Hey guys. I wanted to use this post to introduce you to the upcoming armor/combat revamp. The current system, built around the vanilla MC mechanics is just plain broken as it doesn’t like the high armor ratings that TFC provides. As a result I’ve decided to completely bypass the vanilla armor calculations and instead create one specifically for TFC. At the end of this post will be a status update on TFC2. I’d also like to note that hotfixes for 76 will be ongoing as development on 77 progresses.
Please keep all discussion to THIS THREAD.
Intro
The very first thing that I want to put forth and get out of the way is that we will NOT be doing locational hit detection. I can offer many reasons why I feel that this isn’t right for MC but suffice to say, I do not believe it fits the engine that we are using. However, some form of locational damage WILL be implemented.
Before I get into the details of our planned system, I should explain to you the way that Minecraft handles damage. Currently, when you receive damage, minecraft gets the armor value of all the pieces of armor that you are wearing and adds the armor values together to get a Total Armor value. Then we get: Real Damage = (Incoming Damage * (25 – Total Armor)) / 25. The biggest problem with this system is that if your total armor rating exceeds 25 you can potentially be healed by the incoming damage i.e. Real Damage is a negative number. Obviously this is bad.
The current idea for what we will use is a Morrowind-esque system where each part of the body has a % chance of being the part that gets hit. These are just numbers off the top of my head but lets say: Chest – 60%, Legs – 20%, Feet – 10%, Head – 10%. When you hit another humanoid, the game will decide for you which location that you hit. As long as you actually did hit the creature, you will always HIT. It won’t just randomly decide that you did not hit. Unless we decide that Glancing Blows are acceptable. More on that later.
Once that location is determined, we get the armor rating of w/e armor is in that slot and reduce the incoming damage.
Damage Types
This will certainly be an area that I believe some of you will be excited to know that we are venturing towards. The current thought is for weapon damages to be one of Crushing/Slashing/Piercing. Of course, along with this comes new armor types as well. I won’t be going into those at this time however.
Skills
Now comes a potentially controversial section. For a long time it has been put forth that I would much rather have the player develop actual skills to be able to do something than to have some magic number that determines your skill level. I’ve now had over a year to ponder on the merits of this stance and I find myself in a very gray area. On the one hand, my initial stance is as valid today as it was the day that I decided to follow that route. However in any game it is impossible to provide all of the feedback to a player that you can experiance in real life as you get better at something.
For example: Working a piece of iron on an anvil in real life gives you many visual and tactile responses as the hammer strikes the metal. You can feel the hunk of iron give way as you slowly mold it into the desired shape and the color begins to fade as it solidifies and cools off. Over time you begin to appreciate the subtle nuances of striking in a certain manner and with differing amounts of strength.
The above example I hope conveys the spirit of the issue at hand. Given unlimited development time in a day and some absolute burning desire to make the greatest smithing simulator ever, I’m sure that I could come up with more ways to expand upon the current smithing system. However, I have neither of these things. As a result, we must find another way to convey subtleties of learning the ins and outs of a chosen profession. Skills are I believe the only viable way to accomplish this.
However, I want to be very clear that I still believe that our original stance is the preferable one when applicable.
A skill system does however open us for content down the road with temporary buffs related to your skills etc. It would also provide a very good reason to be afraid of death, which is something that I am always on the lookout for as I still don’t feel that our death punishment is enough of a reason to want to avoid death.
This brings us back to Glancing Blows. We must then decide if we want combat to be influenced by theses skills. On the one hand, it provides an advantage to established players and can to some extent promote the slaughter of newbies (Combat based skills can be balanced to provide a bonus but not be overpowering), however, on the other hand combat will already be somewhat random jsut because you never know which body part that you are going to hit, and consequently how much damage you are going to do or what kind of status you may inflict on your foe etc.
One area that Dunk and I are dead set against is knowledge based skills. We will never implement a recipe that requires Skill X to be at Y value or greater to be used. We do not under any circumstances think this is a good idea.
So there are obviously many facets to this discussion and I trust that you all will do your utmost to debate the details to death and provide me with some other perspectives (If the defunct kingdoms thread is anything to go by).
TFC2
I think that some of you may already be onto this, but for the rest of you, TFC2 is officially mothballed. Because of the sweeping changes that 1.5 brought with it, I was forced to rewrite a far amount of code that I felt was problem code to begin with. As a result, my interest in seeing the TFC1 codebase continue to progress has returned.
But dont fret. The discussions and ideas brought forth in regards to TFC2 were very good and I expect that we will see many of them make their way into TFC1 as we move forward. The mountain code for instance will be coming to TFC in Build 78 or 79 along with another pass at terrain generation. I hope that those of you who were interested in seeing TFC2 move forward will understand that this is for the best at this time.
P.S. I know that I tend to announce something and then change my mind and not go through with it, but hey at least I give you guys something to yell at each other on the forums about for a while 
