So then I put him through the wall...

Collateral damage... we get a little of it here and there (mostly just mayhem missions), but I'd like to see more of it, all over the place.

I know it'd be a task of "heroic" proportions to do it well, but I'm pretty sure our dev team is up to the task.

The way I'd do it (if I had any semblance of programming skills beyond my keybinds) would be to create a new damage type (or maybe just "borrow" falling damage, since they'd be unlikely to mingle) called Collateral Damage. Collateral Damage would be placed on any attacks with a Knockback effect. Collateral Damage would only affect Objects and Breakable Objects (Breakable objects would be much like existing Objects in function except they couldn't be targeted individually, they'd only be affected by AOE... they would be things like windows, wall sections, doors, tables, statues, stairways, and so on). The Collateral Damage effect would be a narrow cone effect (wider cone or even a radius if applied to something with a wide radius KB, like a M30 Grenade). So when you hit someone with a KB effect, and they go flying back, the attack is simultaneously damaging any breakable objects in their path.

Now here's the tricky part, and I have no idea how the programmers would wedge it in to the system... There would need to be an additional process in the attack that measures the total KB effect the target is suffering from, and then use that number to scale the range of the Collateral Damage cone. So if someone's KB is less than 1.00 (they're just being knocked down), the Collateral Damage Cone ends up having no range, and only smashes something if you're right on top of it. If they have 0.00 KB (they didn't even fall, likely the result of KB protection), the Collateral Damage effect doesn't even go off. If however, the KB the target is affected by is greater than 1.00 and the target gets knocked back, the process scales the range of the Collateral Damage cone to match the distance the target was knocked back. As such, if the target was knocked back further than the distance to a breakable wall section, the wall section will be destroyed during the attack, allowing the target to fly backwards even further.

Theoretically, Breakable Objects could even cause some PBAoE damage or debuffs when they are destroyed, creating a whole new combat dynamic that makes KB desirable in this game (le Gasp!). Maybe getting knocked through a door or an office table doesn't do alot, but getting knocked through more durable things like a cement wall or a stone cliff face (requiring a great deal more Collateral Damage to accomplish, at least in one blow) would be appropriately catastrophic (and just epic to watch... so much more satisfying than knocking a Council Marksman onto the other side of the cave wall where he shoots at you but you can't shoot back till he pops out of it...)

I know this would be a metric buttload of work, modifying every KB power in the game, and worse, having to add all sorts of breakable objects to maps and even modify the maps themselves to incorporate break-through walls, all for the sake of a visual effect. But think about how dynamic that visual effect could be. Think about things like the DC vs. Mortal Combat game where you can knock your opponent all the way into a different battlefield, or the end of the fight scene to the "Hope" trailer for The Old Republic. Imagine a bunch of Energy Blasters ganging up and knocking the Kronos Titan THROUGH a War Wall! It would add a new dimension to the gameplay in CoH I believe, one very well suited to the comic book origins of the genre (and the old Champions pen & paper game which was significantly inspirational to the development of CoH).

A lot of us have tried various ideas for collateral damage / destructible environments over the years, and the same issues with it keep coming back up to more or less derail the idea.

The primary issue being:

If the "normal/outdoors/world map" environment has ANYTHING that's destructible, you can pretty much assume that it will ALWAYS be destroyed.

Within hours of something like this being placed into effect, all of Paragon City would be more destroyed than the worst sections of BoomTown - and it would pretty much stay like that continuously.

If you set the destructible items to "repair / respawn" with any sufficient frequency to kind of prevent this, you'd have the entire city being torn down and rebuilt instantly before your eyes - talk about immersion breaking.

Now, in instanced missions it could possibly work, but there's also the problem that the rooms in missions aren't necessarily actually contiguous. If you could break through a wall at some points, you'd either be looking at the "horrible black void" on the other side, or you'd actually be looking at some other point on the map (usually another 'floor' of the map)

What would need to happen for instanced missions would be a complete remake of mapes specifically for destructibility.

Soulwind: you forgot the other primary reasons Geometry modification is largely limited and will likely "never" happen.

Network Bandwidth
Processing Power

Not everybody who plays the game has a AMD Phenom II or an Intel I7 coupled with a RadeonHD 5800 series or a Geforce GTX 400 series graphics card. Not everybody who plays the game has a 12meg synchronous internet connection with the CoH servers.

I realize that anytime the subject of geometry modification is brought up, somebody inevitably brings up Red Faction, which has done Geometry-modification in a multiplayer game. There's one key difference between Red Faction: Guerrilla and City of Heroes, other than the processing requirements. Red Faction: Guerrilla only supports up to 16 players on any single map instance.

That's it. Just 16 players.

Implementing Geometry Modification, any kind of geomeotry modification, is both computationally expensive and network intensive. There is a very good reason that Red Faction is the only video game series to make extensive use of Geometry Modification.

The problem goes beyond simply designing map objects that can be destroyed. Map objects have to be destroyed, then tracked, across all systems. So if somebody breaks through a wall and then connects two rooms, that new geometry state has to be communicated to everybody else in the map. Not only does the geometry state have to be communicated, but if anybody else is attacking or disrupting the object, that object state has to be transmitted as well. This is why the breakable objects in Mayhem Missions and the STF are largely static options with only a few animation effects before they disappear from the map are unloaded from the graphics and base processing systems.

