Damage Model
Like mentioned in the car customization section, each car will have at least 4 damage sectors, some may even have more, but always at least 4.
Now usually, in a game, what happens is that when you hit the enemy, it's armor points get lower, after the armor points are gone, it starts to lose health. Simple
enogh, but hardly realistic. What I have in mind, is a quite more complex one, but still very coherent and it shouldn't be impossible to create, altough I'm
certain it won't be easy. Let me give you an example of how it works (please note that this system will need lots of tweaking before release).
Your car has thick side armor, but almost no front or rear armor. First you get hit to the sides, what happens is that armor takes the hit, but at the same
time it loses armor points, this far it's just like any other game out there. But, after your armor is down to 99% (or even before that if you don't have armored
your car well enough) you may get hit through the armor. Idea is that when your armor is down to, say 60%, what it means is that your armor only covers 60% of the
surface area in that direction. If that didn't make sense to you, think of it this way, as the armor gets hit, it falls off, there is less armor left, but instead
of the usual game, where you have to shoot all the armor away at first, here you only have to make a hole in it. Of course, you have to make larger hole than 1% before
being succesful to destroy enemy car.
Second difference in damage model is this: You get hit to the rear, what happens is that you cargo in your trunk gets hit and damaged, maybe even destroyed. You get
hit to the sides, you alter ego inside the car gets hit and loses HP, more of this later. Another note, it's also possible that the driver gets hit from attacks from
front and behind, but much smaller chance than from the sides. Finally, if you get hit from the front, your engine gets damaged.
Few words about the damage to the driver, since this is one of those things I've given lots of though. I wanted to prevent those battles, where you shoot one bullet
through the window, driver gets killed and that's it. So I needed some artificial system to prevent this. One possibility would have been to forget the whole thing,
you can't shoot through the windows, but I didn't like that. Other system could have been similar to Interstate '76, where only specific weapons do this kind of damage,
but I didn't like to copy that either. So I created my own system. Driver has it's own HP, so when the driver gets shot through the windows or through opening made to
the side armor, he loses HP, 0 HP and he dies and gets resurrected, maybe some kind of death penalty here (dunno about that yet).
Where does combat end? Usually the answer to this is simple, after enemy is destroyed. I wanted to go different way, so I decided to allow players to surrender.
When your car is shot up, maybe it's got it's engine blown, maybe you got your driver HP shot down to nearly zero, or maybe you just realize you have no fighting
chance and no way to escape, you can surrender. I'm still little open about what happens when you surrender.
Firstly, even if you surrender, it is possible that your enemy decides not to comply and instead keeps on shooting at you and finally kills you, this, of course,
will cause severe reputation damage to the assaillant and also cause him to become a murderer. One or two murders can be get away with, by paying fines and
compensation to the player who you killed, but even that can't help your reputation, and if you keep murdering people, you'll finally end up in a situation,
where you can't enter cities, can't drive on goverment controlled road without being attacked by police etc.
Secondly, when a player surrenders, if there are still other combatants, you will have to wait until the battle ends. After that you get to the negotiation screen,
where you and the other party dictate the terms of surrender. This is again a system that'll need lots of tweaking.
So, you have death penalty if your driver gets killed and you have the surrendering negotiations, but, you also have damage penalty. Every item in the game has
mileage, so if your item takes damage, either DoT or direct damage from enemy fire, in addition to having to repair that damage, the item also loses some of it's
maximum stats. So if your engine gets shot to pieces and you repair it, it's not gonna be good as new. Also parts get damaged over time, especially engine, brakes,
suspension, transmission, wheels, weapons and weapon mounts. Armor is much more resilient to the damage over time, since it gets damaged so badly during combat. So,
you have to repair those parts and eventually replace them. This system keeps the game economy running since no item is forever and people are constantly replacing
damaged or worn out parts.
As a closing words, small point about tires, they can be shot out. Fortunately, vehicles in this game have sturdy tires and system which keeps the inflated, even if
they have few holes in them. But, enough damage to the tires and your car becomes impossible to handle.
Collision damage
I gave this thing a lot of thought, and came to a conclusion that collision damage sucks. There is nothing wrong with it when everything goes smoothly, but if
something unexpected happens (lag spike, crash to desktop, power outage, bug, hiccup, etc. and your car ends up wrecked, it's gonna spoil your day (and possibly
of those who happen to be near you). So, I decided to go against it, no collision damage in this game. But you still can't do whatever you want, there will be
falling damage penalty, so if you drive down a cliff, don't expect to salvage much from that car.