In TABG/TABS, when the physical model of, for instance, your sword attacks and touches the enemy it deals the damage. Compared to Unturned 3.0’s “range” configuration.
The downsides of range is that its unrealistic, melee’s don’t have to actually touch an enemy, and it makes “swipe” or “slash” attacks nearly impossible (at-least in my eyes) because its hit-scan based
The upsides of physics-based melee attacks are that they’re realistic. If you have a longsword, you will have a longer range. If you have a dagger, it will be very small. Slash and swipe attacks are very much possible. Perhaps a standard attack could have a decent slash range, while a heavy attack does more damage and covers a larger area.
I generally think this system is superior in every way, and should be easy to implement.
Melee attacks in UII are already planned to be volumetric instead of point attacks (e.g. being able to slash with a blade and hit multiple targets that you can reach at once)
Physics based attacks are superior in terms of being more realistic, but they’re also much harder to implement due to all the potential room for bugs and unpredictable behaviour that comes with any game’s physics.
Volumetric? I’m not sure what that is or how that works.
Thats not how hitscan works, asfar as I know. And then, if it can I don’t think it can hit multiple targets. And if it can, I don’t know how it would handle distributing the damage amongst all of the targets - for instance obviously if you have a 90dmg sword it should deal 90dmg to two targets in one slash, thats unrealistic.
It’s basically kinda like what you’re already describing but it’s still not like TABS or other Landfall games since they’re known to take physics to the extreme in their game mechanics.
As you know, U3’s melees were all point attacks, only effective on literally one point on the screen, behaving as if they were spears. Volumetric attacks allow for much larger areas of potential damage as it allows you to, for example, perform a horizontal sweeping attack and have much greater area to contact a target (or multiple targets). It isn’t, however, entirely physics based.
“Volumetric” also wouldn’t be able to “determine” what part of a melee hit an object. Say you have a melee with different or complex parts. One part could be sharp while the other could be blunt. No punishments for being too close, too far, so on
“unrealistic range” sounds a bit subjective, since it’s quite easy to account for even with U3’s system. If the weapon is 2 meters long, it’d be sensible to have a range of 2 meters. It’s simple and it gets the job done perfectly fine.
While I’d be fine with a physics based system, for the reasons I listed above it doesn’t seem fully necessary, at least for this stage of development, given how much work is needed for it to become a reality and the likelihood of it all being buggy. Most games don’t use physics-based systems in melee combat for a reason - they’re fairly reliable enough.
We don’t know that for sure - using similar coding behind things like damage falloff in ranged weapons, overlapping stat multipliers, etc, this could very well be possible for Nelson to execute with a simple volumetric melee system.