With the recently announced intent to switch to a "physics based damage of projectiles" system, will player clothing/armor be modelled base on the materials that make them up, so that the actual location of the projectile hit on the body zones matters in determining protection, penetration, etc? Will a well placed shot at a joint where two armor plates come together cause the player more damage?Will armor repairs be as common as ship damage repairs (same overall approach and system), or will clothing/armor be discarded as it becomes too damaged?asked by Qro

That's a very good question. A very detailed question, and I have a somewhat detailed answer for you so bear with me. Yes. As we move to the physics-based damage of projectiles - we will be doing that for energy weapons as well as ballistic weapons - there are a variety of factors that will factor into how much kinetic energy is actually applied at the impact point. We also have the concept on the ships which we will apply to the characters that it will check on the physics proxy that it hit, duck down and see what material is applied to the thing that the proxy is for - for example on this gun (shows example of yellow plastic nerf gun with plastic rail on top of the stock) if we had a physics proxy to keep you from hitting on this rail, so your character would impact it, that is then tied to the material of this which is like this yellow plastic. That yellow plastic in the material effects table would have its own set of stats that would say: "I absorb this much kinetic energy before I allow things to pass through, it takes this amount to penetrate me," all of these different factors that would then further allow the bullet to pass or not pass based on the energy of the weapon and the ability of the surface to deflect that energy. If passes through, it would then hit whatever is next in line, or in the case of a character likely your skin and then apply damage as it would to your skin. So... yes, that is something really cool that falls out of the system - that we do all of these material lookups and then can determine where exactly you've hit or at least what material you've hit and then allow the bullet to pass through and adjust all of the physical properties of the bullet which then in turn adjusts the damage.So, it's something that comes out of the system for free and it's also something that is super dynamic because as we allow you to change your ammo types - so you could have a weapon that you change the barrel on and then you change the ammo for it - you'll actually feel it behave differently. If you get a different kind of armour made of a different material, you'll feel it behave differently and because the materials are set on a per-item basis, it will allow you to do things like shoot into a weak point. So, all of that coming out of one system is really cool but that's one of the things that Chris is really good about is thinking about these things in a systemic nature which is what lends itself to a lot of the emergent gameplay that we have in Arena Commander. So, we want to bring that to the FPS as well.