Posted: Sun Nov 21, 2021 5:35 pm Post subject:
[Lore] Converting Valve stats to RA2
To complement the semi-recent wave of Valve asset conversions (from Half-Life 2 (HL2) and Team Fortress 2 (TF2), here are some suggests on how to accurately reflect their stats in RA2. This conversion is built on the assumption that the game universes' laws of nature definitions are the same with regards to what humans are made of, what bullets and explosions do, etc. It is calibrated on the assumption that HL2 Citizen is materially equivalent to RA2 Civilian. Sources used will be "skill.cfg" (a configuration text file that is Valve's equivalent of the rules*.ini of C&C), OverWiki, various wikis and in-game observation (mostly gained from GMod, so there might be, but really shouldn't be, some degree of divergence from HL2). From games with different difficulty settings, this conversion will be from "medium" difficulty setting. It can easily be extrapolated to other difficulty settings from the sources and formulae provided here.
First off, HL2:
Citizen
There is no asset for HL2 Citizens on PPM right now, but we will use them to calibrate our conversion. They might be malnourished, but I think we have no reason to think that a random citizen of City 17 would be much weaker than a Soviet citizen of RA2. HL2 Citizens have 40 HP, whereas RA2 Civilians have 50 HP. If both are equally strong, that means that 40 HP in HL2 represent the same damage resilience as 50 HP in RA2. Thus, when converting from HL2 HP to RA2 HP, the conversion factor should be *1.25.
Civil Protection
The asset is here. CPs have 26 HP between the levels "Point Insertion" and "Water Hazard", and 40 HP in "Anticitizen One" and "Exit 17". I think it's somewhat more sensible that they should have at least as much HP as a civilian, and not be complete cripples next to one. Therefore, I'm treating the 40 HP as canonical. Applying our conversion formula gives us 50 HP for CPs.
Let's look at their weapons; CPs come with a variety of weapons. Some are armed with pistols, some with SMGs, some carry Manhacks (which, I suppose, are more additional equipment than weapon), and some carry shock batons. Because, of these, shock batons are the only weapon not encountered elsewhere, I'll treat them in this section.
According to skill.cfg:
Quote:
sk_plr_dmg_stunstick "10"
sk_npc_dmg_stunstick "40" // Kill a citizen in one hit
Applying our conversion formula, the "stunstick" thus deals 12.5 damage to the player, but 50 damage to an NPC (this is not limited to citizens, though we only ever see it used against them and the player in-game). Apparently, this is not modified by the fact that Gordon Freeman wears his suit; even the CP encountered early in the game in the "Pick up that Can" scene, before we find the suit, deals reduced damage to Gordon. It's hard to explain this with any material features (as is the fact that Gordon, a physicist, has 2.5 times the HP of a Citizen), but let's roll with it. Given that nobody in RA2 is Gordon Freeman, I suggest that a stunstick hit deals 50 base damage to infantry. Of course, this damage is only partly a hit, and partly high-voltage current, so I suggest using the tesla warhead to modify that damage.
The code point "sk_vortigaunt_dmg_claw" is the damage dealt by a meelee attack and converts to 12.5, as is "sk_vortigaunt_dmg_rake", which converts to 31.5. More interesting is "sk_vortigaunt_dmg_zap", which is a ranged bolt attack that converts to 62.5. "sk_vortigaunt_armor_charge" is the Vortigaunt recharging Gordon's armor. I suppose there isn't anything in the universe of RA2 that outright absorbs electric (or semi-electric) energy, so I suppose this would be a somewhat useless thing to have in RA2, but perhaps it can be used to overcharge Tesla Coils, or perhaps the Vortigaunt can modify the current to work with any machinery? That's all up to you.
Strider
The art asset is here. Strider is one of the more interesting conversions. In skill.cfg, the Strider is defined as:
The Strider thus formally has 350 HP, which yields 437.5 HP with our conversion multiplier. However, in HL2, the Strider can be harmed only by explosions and dark energy balls (DEBs) fired by the secondary mode of the OSIPR. The amount of explosions the Strider can take take is defined in "sk_strider_num_missiles*", with "sk_strider_num_missiles2" being the number for medium difficulty setting. In HL2, the only sources of explosion are grenades, SMG grenades, Hunter bombs, RPGs and exploding barrels, all of which vary greatly in damage, but all of which kill the Strider in the same number of hits. DEB hits can be substituted for explosive damage instances at a rate of 2:1. Further, a Strider will be instantly destroyed when hit by another Strider's warp cannon (something that can never happen in-game, but can be modelled in GMod), and the Gunship's "belly gun". Currently, I have not researched this.
