Realism is a priority with me. I want accurate real-world knowledge and player logic to be applicable to the game. So I DO have to include the heart. Especially since it makes players stop idiotically aiming for the head. (Aiming for the head in a real fight is a good way to get yourself killed without hitting your target once.)

Give everyone just 1 HP then :)

Also note that aiming for the heart is an idiocy from the realism point of view as well. If you have a gun you don't try to hit the heart, just the person :) Three random bullets in stomach are statisticly equally good as one well aimed bullet in the heart (unless they are a vampire :D).

You mention stories about amazing feats people accomplish while mortally wounded. There are stories (true or not) of say, mothers lifting cars off of children after accidents... this is the exception, not the normal "Realistic" result. The same applies to everything else, the stories you mention are so incredible because they are so unusual.

Except they're not. Even being shot in the head, with no adjustment for the number of times, the location, the available medical attention (or lack thereof), 10% of victims survive. And if I have to explain that being shot in the head is considerably deadlier than being shot in the chest, I am going to rip my hair out.

Also, I never said every gun shot was deadly either, I said it makes things much more complicated. Walking/moving on a leg that just got shot is similiar to attempting to walk on a leg that just got broken.

Uh, no it isn't. It does impair you, but not NEARLY as much as a broken bone. When you add on being presently oblivious to pain you might not even notice the injury and indeed many people don't, even after the bullet rips open their femoral artery and mortally wounds them. And you know what? The game already handles that just fine.

Attempting to fire with an arm with a gun shot is definitey going to effect your aim, these disadvantages are what get you killed, I was under the impression that you wanted gun fights to be more survivable, it wasn't particularly clear that you simply wanted to make the player take longer to die. It's possible, but your not going to be doing jumping jacks or sprinting to cover.

Except, once again, it's totally frequent to keep going with a gunshot wound. But, of course, no matter how many examples I give, even if I got a list of a couple dozen and sang them to the tune of Turkey in the Straw, you'd just call them all isolated cases and ignore their very existence as if it doesn't impact your argument.

Getting hit in the chest while wearing a vest will still knock you down,

Physics says you're full of shit. Specifically, Newton's third law of motion. NO firearm can ever have enough force to knock somebody down, or the user would be knocked down when they fired it, even assuming perfect efficiency which is far from being the case.

take your wind and possibly break some ribs.

Nope. Not enough force for that. Unless you're arguing the bullet does MORE while wearing armour, because having taken bullets I can tell you it's not what you think. When I was 12, I was shot in the head once and the back twice. I'm not going into circumstances there, I could have avoided that but the guy is still a complete monster. I made it to school the next day, with those wounds. I didn't even notice the two wounds in my back, just the head wound. And with those injuries, I ran from the scene and arrived at a friend's house, then I don't remember anything until about 8:00 the next day when I woke up to find myself late to school and for some reason that seemed really important to me at the time. On another instance... Well, I don't really know. I came home one day when I was about six thinking I had a nasty leg cramp, then I got home and my grandmother pointed to my leg and I realized I had a bleeding hole in my thigh. A HUGE bleeding hole in my thigh. And to be honest, I don't really know what happened there, but I'm pretty sure it was a gunshot wound. I don't think I was ever shot *at*, I think it was a stray bullet, but it happened.

My best friend was also shot on two occasions... Well, one and an edge case. The edge case he was shot at a whole bunch with a shotgun (while running away) when he was 8, and despite hundreds of tiny birdshot pellets hitting him not one penetrated his coat or jeans. He didn't realize he'd been hit at all until he was at home and realized his clothes were in tatters. The more serious time he was 10, and he was shot twice in the back while sitting in a park flirting with a girl.

Also, if you got hit, you must not have been in good enough cover... who ever is shooting at you now has a much easier target.

Nonsense. Bullets go through objects just fine, you can get hit through a lot of "cover". And potentially from a distance where they have no idea they hit anything, and where you might not have even been the target.

Here, you explicitly state that you think a hit in the heart is the problem EVEN THOUGH it doesn't always kill you instantly... indicating that any other fatal shot that has similiar results (i.e death) would be an issue. You say in your game it should be "rare for a single gunshot wound to kill you", but without the right kind of attention it is not "rare" for a single round to the chest to kill a person.[/background]
A statistic from www.trama.org:
"For penetrating thoracic injury the survival rate is fairly uniform at 18-33%, with stab wounds having a far greater chance of survival than gunshot wounds." http://www.trauma.org/archive/thoracic/EDTrationale.html

1. Quit with the formatting changes, it's really obnoxious when I'm trying to reply to it.
2. "Most people shot" does not mean "most people shot in the chest". Most people shot get hit in the abdomen. I know it's strange, but it's true. Gutshots account for more trauma than chest and head shots combined, and with guns it's more than all other gunshot wounds combined. And gut shots have a low fatality rate since the advent of antibiotics, because the density of blood vessels is fairly low and the organs themselves, while required, can be easily operated upon and their function won't be a pressing issue for quite a while after you're shot.
3. This does not adjust for the number of shots.
4. This also does not adjust for medical attention, patient health, or other factors.

