Messing with armor

Hello all!

Kudos on the brilliant work so many of you have done that have allowed me to get to this point!

I've been playing with vehicle armor in an attempt to make it a little more interesting than one hit kills (which the lighter vehicles display when fighting each other) and was hoping someone might have some insights as to how the penetration system works.

So far I've found that most AT weapons rely on the explosiverating to determine wether a vehicle is damaged or destroyed. By setting the rating to 0 (mostly been playing with sabot ammo) the damage is decided by the penetration value. Strangely though the penetration seems to ignore the occupants (but not the guy standing on the other side of the vehicle - you can hit multiple vehicles with penetrating shots and amusingly ricochets!) so I started fiddling with values but I can't seem to make a cannon round kill someone inside a vehicle. 

I lowered the penetration coefficient of the materials so that bullets could penetrate but still the cannon rounds don't affect the guy inside.

So does anyone have any ideas?

Oh and think i know why bullets penetrate the stock value abrams tank, the turret ring has the wrong material on it! When I figure out this penetration business I'll try and find out what material it is and see if it can be made bullet proof without upsetting other things.

I have also found that the vehicle health system is not quite working, which maybe why they made them so explody. If a tank is damaged enough to loose turret function, repairing it will not fix the turret. Sigh.

Why oh why did they not open the code for us? Such potential lost...

Welcome to the forum DogNine!

Hope you found us quite easily. Shame we can't get on the front page of google still. : (

Anyway, be interesting what your findings are about armour values and penetrating shots. I myself don't use armour that much and have never really altered values concerning it.

Keep trying though and keep us updated, I'm sure we can adopt any sort of improvement you find.

Cheers

MD

Another option some have played with is using Lua scripting to make the vehicle invulnerable and creating your own damage system. Our resident mission making expert tjdagger would know the most, and he probably already has bits of working code. From what I've seen, you can track hits and apply damage to specific components of the vehicle (and the occupants). There are probably some limitations to this method, as there always seem to be with this game.

Something like this could probably be built as an EDX module.

Thanks for the replies. I'm far from familiar with Lua but it doesn't look too bad, the only concern with scripts is the drain on the system, as it is things get, um, wobbly is the best way to describe it. I've noticed that if there is too much strain in the game the physics start to play up and things start jumping about.

How demanding are the mission scripts?

What I was hoping to do was create better game play in combined arms instead of the bang its dead way things seem to play out. Being able to disable weapons and kill crew was to be a big part of it...