Armor Systems and Damage Modelling

The Armor system and the Damage Model are component-based and modular. It uses two main parts the Armor Mod and Health. This is used for the individual parts inside of a vehicle, the engine, wheels, ammo, and fuel tanks are all armor mods that have their own health and state, they can be damaged, repaired, or destroyed entirely. All armor mods are then combined into one list and Health watches the armor mods for any changes.

The other component is the Health component, health is way more than a health bar in the game it is used to tell the player if his vehicle is about to get blown up or not, it holds all the animations and information used when the vehicle is destroyed or if something breaks or catches on fire. This triggers particle and VFX shaders to play on the vehicle if, for example, it catches fire.

Any weapons can inflict damage to the armor and damage model as long as they have a weapon data source. All missiles, bullets, mortars etc all use the weapon system, read more about it here.

The red shows the fragmentation penetrating the armor plate, the fragments are lethal for a radius determined by the bullets HE fragment radius variable. This allows for airburst and HE effects,

Damage is calculated programmatically using real-world math, when bullets collide with armor mods we take the bullet’s mass, speed, angle, and environmental factors to calculate the penetration into RHA equivalent using the hardness of the material in this case default steel, but we can model DU, or composites. We can modify this based on the armor mods type, making it able to simulate all NATO standards.

Components are assigned a type and this tells the combat system what is broken or disabled, if a GPS component is damaged by some small arms the GPS functions of the combat system will be disabled. This covers a wide range of subsystems, but the general idea is to avoid taking ground fire in an aircraft or helicopter that doesn’t have armor. Certain components can have critical damage or damage effects, destroying the ammo rack or engine can effectively kill a vehicle making you have to decide to save the vehicle or start in a new vehicle.

The Health Component is a simple state manager that can tell animations to fire or prevent combat systems from working. In this case, you can see options for sonar or radar being damaged. Turrets not working etc. These are the side effects of damage to the component systems, so if a track is damaged it will disable the movement of the tank. Once a tank suffers a mobility kill it needs to be repaired, this can only be done in the field. ARV can recover tanks if they are disabled, this requires the player to leave the tank and switch vehicles to an ARV which can then recover the disabled tank. AI will tank control the player’s tank and continue to fire while the player must race to recover the disabled tank. The player can of course choose to leave the tank on the battlefield and spawn in a new tank, but this will remove the tank permanently from the player’s faction inventory. Recovered tanks can be repaired and used in the next round without any loss from inventory unless the tank is totally destroyed.

Aircraft and helicopters can be damaged by ground fight or other aircraft, sensors like radars that are damaged must be repaired. If an aircraft completes a mission but is damaged it will require time to be repaired and can’t be used while this is happening, this can be managed from the force tab.