The fact that you would prefer a gun shot wound to take a long time to kill you, would generally lead someone to believe that you would attempt to give the player options they could take to avoid getting killed after being shot...

Which I DO, for most injuries. You have plenty of medical implements and an entire skill devoted to medicine. And if you're any good at it, a single gunshot wound IS unlikely to kill you in most locations. Especially in co-op, as having somebody else use medical implements on you is generally more effective than using them on yourself.

not many game designers look for ways to make more of the time players are playing their game have no "winning moves".

And I'm not. You can usually save your own life with the medicine skill, and having somebody else do it gives you even better chances.

You then say "many enemies in the game also use guns"...enemies that use guns tend to be humanoid... and if guns are common it generally leads one to believe that gun fights will be common.

Not really. Many NPCs in the game are technically "enemies" in the sense that you can kill them for gain and they are dangerous to the player, but fighting them *at all* is generally considered a bad mood and anything you can do to avoid the fight is probably the better option. Three good examples:
1. You might be confronted by a looter yelling at you for getting too close to a ruined house and brandishing a weapon and calling you a "claim jumper". Leave and they won't shoot.
2. A firefight between two of the armies in the area might erupt, posing a massive danger to everyone and everything around them. Get the hell away from that before it kills you.
3. A cult of dumb-all-over religious loonies starts screaming at you over a bullhorn. Run like hell, you've got about ten seconds before they break out the heavy machine guns and "defend the holy land" from a "heathen invader" like you... A little lost refugee picking through the busted car on the exterior for baked beans.

If gun fights are to be common then the player seems to be expected to be able to survive gun fights commonly. In order to answer this game "realistically" as you seem to have wanted we can only fall upon knowledge of other instances where there are many enemies often carrying guns in real life... which oddly enough is a pretty good description of a war.

You are seriously spinning this as hard as you can, aren't you? There's a war in the background the player never fights in. That is not enough to be a war game.

I did actually realize that my first post, while I had hoped to be helpful didn't actually address the issue concerning the difficulties of aiming... which is precisely why I added the second post which dealt exclusively with the many variables that affect accuracy. I do actually have experience with weapons, I was combat ops in Iraq for two separate years. I have been trained on the maintenance and use of an array weapons... granted I was a General Issue Joe and not the super star spec ops... I still feel the super human abilities your ascribing to the spec ops guys sounds more like holly wood fantasy then the "do what works" reality.

You don't know what you're talking about, and military experience doesn't change that. All military experience by itself says is you're a shitty person; the rest of your sentence just confirms it when you brag about being part of the US military screwing the pooch so hard the pooch had to lock itself in the bathroom for an hour with a tube of soothing cream. That says nothing about any knowledge you may have, believe it or not, and if you've never been shot in the line of duty you can't even use that, even assuming that you actually did serve in the military because that's a VERY common lie. And the truth of the matter is that special forces ARE trained to shoot exclusively for the heart. And so were you. When they told you to aim centre mass, what did you think was the intended target? The only difference is between being way better marksmen than you and being much closer to their targets when they fire, special forces actually hit the heart pretty consistently and regular infantry don't.

You should try to control your temper. It's rude to treat people trying to help you the way you do.

And finally, the first thing you've said that is actually true. At least, with people I believe are actually trying to help, regardless of whether they're succeeding or not. I guess I should cut you some slack, you're certainly better than this dumbass:

Give everyone just 1 HP then

See this asinine statement? See this blissful denial of reality? It's like he's completely insane and proud of it. Either he really thinks getting hit once anywhere with anything is instantly fatal or he's trolling me from behind that smiley face and either way I want to smack him.

Also note that aiming for the heart is an idiocy from the realism point of view as well. If you have a gun you don't try to hit the heart, just the person Three random bullets in stomach are statisticly equally good as one well aimed bullet in the heart (unless they are a vampire ).

