lightsaber enhancement

[anybodee]

Everyone here has seen the star wars movies and c that a lightsaber is supposed to do incredible damage and in some of the movies a limb is cut off. well i was thinking. Is this possible to make happen in KOTOR 1 and TSL? Its up to you modders.

[Rtas Vadum]

Everyone here has seen the star wars movies and c that a lightsaber is supposed to do incredible damage and in some of the movies a limb is cut off. well i was thinking. Is this possible to make happen in KOTOR 1 and TSL? Its up to you modders.

 

Its possible to up the damage for lightsabers, but KOTOR's engine isn't made to allow body models(or any others, for that matter), to be diced up.

[vanir]

The complexities of modelling live action damage/healing/surgery to a medical accuracy would ridiculously overstretch an already complex game engine, you'd probably need a standalone game focusing on surgical procedures to do this.

 

As with all RP a little imagination must be added to the existing animations for a suspension of disbelief, true enough any blow which securely struck an opponent with a lightsabre should by all accounts sever by default. If you get hit just once you're dead. And vitality points don't in fact represent your physical body in RPG, they represent your will to fight, your stamina, your resilience to continue the fight.

 

When you get struck by a lightsabre in animation, what is actually being represented is the fact that you have a fencing exchange during the 6-second combat round, and your opponent wore you down a bit, perhaps singeing you with some near misses, and gained some degree of advantage. You weren't actually struck physically, because you'd be cut in half if you were.

But since this is RPG the animations represent this in a visually artistic sense for gameplay, by one figure being struck by another and some cool looking effects.

 

Think of when Luke fights Vader in RotJ, and Vader is forced to his knees, Luke is bashing away at the raised lightsabre of Vader's. Every hit is only hitting the raised weapon and not Vader's body, but every hit is causing more vitality point damage on Vader as Luke beats him into submission during that scene (until finally Luke severs the hand and the fight is over).

 

It's the same with a blaster bolt. Only Darth Vader shrugs them off, normal characters get hit by a blaster bolt and they're going to have a burnt hole going through their body. Get hit properly just once and you'd be dead (even in the book Star Wars Stormtrooper armour only protects the wearer from near misses, getting hit directly by a blaster bolt melts the armour, burns the flesh underneath and fuses both into the bone, killing you instantly). The animations represent near misses, glancing singes and the fact you lose some vitality points means in fact, you're just being worn down. It doesn't necessarily mean you've been physically injured, just that you're getting easier to take down. This is also probably why TSL included regeneration of vitality points for all characters normally, because IRL you inherently recover from battlefield exhaustion eventually. Vitality point damage represents battlefield exhaustion as much, or more than physical damage.

 

This is how your vitality increases with level. You don't grow a foot and get stronger bones every level advancement, it just means your skill is increasing so you are becoming harder to wear down in a fight. Your body is no more resistant to damage than it was 1st level, and there is almost no variation between individual humanoids when it comes to how much damage a blaster bolt will do to their carcass, or how easily a lightsabre will slice through it.

 

The closest thing in game which shows the awesome damage a lightsabre is capable of is the "lightsabre door" animation. Using blasters or other melee weapons it can take quite some time to bash your way through a door, put a lightsabre into it once and it opens.

 

Also consider how a lightsabre does such awesome damage. It is like a frozen blaster bolt. If you hold it against something it just keeps doing damage every second, every moment that passes by it continues to do more and more damage as it burns through the object, like a blowtorch. A blaster bolt by comparison needs to trigger pulled successively to keep doing damage as time goes by. And a melee weapon requires force to be placed behind it, or repeated blows struck.

A lightsabre just sits there and does damage.

 

But in combat all parties are moving around, they don't just sit there and let you hold a lightsabre against them. When you strike they try to bend, dodge and squirm out of the way, and try to block you with melee weapons or anything else in their hands (only stuff like cortosis weave has much chance). Their body and reflexes naturally recoil from pain.

So most of your hits are glancing blows or near misses, which do reduce vitality and get the "successful hit" animation, but don't strictly do severe physical damage.

 

When the enemy drops to the ground and dies, that is when you can imagine you finally got a proper hit on him, and severed something or disembowelled him, etc. But it took all that time to wear him down to get to that point, because he was fighting for his life and trying very hard not to get hit properly, not even once.

 

 

 

 

 

 

In other words as Ritas infers, it is beyond the game engine capabilities. But additionally it is a standard of all RPG gameplay that successful hits and combat damage are representative and allegorical for wearing your opponent down, and not literally making solid contact of blade against flesh, bolt against bone or lightsabre squarely meeting limb. If any of these things happened your opponent would of course be out of the fight in the very first blow, probably in pieces at your feet.

[Rtas Vadum]

 

 

 

 

In other words as Rtas infers, it is beyond the game engine capabilities. But additionally it is a standard of all RPG gameplay that successful hits and combat damage are representative and allegorical for wearing your opponent down, and not literally making solid contact of blade against flesh, bolt against bone or lightsabre squarely meeting limb. If any of these things happened your opponent would of course be out of the fight in the very first blow, probably in pieces at your feet.

 

Well, that is what I meant, but I compared it to the game BloodRayne 2(at least the idea). Unlike Kotor, most of the enemies in the game, aside from bosses and some sub bosses, they are literally chopped up when you slice them with blades, though not with the first attack. Along with it, the engine is made to not only allow bodies to be sliced up, but also to spew blood from them. But that game is not so much an rpg in the most traditional sense, as it doesn't exactly involve "level-ups", so much as Rayne's health and Rage increasing at certain points in the game, along with gaining new combos, and weapon modes(though they are staggered through the game, as in you get each new move or weapon mode by itself).