Impact Damage Changes in 1.9
Hey everyone, 1.9 is now really close to release and we’ve seen a lot of interest in the upcoming impact damage changes, so now seems like a good time to do a deeper dive to explain our motivation, goals, changes and future ideas on the topic.
Along with this document we also recommend watching the Dev Diary live stream on the topic which you can find on Youtube and Twitch. Afterwards if you want to see how it plays out in practice you can already find many preview videos made by independent Content Creators. We hope this document will help you understand the changes better and that you will enjoy the changes.
MOTIVATION
In the 1.8 version of the game, prior impact damage is very inconsistent and high. This means landing jumps, driving across bumpy terrain often damages, destroys or outright shatters your structures. This is ok for some situations but is very frustrating in most.
The source of these issues is the underlying physics engine and the data that is supplied to our damage calculating algorithms. So the task of improving the experience seemed very challenging from the get go!
As a side note It is also worth noting that the inconsistency means that it is possible to find both good and bad experiences in the 1.8 version and it is easy to unintentionally cherry pick one or the other, which further complicates the issue.
GOALS
To summarise our goals were then to make the impact damage more consistent, lower in general, make the damage persistent, maintain existing combat and hopefully make the game look even better. A long list of lofty goals!
IMPACT DAMAGE CALCULATIONS
Fortunately we have been able to calculate damage in a new and completely different way. Without going into too much technical detail we are now using both collision events and accelerations data compiled over short periods of time, which in general leads to much more consistent results.
With this new approach we are also able to distribute damage based on distance rather than connections between blocks like in the 1.8 version. This leads to much more realistic behaviour where structures gradually “crumble” in an area rather than one block at a time.
However unfortunately we have had mixed results with this method when calculating damage between structures colliding with each other. So in the end we are combining the new method with the old for structure to structure collisions, leading to improved but still somewhat inconsistent damage for these collisions.
We have also worked hard on improving damage calculations for walkers so that they shouldn’t lose their feet quite as much when walking across terrain. Similarly you should also be seeing less damage from internal structure collisions such as when structures perform clapping-like actions.
Additionally just like weapon damage, all impact damage is now persistent and visualised on the blocks – just like you’re used to seeing in combat in 1.8.
POWER CORE EXPLOSIONS
Finally we have made blocks that use power cores explode on death. This makes the structures get destroyed in bigger chunks instead of becoming more and more crippled, applies forces to dead blocks and creates some visual explosions that many have missed from earlier versions of the game and requested. In the start we had a rather high damage of up to around 50% of the neighbouring blocks’ health, which led to a lot of chain reactions when clusters of these blocks existed in structures.
While it could be argued that this effect would create more interesting building challenges, where players would have to shield their power core using blocks, we have ultimately decided that it is better to focus on keeping existing structures working more or less like before and not change the game too much on this occasion. So this number was later changed to 20% and with the latest version it is only 5%. Hopefully this should still create the desired effects we’re aiming for without affecting too many existing structures too much.
We should also note that this is something that we will be keeping an eye out for in the future and we may for example make different explosions for different blocks at some point.
THE FUTURE
Since we have many other exciting features and fixes to work on and we don’t want to hold back all the other cool things part of 1.9 this is what we had time for this time around. Fortunately Trailmakers is a living game and this is already the second iteration, so we may very well come back and revisit it in the future – especially once you have all had some time to try out the new version and provided us with feedback.
Some things that we are considering already:
1) Make different explosions for some of the power cores using blocks and possibly exclude some outright.
2) Improve the block damage overlay, possibly introduce scratches, deformations and other effects to make the damage look even cooler.
3) Adjust damage calculations to better fit future gameplay and different sizes of structure and impact speeds.
4) Maintain some of the speed of the leftover blocks after a collision to allow them to take additional impact damage further enhancing the crumbling effect.
5) Optimise the significant lag spikes that sometimes appear when smashing large structures into things.
That’s it for now. We hope you can see what we tried to do when you get your hands on the update.
Thank you for playing Trailmakers.
