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The lack of heart-shot mechanics in video games.
Why can't I attack some other vulnerability that should be just as lethal?
In fact, medically speaking heart damage is much more dangerous than brain damage.
In fact, medically speaking heart damage is much more dangerous than brain damage.
Comments
These are the factors that spring to mind:
I don't know much about creating hitboxes, but I'm lead to understand that the more variation you want in the hitbox, the more difficult and finicky it becomes to get them working properly. Extremities like the head and limbs are probably easier to define as separate targets, whereas a potential heart shot would have to be a small area on the front of the torso, another on the back and under one of the armpits. So rather than the universal facing of other hitboxes, a heart shot would only come up positive on three facings, and then you have to take into account that the area immediately around the heart would just be a "normal" shot. Then again, you're more likely to hit a lung; not as immediately lethal, but just as disabling, so it might be pointless to have a difference and just stick to torso damage.
The other thing is that the head is a visually obvious target, and it's fantastic from a game design point of view because it incentivises hitting a smaller target for a greater reward. If you have equally lethal heart shots, then rapid fire weapons that disperse ammo in a cone of fire won't only be more reliable as centre-mass weapons, but they'll usually get at least one heart shot in a burst of fire to the torso. So the balance between a more likely hit for less damage and a less likely hit for more damage is lost if you introduce heart shots.
Hotboxes are rectangles/cuboids, I will interject here.
Thus, it's easy enough to create a hitbox for the head- a small target stacked on top of another target; a cube sitting atop another cube- but it's much harder to create a hitbox for the heart- a small target within a larger target.
Creating heart shots would essentially require making the entirety of an object a hitbox, except this one part of it, which isn't a hitbox.
Compare the following hitboxes, found within Counter Strike:
Now, imagine trying to make the torso's hitbox out of several smaller cubes so that you could have a cube in there representing the heart.
I'd imagine if you were to make a heart hitbox, one would have to make the bullet in question turn off the general torso hitbox for that particular bullet once it strikes the character in the torso. If it doesn't hit the heart hitbox, the character doesn't take extra damage. If it does pass through, he takes extra damage.
But yeah, i'd think that would be a pain to design, and you'd pretty much have to make sure to design the inside anatomy of the player models and build some kind of physics system built around how bones and muscles are affected and all that.
Overgrowth does that, I think.
^^^Is that actually from CS? But in any case, those are clearly primitive. I believe that modern hitboxes are tighter, but we still aren't at the point at which we could make feasible heart hitboxes.
Yes.
They still work off the same principles nowadays.
Shot through the heart, and you're to blame...
No one can save me, the damage is done!
Chivalry medieval warfare has a heartshot mechanic. I don't know how it works, but its there.
You bastards.
There are games that do it. I don't think many of those games have automatic weapons though.
Dwarf Fortress does it.
would you say that at the heart of the matter, you just want games to aim for lower goals
^^^ Makes me think of FATAL's combat damage system, heh heh.
FATAL's problem...
Well, one of FATAL's problems...
The reason why FATAL's combat sucks (it says a lot that that isn't one of the bigger problems with the game) is that it's basically designed like a really complex computer game, then asks you to do all the calculations the computer would be doing.
Excuse me are you forgetting the unbeatable classic heart-shooting experience that is Cabela's Big Game Hunter 2010?
FATAL as a computer game? I'd shudder, but I'm pretty sure somebody in Japan already did no less than a three-part series.
I'm not saying a FATAL computer game would be good. I'm saying FATAL thinks the player is a computer.
^^ The Maiden
No, you promised yourself you'd stop