Hunting & Targeting Animals


Burning Bridges

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* Major overhaul to Hunting. All wildlife now have location-specific damage. Only headshots are now one-shot kills. Injured animals will bleed, making it possible to track them. Depending on the injury, animals may eventually bleed out.

Great, but I hope the highlighted part is not set in stone. Hunters will tell you that it's actually heart/lungshots that kill. A shot into the head is possible but most have very small brains and usually you just hit the skull. Especially killing bears with headshots is not easy.

Anyway, great that you went that direction. It will eventually result in great gameplay.

Thanks for listening to us;)


FORUM ADMIN NOTE: Discussion split from original thread as it's a worthwhile and separate discussion topic which warrants its own discussion thread to keep all the notes and suggestions organized.

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  • Hinterland
* Major overhaul to Hunting. All wildlife now have location-specific damage. Only headshots are now one-shot kills. Injured animals will bleed, making it possible to track them. Depending on the injury, animals may eventually bleed out.

Great, but I hope the highlighted part is not set in stone. Hunters will tell you that it's actually heart/lungshots that kill. A shot into the head is possible but most have very small brains and usually you just hit the skull. Especially killing bears with headshots is not easy.

Anyway, great that you went that direction. It will eventually result in great gameplay.

Thanks for listening to us;)

Yes, we've been hearing this feedback a lot. From a gameplay perspective, the headshot is a harder shot to make so it makes sense that it would be more lethal. But, we may change it depending on how "easy" it is to make the heart/lung shot. We don't have a specific location for heart/lung nor an easy way for players to be able to target it, so we'd have to make the whole chest area provide a possible one-shot kill, which might be realistic but not very interesting from a gameplay perspective.

Thanks for the feedback!

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For me chest area is absolutely ok. Just use the front third of the body otr something like that, it does not need to be super complex like in a hunting simulation.

http://www.hunter-ed.com/images/drawing ... organs.jpg

It sounds easy, the problem is if you hit a little too far behind or aim in the middle of the animal (like most inexperienced people will do) you hit stomach or guts and the animal runs for an eternity.

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Also, there is nothing wrong about head shot being lethal, just about it being the only shot that is instantly lethal.

As far as I know brain / spine shots will absolutely drop every animal on the spot, it's just that they are easy to miss and a lot of bones are in the way.

It also depends on the animal. I believe with hogs hunters often aim for the brain because they have a smaller lung/heart area.

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I cannot upload images atm. But something like this (simplified)

http://techeyes.com/techdaily/wp-conten ... e-kill.png

Lethal shots in most animals are just the lower half of the forward third of the body. That's just a sixth part of the body, doesn't seem super easy to me. There is of course also a lethal zone in the brain (small) and the whole spine.

For a game like TLD head + lungs/heart will do

Have not played since the update, But as long as you have blood trails and animals running for long distances, and instant kills in reasonable spots, you are on the sure path to making this 1000% more interesting :hatsoff:

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I know the update invalidates previous saves, but it seems I can't load any new saves either.

Unless being killed by a wolf immediately invalidates the save file, in which case, that's a problem given how many times a random wolf attack will kill you.

Button mashing or no, I've never been able to get a wolf to leave me alone after it attacks. I just die. Every time.

The save is deleted when you die. Death is permanent, you will need to start a new game when you die.

Lethal shots in most animals are just the lower half of the forward third of the body. That's just a sixth part of the body, doesn't seem super easy to me. There is of course also a lethal zone in the brain (small) and the whole spine.

For a game like TLD head + lungs/heart will do

I think the problem isn't in how hard the shot would be to make. Shooting the hart/lungs is probably as hard as shooting the head, but how do you "teach" people to shoot the hart/lungs in a game that doesn't do handholding? Even telling them they need to shoot the hart/lungs isn't going to help many people, since they don't know what part of the body contains the hart/lungs. Everyone knows where the head is...

