, 2012 by devinpatterson

[maryberry01]

I poked around here for a bit, sounded pretty neat. Keep up the good work there Rex (lol I mean Devin xP)

[greenknightfury]

Really liking the idea of the more fragile suits (much like how fragile the radiation suits themselves are, one good smack and you are wearing something with 1% of it's health left lol) until you get the better ones. Of course if we are looking for some variety in models to use for them..all I can suggest is talk with the guy on Beyond Boulder Dome about the Dome suits model lol that would fit rather well I think.vOf course we have at least 3 models just from what we are talking about grabbing from the base game: Rad/Science suit, Modded T51, Space suits like those in Repconn (which would be perfect "middle of the road" suits, built in rebreather but not all that durable) in fact I'd love to see a recolored spacesuit in Vault Tec colors lol (perhaps a special model with better protection and slight stat increases..something like the stealthsuit from OWB, midpoint between it's normal form and power armor as it was midway between the assassin suit and power armor).

[devinpatterson]

Really liking the idea of the more fragile suits (much like how fragile the radiation suits themselves are, one good smack and you are wearing something with 1% of it's health left lol) until you get the better ones.

 

It'll be a great equalizer, since we're shooting for very high level mod (but I'll level it later, so other players can enjoy it). In principal I like the idea of it being an achilles heel through the whole mod, but I want the last half to be *very* fast paced. I really want to reinforce the idea that your just behind Presper and to have any chance of catching him your going to have be at full throttle. I just don't think I can pull that off if the player has to scrounge new armor or repair kits after each battle....it's just going to completely kill the momentum. But the normal power armor has ridiculously high health, probably won't need to repair that more than a couple times in the whole mod.

 

Kind of playing with the idea of a time limit to increase the tension/pace.

 

Tthe other reason for introducing the armored suits later, is I don't want to fatigue the player too much having to constantly repair/scrounge armor when the heavies start beating on him/her. I think it will be good in the begining to really reinforce the deadly environment, but if it goes on too long it's going to turn some players off. And it's always nice for the player to have a sense of achievement by leveling up.....in this case one of his/her most important upgrades can be the suits.

 

But we'll mess around with it, do some play testing and see how far into the mod to start introducing some decent armored suits.

 

Of course if we are looking for some variety in models to use for them..all I can suggest is talk with the guy on Beyond Boulder Dome about the Dome suits model lol that would fit rather well I think.

 

I'll give that a shot. I tried contacting one of the authors about the primates, which are needed for the biogel/brain facility (along with some other mods), assuming we have research centers for all the alien tech, but never received an answer. I'll try contacting rjhelms84 directly.

 

But for the pressure suit (the equivalent of teh dome suits) I was actually thinking something along two different lines. One is a half-life suit (along with it's basic AI), partly as a homage to the game, but also because it just "fits" somehow. The other way would be combat armor as a base, but retexture the exposed flesh meshes (just hands and face, I think) with black balistic cloth, and add a rebreather along with a different (more inclusive) helmet. Mostly because I want to make them different but not too different.....I'd like each suit to be recognizable as a realistic extension of U.S. fallout tech. So I guess the order of the day is little tweaks.

 

vOf course we have at least 3 models just from what we are talking about grabbing from the base game: Rad/Science suit, Modded T51, Space suits like those in Repconn (which would be perfect "middle of the road" suits, built in rebreather but not all that durable)

 

Yep and combat armor

 

in fact I'd love to see a recolored spacesuit in Vault Tec colors lol (perhaps a special model with better protection and slight stat increases..something like the stealthsuit from OWB, midpoint between it's normal form and power armor as it was midway between the assassin suit and power armor).

 

Good points :thumbsup:

 

I'v been focused on the gov suits like the United States Space Administration (USSA), army/marines, etc re-textures I didn't even think about private corp's suit re-textures. Yeah, that's going to be cool and add more variety (not to mention strategic options).

 

The assassin suit totally slipped my mind (which is weird because its one of my western characters primary armor, with a duster over it for "atmosphere"). Great base for the half-life hev suit....a little re-text, minor changes to the mesh, add a helmet and good to go.

 

Also when the player gets the alien shield (Inertia suppression field) should we just assume it's "air tight", if not that could be one of it's balancing factors. Another could be that it can't be worn with anything but light armor...power armor and other bulky stuff just doesn't fit in the shields bubble, too big. That could mean that, practically speaking, the shield is only of use indoors. Might help a lot with it's potentially overwhelming protection in re: to game balance.