I guess I’m okay with character bullet penetration (as mentioned in the Trello) and penetration through obstacles, (as mentioned in an early Devlog) but not there need to be significant drawbacks to shooting through things. Players shouldn’t be able to Fortnite themselves some cover and still be able to shoot through it effectively, but bullets shouldn’t be able to do massive amounts of damage to buildables, and a bullet shouldn’t be able to pass through the floor below you, your leg, your torso, and still get a headshot that does as much damage as a shot directly to the head.
When bullets penetrate through obstacles, they get lower velocity, less stability, deflection, increased drag, and reduced terminal effect. Bullets with higher velocity and sectional density are better at penetration. A Spitzer or conical bullet also helps with penetration somewhat.
When going through bushes or branches, bullets have a significant chance of being deflected to some degree. Heavier bullets are deflected less than lighter ones. The profile of the bullet can also mitigate deflection by brush to a small degree, with round nosed bullets tending to deflect less than flat nosed bullets and flat nosed bulleys tending to deflect less than pointed bullets. Bullets being deflected by brush would discourage bush and tree camping, as firing through the brush would mean the bullet is going the wrong direction and has bad ballistics from the very start, while a bullet being fired into the bush would only be deflected after it has gotten most of the way to its target.
Explosive, frangible, fragmenting, soft point, and hollow point bullets are all especially unlikely to pass through any obstacles in one piece, whether the obstacle be a brick wall or just a bush. These sort of projectiles while ineffective at penetration, should have greater terminal effect against living things, and the inanimate objects which they are able to damage. Bullets should have to penetrate through body armor, or have their ability to penetrate taken into account, rather than body armor giving a fixed damage reduction.
So tl:dr from what I can tell is when a bullet goes through something it will slow down, but slow down more or less depending on the gun, bullet, or what it’s hitting
The Lenny face was to distract critics from the wall of text, which was left unformatted so it would appear too dense of a read for any detailed criticism
I reformatted it to be more readable.
Harvest, you and I are on the same page when it comes to bullet play.
Slightly unrelated
I don’t want to make a separate post about this, but magazines are much more useful than drums, take up less space and are easier to fill and reload with than drums. Hopefully these are balanced in 4.x
Drums are nice, but magazines are better overall.
Most of the specific details were things from real life that could be included to make weapon balance more interesting, like the ability for flat or round nosed bullets to go through brush could be exaggerated to make so called brush guns more viable. The general ideas were ballistics should be required for and affected by penetration, brush should cause deflection, some projectiles get destroyed or very deformed on their first impact, and body armor shouldn’t give a fixed damage reduction.
It would also be cool for the bullets to do less damage depending on what material they passed through on top of this since their are traveling slower (im not a gun expert so if this is wrong its wrong)
There have been posts about having the inventory be more reflective of items actual size and shape, the inventory being separated into pockets, and weight being part of the inventory system again, any or all of these might help balance drum magazines. Reloading times and tools have been mentioned in a couple of posts IIRC. The only other problem I know of with drum magazines is reliability, and I can’t think of many posts that actually go into much detail on the cleaning and maintenance of different components and attachments, and what specific malfunctions those components are liable to cause. All things considered, I think both the utility and the ineffectiveness of drum magazines are exaggerated by different sources, sure they may be difficult to store and might take some time to fill, but one relatively compact and reliable drum magazine, (like the Magpull D-60, as opposed to a Beta-C magazine,) kept in the weapon and topped off when possible, with spare stick magazines not spare drum magazines, really isn’t that outlandish of an idea.
It’s from another (already dead) game called Contract Wars, which means this information is merely referential and many of the content in it doesn’t fit with Unturned, as all values and many mechanics are very different of how Unturned’s actually are and might be in the future.
I post that info so it may work as a very sustained example placeholder of how bullet penetration could work. I could do my own post about it, but I have so many pending that I still dunno xd.
I made a post regarding bullet penetration, however, my post was covering armor penetration on each gun rather than penetration in general. I would agree that each should have its own multiplier as well as “deflect chance” based on the angle that you hit the surface of the object. Simple wood obstacles would have a 0.75 damage multiplier, harder materials will obviously give a lower damage multiplier. It also depends on the bullets. Each bullet has “penetration power” as to how much will the damage multiplier affect the damage. From 0.0 up to 1.0 (100% effect from the wood)
I too favor the D-60 over the Beta-C magazines. There’s also the 40 rnd sticks, and the wide 60rnd sticks, not to mention 20 round and even 10 round magazines.
I’ve never heard good things about any quadstack magazine. A 60 round quadstack magazine might be slightly slimmer than a 60 round drum magazine, but it’s also slightly longer, and from what I’ve seen less reliable, especially if you’re actually loading it to full capacity. I’ve derailed my own thread
I tried to shorten all that down to “terminal effect,” but your phrasing was certainly much more explanatory.
When I said deflection, I was referring more to how the path of a bullet doesn’t stay straight after passing through an obstacle, or even a branch, but Bf1-esque ricochet mechanics wouldn’t be a bad idea either.
I think this damage multiplier is referring to the damage a bullet can do after penetration, not how much damage the bullet the bullet does to the object it’s penetrating, but I’m not 100% sure. If my assumption is correct (though I find assumptions often aren’t) I’d say the effect that penetration has on a bullet’s damage being based solely on a factor inherent to the projectile and a factor inherent to the material being penetrated is too simple because it doesn’t have the extremely important factor of velocity. A stray bullet that is slowing down after flying five miles shouldn’t be able to penetrate a wall as well as one that’s being fired point blank.
I really don’t mind bullets being that realist like u described in the post bullets should pass through walls depending on how powerful they are and how much penetration power it has, for example, full metal jacket round should penetrate less than armor piercing round, it also depends on the velocity.
But in any case, bullets should not destroy buildables like in 3x
I’d be fine with explosive bullets damaging buildables, glass windows being destroyed by the first bullet that hits them, a couple of shots from a breaching shotgun destroying locks, or even most projectiles being capable of doing some damage to buildables, but yes, firearms shouldn’t be so effective or efficient at raiding, and machine guns should be balanced to primarily shoot through walls, not at them.
bullet hole decals in actual players would look cool, some blood drips and red spots and stuff would look a bit more professional and be pretty cool to see
You misinterpreted both parts of my comment. When i mean deflect chance, i didn’t mean ricochet. I mean after it penetrates the surface, there’s a chance that the bullet will deviate from the initial direction.
As for the second part, I meant that after the bullet passes through the obstacles, it causes a decrease in the bullet’s damage. Just like R6’s penetration mechanics, but not the exact same tho.