But I agree that it would be a good thing if hart/lung shots would also be lethal, not just the head. If both regions are lethal people who don't know where the hart/lungs are can shoot the head.

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I'm not sure I understand what you mean. There are many things in TH that require knowledge and skill, and which are not obvious to anyone from the beginning (just think of the many who expect that you can simply eat snow). And it's not that animals won't die when you shoot them in the intestines, it's just that they can live for hours and you have to search them. So players might still shoot animals anywhere in the body, and go through the searching part, but they may also begin to wonder what they could do to kill them on the spot (because that is the most convenient way), and that is aiming for the heart/lung. And I assume there are millions of hunters who started as bad shots, there is no shame to that.

Also implementing sounds not too hard to me. For example just a sphere where the reticle is in my image and another in the head..

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  • Hinterland

It's a pretty tough problem to solve, actually, without adding a bunch of UI to the experience.

We can try other things though. This is the first-pass implementation, with the priority being to test adding a little more nuance to the hunting activity -- so that simply having a rifle and ammo is not enough to guarantee you X more days of survival.

Also, if you haven't tried it yet, tracking an animal by blood drops is pretty amazing. Especially when the wind picks up and those drops start to disappear...

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Also, if you haven't tried it yet, tracking an animal by blood drops is pretty amazing. Especially when the wind picks up and those drops start to disappear...

I've been wanting to, I admit. Shame that I've only landed headshots since the update!

(Is it just me, or did the rifle redesign adjust the ironsights to make them sliiightly more intuitive/accurate?)

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Also implementing sounds not too hard to me. For example just a sphere where the reticle is in my image and another in the head..

...it's amazing how easy some things sound like they should be. And then reality steps in. :)

Nothing is easy in games.

As I said before I would just put a 3d model of a sphere inside the body moves with it and use that for hit detection.

I have no idea though how easily your engine can provide that. On a low level like OpenGL it would not be unusually hard though. Anyway, if you say it's hard I believe you. But you do check the headshots so I don't see why it could not als check the chest.

And yes, though I haven't tried it I know that the blood trails will work fine because of the hunting games I played.

That's exactly what I hoped you would do. You could also put tracks into the snow, that would be equivalent but of course there are performance problems. Just saying, if one day we in the future could locate animals by their tracks in the snow that would be awesome. Right now the tracks disappear too fast for that otherwise everything is already there.

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While on this topic - Have you considered adding a scope to the rifle? To make it less accessible it could be found separately and attached with simple tools or something.

The point of the scope is to reward players willing to invest the extra time to obtain it. The reward being - better aim and more efficient use of the bullets.

I also mentioned in another post how rifle condition currently does not affect aim. Maybe reward players who manage to keep rifle condition above certain number by making the rifle more accurate?

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I remember it has been suggested before. And I am sure they are considering it. A scope is a logical extension to the game, but imo not trivial to implement. I personally thought about it while playing and came to the conclusion that is it is not necessary unless systems are changed. It would of course be different and if the aiming was more sophisticated like in hunting sims, and distances are much greater. But as it is right now it is more basic hunting, the spook distance is very low and aiming with ironsights feels okish to me. In real life whenever I see a roe deer it is at least 100m away, or if it is very young it will instantly spook like a thunderbolt whenever I "catch" one by suprise, mostly when riding the bicycle. And this in an area like Germany where those animals are relatively safe.

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I see chest area has been implemented in the latest patch, cool. Unfortunately I have the game not installed atm (decided to take a break as it was getting addictive), but if the game now drops animals dead when hit in the head and chest, and they flee for considerable distance otherwise, I find it perfect for this game. It gets only complicated if someone notices that if you hit the animal in the butt the bullet could travel to the vital organs, but I don't think this is even necessary in this type of game. When you're aiming at an animals butt you not doing it right.

If one of the devs reads this I would also add that every rifle shot should also spook all animals in a radius, at least temporarily. So that if you miss you can't simply place another shot.

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