So, I was thinking about the building system again recently. Taking a peek at the city concept image dating back from the Kickstarter, I realized how difficult it would be to identify damage on those buildings, should enemies attack your settlement and take a few swings at them.
Currently, houses seem to get recognized as a whole project or entity upon their construction–or at least it seems to be becoming that way. Eventually, I assume we can define and rename structures based on their use, ownership, and combining or splitting them for various reasons (like building two separate towers, attach them with a bridge, then be able to recognize it all as one “structure”. So where does this play in with damage?
Well, I think recognizing a structure can also mean that it could have the capability to recognize “damage”–changes to its current design. Therefore, if something like a door or wall got removed, taken off, or just a few voxels chipped off of it, the structure’s health or status would reflect this to some degree.
From what I remember, Radiant has been trying to avoid outright numbers (such as unit health, which is currently a numerical value but they previous mentioned it’s a placeholder for now). So I’m interested as to how damage could be recognized in a building, fence, or wall without shoving your face into the model to visually check it or resort solely to numbers.
Well they also have basic physics right now. Maybe that’s how they’ll do it, and it would really be decided on how hard the hit was on said object? Maybe?
What about a simple alert icon above the structure, like the way units get the “Zzz” thing when sleeping? You could then look at it and see the holes in the walls or whatever, and then order your hearthlings to fix it (or not, if it’s only minor damage and other things need fixing more urgently).
The icon’s not a bad idea. Seeing a sort of difference for ‘minor’ and ‘major’ damage would be pretty neat to see, but I don’t really know what variables would control the distinction at this point. What if you could control when and where the damage icon/health bar/etc. shows up? Maybe it only shows up in the building view mode, or if you click the structure. I don’t think clicking buildings should be the only way to check, though, as it feels like it’d get too micro-manage-y.
But being able to select where the icon appears could be useful–if you have a long road with houses on either side, you could instruct the icon to appear over each roof, or in front of the structure in case they have radically different heights and it gets hard to see or discern them.
I was thinking more of having just a single speech bubble type thing, and then actually looking at the damage to see how bad it is. May be harder to keep track of if you have an awful lot of buildings and they’re all damaged I guess.
So, like a notification? I can see having messages like “House 3 is under attack!” being useful, but I guess the problem would be how the player would be reminded afterwards and be able to check their structures for damage without looking at every individual building.
Unless you meant a single icon for each structure or a list, notating some sort of damage to it. General workers/builder classes could then be automatically/maually set to recognize and repair these structures–possibly another tactic for the “Defense” tab? Workers get pre-designated to a certain area or list of “structures”, and would be tasked with repairing them or fortifying them during battle?
This could even open the possibility of activating multiple “strategies” at once–say for example, you have a town with 10 workers and crafters (military units are excluded). Four of them are “non-builders”, like Trappers, Farmers, and Weavers. These four could be set to the “Red Alert” command, while the remaining six would be set under the hypothetical “Repair under Fire”/“Bolster Defenses” command, focusing on their specific assignments. If the fighting gets too overwhelming, you could set all groups to an “All-Out Red Alert” mode.
(These are starting to sound a little tactic-oriented, so I might re-mention them in one of the tactics threads as well. I figured these ones related to the structure-recognition concept enough to keep them.)
Yes, but like a permanent one. Ie, so long as the building is damaged, the pop-up will be there (well, I guess you can choose to hide it or w/e, but the point is it won’t go away on its own). A bit like how sleeping hearthlings all have the “Zzz” speech bubble above them throughout their sleep.
Yeah, that’s right along the same lines as I thought! Something not too intrusive, considering how many structures one person might have in a given area.
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