And this confirms it. See this? This shows a complete lack of knowledge in the area as people can take gutshots all damned day and only die from it after the fact. Intestinal trauma is one step up from muscle damage, it results in only somewhat more blood loss and doesn't really matter much until it gets infected. (Though when it does, DAMN but it gets nasty.) Most of the time, when somebody lives through multiple gunshot wounds it's because none of the wounds were in the chest or head and it's actually better to get shot multiple times through the stomach or intestines than a single time through a lung. There's a reason why ALL instructors for the military, police AND civilian self-defence courses tell you to aim for the chest and fire until your weapon is empty. But this guy doesn't know and doesn't care. It's like he's proud of his ignorance.

Well Paragon, you're a lot better than he is, at least. But then, I'm not sure that's saying anything.

Also Acharis, please, whatever you do, never breed.

Okay, I respect your reasons. Number 1 will definitely affect gameplay. The uncertainty of whether they're really done, the technical difficulty as the enemy slumps behind props and is much harder to target, the tension as you approach the body for a better shot, I get it. Numbers 2 and 3 will apply to some players but not others. It depends on how much the player invests into mechanics vs story vs role-playing vs social, etc. If you're aiming for just the niche that are into that, cool. If your aim is more general it may negatively affect some players.

Okay, I have a few minor issues with this one.

1. I am concerned with making good games, what the market wants is a secondary concern at best. If I wanted to pander to the market I'd be making a shitty piece of "casual gaming" shovelware with match-3 or tile flip mechanics. I'll be fine with whatever audience I get.
2. It's a bigger audience than you think, otherwise games like Dark Souls wouldn't be so popular.
3. I admire more artistic games, especially those good at using mechanics as metaphor or giving setting information, lore and story without ever shoving it down your throat. Dark Souls is one example, so is Spec Ops: The Line. For quicker examples for you to Google and know what I'm talking about in ten minutes, try "Freedom Bridge", "Loneliness" or "Every Day the Same Dream". That's something I enjoy in games. And that's what I want to do, but with my own themes and messages.

I was more thinking along the lines of shotgun or improvised weapons when I spoke of bones deflecting the projectiles. What sort of distribution of weapons would be available, e.g. military vs household vs improvised?

Well, that's a complicated question, actually. For firearms, you can expect to find mostly "civilian" weaponry, but the alternate history in the game's background leaves Europe, especially central Europe (the game is in Germany), stocking up pretty heavily on firearms all the way to the '90s and that means that, if most of them hadn't been untouched and unmaintained for a couple decades now, the guns you find would be likely to be of quite high quality in addition to high quantity. But as it is, most are in pretty crappy shape and those that still work tend to be older, more reliable, manually-operated models. Unless you're looting the corpses of recently fallen soldiers, which is dangerous like you would not believe but if you can pull it off is pretty rewarding.

I completely feel your pain, it has happened to me numerous times on numerous websites. These days I treat any comment box that I write more than a paragraph in as unreliable. My suggestion is to occasionally copy/paste to something external like Notepad to prevent disaster. I'm doing it right now.

Taken to doing the same after that fiasco. Seriously, one misclick and when you go to delete a word you find yourself on a previous page. That's how I finally got try #4 through and how I'm doing this.

And please do your best to keep the temper in check, even though it can be trying.

I'd blame the frontal lobe damage, but I'm better than that.

Sorry, low blow on my part, I was just highlighting the use of the word war rather than making any relevant point.

Eh. You're still better than Acharis, at least. And Paragon. And at least one other whose name I can't recall at the moment.

JustinS:

I'm closing this topic because you're acting like a child throwing a temper tantrum; you're swearing excessively, expecting people to infer information you haven't provided whilst also lambasting them for incorrectly inferring other things, and insulting those who are trying to help you.

We'll cut anyone some slack for occasionally losing their temper -- especially if something frustrating has happened -- but you have been consistently rude through a number of posts in this topic (as well as in a number of your previous topics) and have continued to directly insult other members hours later when your frustration with the post editor should no longer have been in play.

Oh, and sorry you lost your post contents; unfortunately this sometimes happens, and it's something we'd like to improve longer term.

There is an auto-save function when using the quick or full post editors from most desktop browsers when JavaScript is enabled. When this function is available post contents are saved every two minutes and when available can be viewed and restored from a small text link in the lower left of the post editor; it's a simple over-write with no versioning, but it might be worth a look if you lose your post contents in future.

If this functionality doesn't seem to be available for you or if you'd like something more reliable unfortunately all I can recommend for now is composing longer posts in an external editor as many of our other members have taken to doing. We have very limited resources and a lot to work on, but we will try to improve this in future if Invision (the providers of the forum software) don't provide an improved feature in the meantime.