[R-DEV]Mats391 PR:BF2 Lead Developer



Join Date: Aug 2010 Posts: 6,352 Germany Germany Location: Muenster Blog Entries: 5

Tank armor changes

For the upcoming patch we decide to redo the tank armor a bit to make tanks stronger in some places and way weaker in others. To achieve this without having to recreate the tanks export scenes, we developed a new tool that allows us to import only the collision meshes, edit them and export them again with very little effort. But that is technical stuff and not interesting for most of you, so lets get straight to some pictures





Green: Front armor, Blue: Side armor, Teal: Rear armor, Yellow: Top armor

What do you see? The most obvious change will be the removal of an extra material for the tracks. In the past the tracks where a hitzone that dealt lots of damage to the tank. After some discussion we decided that we will never be able to represent the actual damage done to the vehicle when the tracks get hit (track breaks, but tank is fine) and instead just removed the tracks as a special hitzone. The tracks now have the same material as the hull according the position they face. This means hitting tracks from side will deal same damage as hitting hull from side and hitting from front will deal same damage as hitting front hull.

A more subtle change is the removal of non-armor materials. Currently tanks and other vehicles have lots of materials that are not specific armor materials. These are often glass, rubber or cloth. Those materials can create a weak or strong spot in places that do not make sense. Some of you may remember when you could blow up a tank instantly by shooting its periscope. By removing those materials and replacing them with hull materials, this will be a thing of the past. The only down side will be wrong impact effects. Sorry to all tank crews that had fun knifing and shooting the lights for the glass cracks



The next big thing are changes in damage values. This mostly revolves around a thing requested a lot of times: ATGM damage vs tank front armor.





Damage done vs different materials in percent

As you can see ATGMs and other HEAT projectiles will only deal very little damage vs the front of a tank, but quite a lot on side and rear. While this will make it harder to kill a tank from the front, it will also be the end of a tank surviving a HAT missile into its back. Even light anti tank weapons will be dangerous to a tank if they get behind it.

We decided to go with this setting as modern reactive armor has proven to make HEAT projectiles very ineffective. Even tandem warheads fail to penetrate quite often. Some of our tanks do not feature reactive armor, but for now they will have the same armor values as those which do. Mainly the T-72, in reality poorly armored, will still be comparable to other modern tanks until we get a new main battle tank for MEC. The only tank that will not get strong front armor is the T-62. In the future we would like to have even more variety between the different tanks in terms of armor, but that is a long way out.

Kinetic AP shells will deal more damage to the rear as well making the rear of a tank very vulnerable. The damage to the front is unchanged.

These are the values in current development build. They might change for the initial release and we will keep an eye on them even post release to ensure balance is preserved.





Other things we did while we worked on the tank armor include fixing some BF2 vehicles to have better materials. LAV-25 and BTR-60 no longer have the same material all around.



In the past you might have seen us talk about redoing some of our armor system in public. Now it is time to show some of our progress!For the upcoming patch we decide to redo the tank armor a bit to make tanks stronger in some places and way weaker in others. To achieve this without having to recreate the tanks export scenes, we developed a new tool that allows us to import only the collision meshes, edit them and export them again with very little effort. But that is technical stuff and not interesting for most of you, so lets get straight to some picturesWhat do you see? The most obvious change will be the removal of an extra material for the tracks. In the past the tracks where a hitzone that dealt lots of damage to the tank. After some discussion we decided that we will never be able to represent the actual damage done to the vehicle when the tracks get hit (track breaks, but tank is fine) and instead just removed the tracks as a special hitzone. The tracks now have the same material as the hull according the position they face. This means hitting tracks from side will deal same damage as hitting hull from side and hitting from front will deal same damage as hitting front hull.A more subtle change is the removal of non-armor materials. Currently tanks and other vehicles have lots of materials that are not specific armor materials. These are often glass, rubber or cloth. Those materials can create a weak or strong spot in places that do not make sense. Some of you may remember when you could blow up a tank instantly by shooting its periscope. By removing those materials and replacing them with hull materials, this will be a thing of the past. The only down side will be wrong impact effects. Sorry to all tank crews that had fun knifing and shooting the lights for the glass cracksThe next big thing are changes in damage values. This mostly revolves around a thing requested a lot of times: ATGM damage vs tank front armor.As you can see ATGMs and other HEAT projectiles will only deal very little damage vs the front of a tank, but quite a lot on side and rear. While this will make it harder to kill a tank from the front, it will also be the end of a tank surviving a HAT missile into its back. Even light anti tank weapons will be dangerous to a tank if they get behind it.We decided to go with this setting as modern reactive armor has proven to make HEAT projectiles very ineffective. Even tandem warheads fail to penetrate quite often. Some of our tanks do not feature reactive armor, but for now they will have the same armor values as those which do. Mainly the T-72, in reality poorly armored, will still be comparable to other modern tanks until we get a new main battle tank for MEC. The only tank that will not get strong front armor is the T-62. In the future we would like to have even more variety between the different tanks in terms of armor, but that is a long way out.Kinetic AP shells will deal more damage to the rear as well making the rear of a tank very vulnerable. The damage to the front is unchanged.These are the values in current development build. They might change for the initial release and we will keep an eye on them even post release to ensure balance is preserved.Other things we did while we worked on the tank armor include fixing some BF2 vehicles to have better materials. LAV-25 and BTR-60 no longer have the same material all around.Now BTR-60 will be bit stronger on the front and LAV-25 will finally die from LAT to the rear.