(I know this was published November 1st; it was supposed to go up yesterday but technical issues so it’s still October to me)
Area-of-Effect Weapons
The damage system in Parabellum was entirely built with armoured vehicles in mind, so it’s designed to take into account armour plates protecting delicate interior components. Projectiles are based on striking an armour plate, and doing a penetration calculation, etc etc.
As a result, radial area-of-effect damage just wasn’t possible. Well, I figured it was time to sort that out, so I devoted a chunk of time to refactoring how the projectiles work so that you could have both direct-fire armour piercing rounds, and splash damage explosive rounds.
The very short version is, I had to rewrite the projectile logic, but it’s much more efficient and compact now. It turns out, I wrote that code early, and it wasn’t good. Now though, when a high explosive round goes off, it can damage nearby targets, but has to test against their armour first. It’s like firing a bunch of smaller armour piercing rounds out in a radius, in theory.
The end result is that you will be able to fire a high explosive round behind an enemy and potentially catch their weaker armour with the splash, or hit the crew behind an anti-tank gun, hit infantry in cover etc etc.
Anti-Tank Mines
I wanted to apply this new high explosive addition to an object I’ve wanted to put in for a while, but haven’t been able to; anti-tank mines.
It wasn’t super simple; getting it to react to contact was easy, but getting it to essentially detonate a high-explosive round after contact wasn’t as simple as just spawning one or something. Instead, the mine is essentially a projectile itself. It’s a sub-class that can be manually detonated by proxity/contact — hilariously, in trying to find the most straight-forward solution to getting mines working in the game, I accidentally made them work essentially like real-life.
Anyway, I’m going to take a little break for now as area-of-effect involved a few late nights and a bit of stress. The next update should show off adding barricades, mines, and infantry to your defences in the defence mode!
-Rob
Parabellum 