Spatial Dimensions of Combat Options

[Criaus]

Properly positioned, a thief's backstab does multipliers worth of damage in one strike, effectively connecting an assasin's death blow from the peripheals or unchecked boundaries of a victim.

With the advantage of height (i.e., on top of a hill), warriors can defend more easily and archers may scan the vistas having expanded their range. However, hilltop campers may be more exposed to dragons and the like.

To describe these aspects of combat in functional language, the relative locations of attacker/defender must be known. In the game itself, when I make a backstab (or even a regular strike at the back) I definitely want the math to work right. The chances of hitting are higher, the chance of doing higher damage is virtually guaranteed. In the case of hilltop advantage, those on the hill get bonuses and those at the bottom of the hill do not, or worse yet, get negatives.

These spatial arrangements may or may not require a pre-determined check by the computer in order to compute modifiers for attack and defense rolls. The men on the hill do have determinable attributes that are recognizable by the computer and may or may not necessitate translation into functional modifiers. For example, archers on a hill have a wider line of sight than those on the bottom of the hill, and the accompanying hilltop warriors may take advantage of an easier strike offered by a downward slope (which would be the case only if speed is modified by slope to parallel real-world physics), and these are natural modifiers of terrain acting upon a body. On the other hand, a backstab result specifies modifiers that are not simply a natural extension of computer-generated spatiality or virtual terrain.

A defense bonus would be allocated to forest-dwellers whom are being attacked by hiwaymen archers. However, by using Line Of Sight, the defense bonus is accounted for by virtual trees that may or may not be blocking the path of an arrow. The various composition of forests and woodlands promotes a vast array of Line Of Sight potentialities, therefore LOS is perhaps a sufficient means to remedy the need for a defense bonus given by a swath of woods (and clearly, LOS in red wood forests is altogether different than in a forest of cedar/fir/oak trees).

But one of the thief's main attributes, the ability to backstab, will always be played out to its fullest when a thief actually stabs at the back. This in itself is one of the thief's glorious qualities, and would be diminished in that sense if these spatial dimension requirements of combat were not recognized in an online combat game. To be clear, though, everyone ought to have bonuses when making an attack at the back, not only the thief. The thief makes the attack from the same position, but gets extraordinary bonuses for doing so.

Where the programmers have paid attention to the spatial dimensions of combat, then these natural advantages--line of sight, and the bonus to speed as a benefit of downward slope--may emerge as virtual combat opportunities that are verifiable independent of interpolated modifiers. In other cases, like a thief's backstab, a program must recognize the combatants' relative spatial positions in order to proceed to the next step of enforcing an interpolated logic of damage multipliers and stun possibilities, etc.

.

[Jerky]

I very much like those ideas, but again, this is harder to do in an online game. Latency (for one thing) can effect the spatial aspects of an attack, and there is currently no way around this other than to be lenient on attacking (ie. you only have to be within a certain radius of the mob, to succesfully attack, otherwise you die because the server never knew you were there, even though your client said you were). For people with bad connections (and since this game would probably have 1 server for the entire world (US, Europe, Asia), this makes ideas like these very hard. Also, ideas like location/position are more variables to add to how the client/server communicate, which add to the problem.

I think your ideas would be great for an IPv6 internet, but for now, they might be too difficult or taxing. But who am I anyway? ;) If it can be done, lets do it.