As HL2 takes place in the same universe as HL, and in HL it is possible to damage vehicles with guns and even your crowbar (albeit slowly), I'm going to treat the immunity of the Strider to small arms as a feature of having an armor that is different from that of terrestrial combat vehicles, and not as a feature of laws of nature that are different in HL than they are in RA2. It's not like you can't damage vehicles with bullets in HL, but in RA2 you can, but rather, the Strider carries some exotic alien armor that makes it immune to bullets and pulseguns (and meelee hits with a crowbar).
When NPCs attack a Strider with RPGs, the number of hits required is actually doubled compared to that of the player/Gordon Freeman.
Striders have three modes of attack: a burst-fire pulse chaingun, a "warp cannon" and a leg stomp. The leg stomp is most easily converted to RA2, as it only works against small organic targets and is instantly fatal, thus resembling Crush. The Warp Cannon is the most interesting; it is only used in a few scripted instance, but it is crucially the only weapon in the game capable of damaging buildings. It is also instantly fatal to almost any target, including targets whose HP have been raised by hacking to insane values.
Next, let's look at TF2. Converting TF2 requires taking a somewhat more circuitous route. Let's first calibrate the conversion:
Civilian (TFC)
In TFC, there was a Civilian class. As before, I'm going to assume that an unarmored rando civilian in the universe of TFC has the same damage resilience as a Civilian in RA2, and voilà, the TFC Civilian also happens to have the exact same HP value as the RA2 Civilian (50), which means that we do not need to apply any conversion factor at all between TFC and RA2.
Step 2: finding a shared element between TFC and TF2; I've been able to find two items that appear in TFC and in TF2, which are the Classic (a sniper rifle) and the Original (a rocket launcher). I have not been able to come by damage stats for the Classic, but the Original deals 100 damage in TFC and 100 damage in TF2 - exactly the same as the default TF2 rocket launcher. We can thus conclude that damage values can be transferred 1:1 from TFC to TF2, and thereby conclude, since TF2 and TFC take place in the same universe and thus have the same laws of nature and biology, HP values can also be transferred 1:1 from TFC to TF2.
As we now know that the TFC HP and damage values can be transferred 1:1 to RA2, and HP and damage values can be transferred 1:1 from TF2 to TFC, we know that HP and damage values can be transferred 1:1 from TF2 to RA2. Thus, for TF2 to TFC conversion, we don't actually have to do anything - plus&minus some modifications to account for evasion and damage resistance in RA2. For example, Sniper (art asset found here HP is 125, which yields exactly the same value as the Sniper in RA2. I think that the post-conversion stats actually don't yield any ridiculous numbers in RA2 speaks for this method.
Spy
The TF2 Spy also has 125 HP, so would result in basic infantry HP when implemented in RA2 (substantially more resilient than the TF2 Spy). Like the RA2 Spy, the TF2 Spy can disguise, and does so pretty much the same way: an infinite-range disguise kit allows him to disguise as any enemy infantry currently spawned. Additionally, the Spy carries three weapons, one per each of the categories "pistol", "knife" and "sapper".
The knife delivers a meelee attack which inflicts greatly increased damage (almost universally fatal) when attacking an enemy from behind (backstab). As we all know, RA2 does not offer directional armor, so implementing the backstab of TF2's Spy is not possible, but I had the idea of providing this substitute for use with the Spy conversion from TF2:
[Backstab]
RelativeDamage.Infantry=200% ; In TF2, Backstab inflicts 200% of the target's current health in base damage.
Verses=3,3,3,x,x,x,x,x,x,x,x ; And then deals a critical hit, which increases the damage to 300%.
Versus.CritImmune=1 ; I suppose you might want some targets to be immune to critical hits.
I'm frankly not sure what verses to give for vehicle and building armor. We might use the "Mann vs. Machine" game mode as a guide; spy backstabs only do 25% damage to robots, which might give a guidance to vehicle armor.
Sappers are weapons placed on devices constructed by Engineers which, until destroyed, have two effects: they disable the device, and they gradually damage it. They can be removed by hitting them with meelee weapons. In TF2, the Engineer's constructs are referred to as "buildings", so perhaps instead of, when implementing the Sapper in TF2, limiting it to the constructs of the Engineer, it makes sense allowing it to also sap other buildings.
Although the TF2 sapper closely resembles several RA2 features (IvanBomb and EMP), RA2 does not offer any way to perfectly implement it. We might have the intuition of using a combination of IvanBomb with an IvanBomb.Image that is an animation that deals damage and EMP, however IvanBomb.Image does not parse its entry as an animation, so this does not work. QUICK_EDIT
You cannot post new topics in this forum You cannot reply to topics in this forum You cannot edit your posts in this forum You cannot delete your posts in this forum You cannot vote in polls in this forum You cannot attach files in this forum You can download files in this forum
[Lore] Converting Valve stats to RA2