This fundamental limit on how much information has to be tracked, transmitted, and then disseminated is why most games fudge things like Breakable walls and barriers. You can have breakable objects, or objects with different physical states pre-loaded, and thus give the perception that somebody has to break through a loose wall. Batman Arkham Asylum stands as a good example of this. At one point in the game you have to blow out the walls in order to rescue a hostage. Rather than a full-on geometry modification, the walls themselves are their own objects, thus saving on overall processing power and state tracking.

This type of destructible object barrier has been in City of Heroes for a long time; Eden trial with it's moss and rock walls; Orange Bagel with it's magical prison doors; council tunnels with their prisons; and Longbow bases with their prisons are all instances of these types of destructible object barriers. These limited target-able object barriers are the best way to implement a destroyable obstruction that requires as little processing power and network bandwidth as possible.

Implementing a full-scale break through that mission wall at any time geometry system would require not only drastically increasing the base processing requirements for City of Heroes, it would also require an extensive amount of more information to be transmitted across the network in order to keep all players systems update with the new state of the maps.

Such an update wouldn't just knock out players with older Radeon and Geforce graphics cards, it would also knock out players with older Athlon and Intel Pentium Processor. Such an update would also require significantly more powerful server processors, as well as significantly more server resources such as system memory and hard-drives for data storage. Such an update would also require a faster internet connection on the part of the players.

All of these technical factors mean that City of Heroes, and any MMO for that matter, won't ever see a geometry modification system, even in instanced missions.

Je Saist: Happy to calmly and decisively explain the most brutal truths in a polite and concise manner.

You get a cookie!

-Rachel-

Je Saist, while the informative lesson on network bandwidth certainly looks interesting (or at least looks like it will be more interesting when I come back later, just waiting for a health bar to refill now, which is probably already done...), it's not geometry modification that I was referring to, but rather what you mentioned (or at least similar to what you mentioned) about existing breakable barriers (such as prison doors and vault doors) being the technology base for such an effect.

In most cases with maps, this would mean building new map sets (that may at first look similar to existing map sets) that have an extra hidden layer behind any breakable walls. Yes, sometimes breaking through a wall would allow you into part of the map you'd have had to walk to, but more often they'd just open up to a partially shattered room, hallway, or crawlspace. Maybe some would allow you to break out of the building, into what seems to be an outdoor map, but is in reality just part of the same map that you couldn't see until the breakable object that looked like all the rest of the wall was destroyed. In some cases it might even lead to bonus objectives, like finding a special glowie or one-shot contact hidden in a walled off room or built-over basement. But it would always still be breakable objects in the form of existing tech, just using the new collateral damage type to interact with them as a side effect of knockback attacks. You could even have the breakable walls have a "damaged" state (like Vault doors) when they are busted up without being broken down, making sections of a new/clean warehouse map start to look more like the degraded/abandoned warehouse map.

As for concerns about repair and respawn in non-instanced areas, I agree, in most cases this should be left to instances, at least for awhile. If it were to be tested in open areas however, Praetoria would be an excellent test bed for the effects, since the repairs can be justified by seeing a couple of Praetorian clockwork show up and go about "fixing" whatever broke (after all, that must be how the rest of the zone stays so clean and shiny anyway). Other situations, like a hole in a war wall, could be justified by requiring *a lot* of appropriate damage (and regarding the Kronos Titan idea, you could put a PBAoE buff to collateral damage on the Titan, so that *if* you've got a group that can put out enough KB to knock him back into the wall, they're simultaneously buffed enough to do the necessary collateral damage numbers required to give him a hole in the wall to fall into). You could also give destructible objects like in the case of a section of war wall, a contingency power (like Nemesis Vengeance) that makes other "nearby" objects immune to collateral damage for some time (probably 2x the amount of time needed for the broken object to respawn/be repaired) thereby preventing the playerbase from maintaining a constant status of broken stuff. Furthermore, the above mentioned idea about many sturdier walls only having some cracks appear, if that, is perfectly appropriate for most of the terrain anyway.

Ok, back to my character who I'm sure is at full health and tapping his foot impatiently...

DCUO actually is supposed to have some limited evironmental destruction. At the very least I know you can pick up all sorts of objects like cars and light posts and break them by bashing enemies with them and that said objects can be destroyed in the midst of a fight. I don't know about more generic objects like windows, walls and buildings though; I think those are probably undamageable. However from the game play trailer it looks like if you smack into the ground hard enough the ground will crack under you even if it is purely cosmetic.

I think it would actually be easier than everyone is speculating, assuming ONE thing was done differently. It would sacrifice being able to knock people THROUGH walls, but it would still get the effect through.

Lets say you knockback an enemy into a building/cave wall/etc. Rather than the enemy being punched THROUGH the wall, create an animation effect where the wall takes damage, you see bits of concrete/stone/dust/etc flying away from the impact, and when the enemy falls to the floor, you look at the wall as see it has obviously been damaged. However the wall still remains intact, and unable to walk through.

For anyone who's watched alot of cartoons or anime (especially DBZ) this effect should be familiar to you.

And I believe in most cases, this would require no more than adding a "impact" animation and a graphic overlay for the section of the wall that got damaged. Of course smaller objects like desks/bookcases/etc could be destroyed without any impact on gameplay.

In zones, there would have to be a "repair timer' so to speak, however in instanced maps this wouldn't even be necessary.

I also think this would be really fun with war walls/zone barriers, where rather than an impact animation, you could see the enemy getting a kind of electric shock, sparks flying, etc.