View source for Comm-Link:Healing Your Spacemen

Early in [[Star Citizen]]’s development, we laid out [[Chris Roberts]]’ vision for a new, more interesting system of character death. You can read all about it in Death of a Spaceman, but the gist is that our game aims to treat dying very seriously. To make Star Citizen’s world immersive and engaging, we crafted a high level design for a system that attempts to treat player death as more than just a ‘respawn and then continue playing’ moment. It’s possible to survive the destruction of your ship, to survive your battle wounds… but it’s also possible to lose your character permanently.

Until recently, Star Citizen’s death mechanic was a broad concept. Something we intended to put into play when the persistent universe launches, not something we needed to engineer for the [[Hangar Module]] or [[Arena Commander]]. With the upcoming First Person Shooter module, that changes significantly. A key portion of any FPS is the health system, which connects directly back to player death. Think back to classic FPS’ you have played. There have been countless iterations on player health and death, from picking up med kits in Wolfenstein to passing periodic regeneration chambers in Bioshock to the ‘rest and heal’ mechanic in the Call of Duty series. The challenge for the team at Illfonic became: how do we express Chris’ goals regarding player death through the FPS health system? The balancing act between realism and fun is important but what is more important is staying true to the vision. We want every firefight to matter and we want the player to feel both a sense of triumph in victory and the consequences of defeat.

In the end, the team decided to run counter to the standard FPS mechanics of regenerating health and instantly respawning on death to make every fight a calculated decision that can have ramifications that impact your character and place in the ‘Verse. What follows are the FPS health mechanics as we have implemented them; like much of Star Citizen, we’re excited to break from the norm and try something we believe to be extraordinary!

For health, we have devised a limb-based system with varying degrees of severity, permanence and reaction that we feel makes FPS combat more tactical and interesting.

Keeping in the spirit of total immersion, limb damage is a serious issue in FPS combat. All parts of the body have their own health. What this means is that there is no “overall health”; instead, ten different parts of the body (called limbs, detailed below) track their own data and impact the total for each Citizen. The amount of damage an individual limb suffers can be modified by other factors, such as armor and even environment. For instance, having armor on a particular limb will reduce the damage effect. There are 4 levels of health to each limb, each of which impacts how your character controls (what they are capable of, their response time and so on.) These are:

# '''Normal''' – You are fit and ready to fight!

# '''Hurt''' – Hurt limbs can cause problems with aiming, walking, or other functions that would require that limb. Limbs can get hurt from being too close to an electric spark, flame, outer explosion, or being hit with objects in the environment. Light Armored players can quickly be hurt.

# '''Damaged''' – Damaged limbs are useless and the player cannot use them unless they get them patched up in the field or taken to a mobile trauma system (see: Healing). This is the state right after the hurt phase, where the pain is so severe to the player, that no matter what limb is damaged, they will have a hard time being mobile. If one of their legs are damaged, they fall to the ground and crawl.

# '''Ruined''' – Limbs in this phase are essentially gone. The player will most likely bleed out at this state. This is usually something as bad as your arm being blown off. If the ruined limb is an arm then you will not be able to aim any weapons that require it. For example two handed weapons require both arms to be outside the Ruined state. Screen effects are also present to simulate the pain the player is enduring in this state. If the player is able to be healed by a player with medical equipment, the limb is completely gone and cannot be used, but the player can at least move around and continue the fight (if they have their legs, that is!)

In the current system, there are 10 Limbs that can receive isolated damage.

# Head

# Torso