Robocraft 2 Health System
In Robocraft 2 we’ve had to rework the concepts of ‘Health’ as your Robot and your player character (e.g. Cray) are independent things. Even when your Robot is destroyed your player character can still be alive and can still perform many useful things. Each battle arena will contain features which are operated by the character only (e.g. controllable turrets, payloads, etc.).
Even the concept of “your Robot” needs to be reconsidered as you can bring a Robot into a battle with multiple separate parts (e.g. a truck that lays TNT mines with sensors to trigger when enemies are near or a truck which launches an RC rocket drone with a remote camera).
In RC1 when a Robot was broken in two, the smallest of the two parts got removed from the simulation and just disappeared (with a few particle effects). In Robocraft 2 all separated parts can remain interactive and this can even be a legit tactic such as having an active decoupler which you can trigger to separate on demand.
Structural Integrity as opposed to Health
The key concept behind the destruction of Robots [and the environment within Robocraft 2 is the Structural Integrity system. The basic idea is that blocks on their own aren’t very useful, it’s only when smart Robot builders combine the blocks that make Robots powerful. So, the weapons within Robocraft 2 damage Robots by breaking the blocks apart, essentially by removing their structural integrity.
This system also allows for ramming and collision damage to be included as valid ways to destroy a Robot and for physical weapons (like gravity manipulation, grappling hooks etc.) to be able to play a role in causing destruction in future.
So, in Robocraft 2, instead of blocks having health, it is the connections between blocks that have health. Look at this image below showing two blocks that are connected together:
The outline drawn on the image shows the edge that connects the two blocks. The length of this edge is like a weld between the two blocks. The longer the weld, the stronger the bond.
Another factor is the materials used. Each material has a bond strength:
The connection strength used is always the lowest bond strength of the two materials being connected together. So:
Ladium connected to Ladium = connection strength of 2.5
Ladium connected to Moderonium = connection strength of 2
Moderonium connected to Moderonium = connection strength of 2
The final health of each connection between the two blocks is as follows:
Connection Health = Weld Length x Min Bond Strength
Note: Ladium has 25% more connection strength, but weighs 365% more.
Weapons
When weapons apply their destruction Robots use algorithms to reduce the health of these connections. Collisions also reduce the health of these connections. When the health of a connection gets to zero the blocks break apart.
Our plan regarding the algorithm that weapons use to reduce the health of connections is to have classes of weapons that use different algorithms. This should provide interesting counters to metabot designs when users make effective use of the Robot switching system via the Switch Plate.
We’ll do a separate post on the destruction algorithms used by the collision system, the Laser Class weapons and the Plasma Class weapons soon(™).