i'm working on a STALKER themed project and i've gotten to the point of adding radiation, but i'm not knowledgeable enough on radiation to know how to implement it, or what adverse effects could possibly be. i was hoping someone on here who knew more than i did would be able to give some pointers.
for simplification reasons, the only way i'll be able to represent rads ingame would be as a percentage from 0 to 100, 0 being nothing and 100 being inevitable death.
[editline]2nd September 2016[/editline]
for people wondering, i'm wanting more realistic effects as opposed to 'more radiation = more health degradation over time' like the actual STALKER games go by.
I don't like the 0-100 thing. Using actual rads is way more cooler. And besides, radiation doesn't work like that. The more radiation you have, the sooner you'll start feeling it's effects and possibly die. It's really hard to make a realistic radiation simulation in a videogame because it doesn't act fast - can be hours or days or weeks. And it's permanent. You can't really "heal" it completely. Unless you're making some sort of permadeath game.
I would recommend just going to wikipedia for general knowledge and inspiration and iterative playtesting for the actual gameplay. It doesn't matter if it's realistic, but it should be fun.
Depends on the other elements in your game. Does the PC have any stats besides health or stamina that could be affected by a radiation debuff?
[QUOTE=Spor;50988634]I don't like the 0-100 thing. Using actual rads is way more cooler. And besides, radiation doesn't work like that. The more radiation you have, the sooner you'll start feeling it's effects and possibly die. It's really hard to make a realistic radiation simulation in a videogame because it doesn't act fast - can be hours or days or weeks. And it's permanent. You can't really "heal" it completely. Unless you're making some sort of permadeath game.
I would recommend just going to wikipedia for general knowledge and inspiration and iterative playtesting for the actual gameplay. It doesn't matter if it's realistic, but it should be fun.[/QUOTE]
i don't like the 0-100 thing either, but other variables in other code sections will fuck up very hard if i do it any differently. and i know it shouldn't be totally realistic, which is why i ask for some ideas. i'm hoping to strike a balance between 'painful' and 'not annoying as all hell'.
[editline]2nd September 2016[/editline]
[QUOTE=HammerBrute;50988659]Depends on the other elements in your game. Does the PC have any stats besides health or stamina that could be affected by a radiation debuff?[/QUOTE]
health, stress (think darkest dungeon, morale and such), hunger, thirst, consciousness (doubles as stamina) is all there is right now
The effect of ionising radiation on the body can roughly be split into two categories, acute and chronic. Chronic effects are mainly due to accumulated mutations that eventually lead to cancer, but this takes years so unless your work takes place over several years it won't really matter. Acute radiation poisoning is probably what you're thinking of. The effect depends on both the accumulated dose and affected part, although I can imagine coding it to account for affected portions would be way more trouble than is worth.
Since radiation damages DNA, the tissues that are most affected are those undergoing rapid division and/or metabolism. Stuff like hair, nails, skin, digestive system, liver, bone marrow are the first to get hit since these tissues rapidly replenish themselves. This is why people undergoing radiation therapy lose their hair. It's also why some of the symptoms of radiation poisoning are vomiting and diarrhoea.
In my opinion the best way to portray it would be some kind of status effect that weakens the affected person, possibly sapping health over time as well. The effects of the debuff should follow the symptoms of radiation poisoning outlined in the [url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acute_radiation_syndrome#Signs_and_symptoms"]Wikipedia article[/url]. The strength of the debuff depends on the radiation dose absorbed over the past X minutes. The absorbed dose should naturally decrease over time as the body repairs itself, thus allowing a way for the player to recover.
[QUOTE=portalcrazy;50988676]i don't like the 0-100 thing either, but other variables in other code sections will fuck up very hard if i do it any differently. and i know it shouldn't be totally realistic, which is why i ask for some ideas. i'm hoping to strike a balance between 'painful' and 'not annoying as all hell'.[/QUOTE]
You can use the variable from 0-100 in the code, and you could set one variable to be used to give a more accurate measure of radiation based on the 0-100 value.
Since youre working on a STALKER inspired project you can easily add some suspension of disbelief - don't follow the wiki article to a T, just enough to logically make sense and to let players know they're actually dealing with radiation damage. Like shortening the time of acute and chronic effects to days or even hours.
As a visual representation of the dosage you have taken I'd make the player shake their gun, or view, because it fatigues the patient very quickly. For more severe dosages you could make the view flash a bit. The effects could get worse over time so the player knows they'll have to heal it or death happens.
If it is STALKER themed and you have a carry capacity, you could lessen that to indicate weakness caused by the side effects of acute exposure, which have been listed. You could also make recoil for guns worse, due to lack of energy, reduce sprint time or disable it, introduce phases of blurred vision (annoying to player though) and such.
If you have STALKER style system, maybe you could make bleeding heavier if you are irradiated.
I'd kind of consider ignoring all of the real world things and focus on game play rather than realism, though.
That said, working in milisieverts would be great, consider your location - if it's the US they might use rads, but the majority of the world uses milisieverts to measure absorbed effective dose.
[QUOTE=Terminutter;50994459]If it is STALKER themed and you have a carry capacity, you could lessen that to indicate weakness caused by the side effects of acute exposure, which have been listed. You could also make recoil for guns worse, due to lack of energy, reduce sprint time or disable it, introduce phases of blurred vision (annoying to player though) and such.
If you have STALKER style system, maybe you could make bleeding heavier if you are irradiated.
I'd kind of consider ignoring all of the real world things and focus on game play rather than realism, though.
That said, working in milisieverts would be great, consider your location - if it's the US they might use rads, but the majority of the world uses milisieverts to measure absorbed effective dose.[/QUOTE]
I like those ideas - makes radiation a much more serious threat than just damage over time.
Maybe the radiation % could correspond somehow to a % chance of something bad happening, or a % increase to stamina usage. I don't know. You'll probably want it to do a couple of different things, because I'm pretty sure radiation can fuck you in several different ways. Constant penalty mechanics like this are tricky: you need to make it threatening, but not irritating.
That's the main issue, radiation issues are either long period things like the stochastic effects which *might* take place, such as cancers but generally occur in the future, or deterministic effects that are short term and will occur, like skin damage, hair loss, sterility, cataracts and acute radiation syndrome. The deterministic are ones you'd really consider in a game, but if you are affected, it's going to pretty much be debilitating or flat out lethal. That's why I'd lean towards taking artistic license.
enemies should be able to follow the blood and pus trail oozing out of the growing sores across your body
Sorry, you need to Log In to post a reply to this thread.
