So I’ve been playing stationary for quite a while (almost since the beginning of nested containers introduction) but now I’ve tried driving around again and noticed very annoying thing: collision damage, which was previously manageable, is now insanely high. And by that, I mean if I have fully repaired 17-effing-tons vehicle and run it into a meager dozen of zombies (not even hulks or juggs, just regular size zeds), then all my inboards mirrors are rekt and about 10% of all other vehicle parts on the interior are at least somewhat damaged. No damage to rams, though, lol. (also, doesn’t matter if I use rams or spikes or blades or just plain old spiked plating, it’s all the same)
Was this change intended or something went wrong somewhere? I remember murderizing, like, hundreds of zombies with my deathmobile before it needed repairs, now it is about ten zeds and I can’t see shit because all the mirrors are gone…
I remember (it’s a while ago) seeing a post on GitHub (I think?) about the vehicle changes they made; the impact force gets transfered throughout the car.
Actually, I remembered wrongly…
But this might help you even more:
Maybe it does but is still ridiculous. Hitting ~100kg zombie with 17+ tons vehicle at 30-40 km/h should not lead to -any- damage to interior, shock absorbers or not. I could understand it for (way, way)higher velocities and/or bigger “obstacles” but as it is now, it makes zombie-mowing vehicles outright impossible, except disposable ones.
well you gotta remember too, a lot of the plates of cars and stuff that we work with were designed in the current sense, as in, not-resistant-to-crumpling, so that when you impact with something else it causes less damage to the driver. shock absorbers make it so that all of the impact is forced into the ram you have attached
alternatively, slapping a steamroller drum onto the front of your rig and driving at slow speed will cronch all the zombies with minimal damage
Shock absorbers prevent other parts on the same the vehicle map square from taking damage from collisions. They don’t funnel damage or protect other map squares.
then you would have to put shock absorbers on every section of your vehicle…?
that doesn’t seem right.
If you want every section of your vehicle protected from collision damage, you would need to put shock absorbers on every map square of your vehicle. That was the design intent when I got them to actually work against the radiated shock damage from collisions. If you think they should work differently, you’re welcome to code up a different solution and convince Kevin that your solution is better.
My primitive view of the issue is that shock absorbers ought to negate damage up to its absorption limit. The excess ought to be divided between the current tile and propagation to other tiles as if only the reduced damaged was suffered and there were no shock absorbers (i.e. the “standard” distribution. Given that the shock absorber is actually present on the tile, excess damage may well damage it as well (and I wouldn’t argue against someone suggesting the excess damage ought to hit the shock absorber first before other components and propagation)). If tiles down the impact propagation chain have shock absorbers they’d take up to their limit of that damage before hitting its tile and propagating further.
Having a lot of shock absorbers ought to result in a very strange vehicle behavior as it would swing back and forth with whatever forces it was subjected to.
That’s just a hot air opinion, however, as I’m not aiming at modifying the code.
just wondering, what was the reasoning behind making the damage inversely proportional to square distance to the point of collision?
I’m not really sure; that’s how CDDA collision damage has been handled since 0.C if not earlier.
So, I just got collision damage on my rear military grade armor plate which is 10 tiles back from the rams which were the only colliding part. Even ignoring the fact collision damage somehow managed to propagate far enough to hit it (and be strong enough to actually damage it enough to notice), shouldn’t at least armor plates be excluded from indirect collision damage?
How does it even work? I can see it affecting structure and regular parts, but armor?
afaik, or understand, the armor plates are meant to reduce damage to all other parts of the block its attached to, therefore it would be the one taking the most visible damage
That’s direct damage. I’m talking about collision damage propagated from other part of the vehicle. How does it damage the armor? At all? I mean, how would it work IRL? The only things I can see damaged from such a collision are nearest parts of the vehicle, and armor plates at the point of collision, not on the other side of the vehicle.
Ignoring real life logic, if armor has the property to jump in the way to soak up damage, I’d expect that to happen to indirect damage as well, unless some logic is added to block the blocking effect for indirect damage only.
This should not be treated as a defense of how it works, just as a guess as to why it might work that way.
We should not ignore it, instead we should strive for it to be implemented 
As I said, it was an attempt to provide a possible explanation for why it works the way it does. It’s rather obvious that it’s not ideal, and it’s quite possible to original author didn’t consider indirect damage, but I’m not volunteering to change the code.
Radiated shock damage isn’t prevented by armor plating. That’s already coded in.
I can’t see why shock damage would ignore armor in general. It’s hard to damage armor, so armor usually isn’t damaged by shock damage, but it could certainly happen.
yeah i didn’t point that out before but i looked in-game and specifically every armor plate states it ‘does not protect from shock damage’
well, shock absorbers arent that hard to just make, so eh, i’ll just have to remember to place them on every section of my car, similar to armor plating!
The rate at which parts without shock absorbers get damaged seems to be way to high. I get that stuff would get damaged but as it stands now you just need to have 5 high-speed collisions with flaming eyes in an armored vehicle like a Humvee and the seatbelts are already destroyed and the battery is draining. That seems a little excessive to me. Also if a part of the vehicle collides that has shock absorbers than there should be a very severe reduction in shock damage form that collision otherwise you would have to install shock absorbers on every part of the vehicle which is definitely excessive.
If you have some good data about how damaged vehicles get in collisions, you’re welcome to share it. Otherwise, your feelings are not sufficient reason to change the code that is working now.
Similarly, shock absorbers are working as I intend them to work. You may want them to work differently, but if so, you’re going to need to write some code, open a PR, and convince Kevin that your implementation of shock absorbers is superior to mine. Alternately, I guess you could try to convince me that your vision of shock absorbers is better than my vision, but I can be kind of opinionated and redoing shock absorbers would be a lot of work for me, so I don’t see a high likelihood of success with that.
Why is it excessive to have to install shock absorbers in every map square of a vehicle in order to get protection for every map square of a vehicle? That seems perfectly fair to me.