New Tool: Leaky Shields/Armor simulator.
 

http://imagemodserver.mine.nu/other/...p/leakysim.zip

Plug in the shield, armor, ship and weapon stats, and see how your design fares.
Makes a nice big chart showing the damage progression.
Mouse over the chart to get exact numerical values.

Note:
This is not a statistical analysis; it is an accurate simulator with SE4's randomness built in. Every battle may turn out differently.
How many hits will it take to cripple your warship? Now you can find out!

Re: New Tool: Leaky Shields/Armor simulator.
 

Interesting.

Re: New Tool: Leaky Shields/Armor simulator.
 

Christmas comes early this year!

Re: New Tool: Leaky Shields/Armor simulator.
 

I don't get it, what are the scales that are being used? What is the black represent? The colors represent the component types, that's obvious, but why are they larger in one area than the next? I've not much idea how to use this analysis tool.

Are the values you enter into the Critical and Non critical HP supposed to be for each component or a sum of all of them?

What does SGFD mean? How do you evaluate the Carrier Battles shield mix where you can have a blend of both hard (classic) shields and those that only absorb hits from round to round?

Why do the values in the lower boxes change when you move the mouse over the chart? What is that showing?

Re: New Tool: Leaky Shields/Armor simulator.
 

If you hold the mouse over the labels on the right, the tooltips will pop up and explain further.

SGFD stands for the "Shield Generation From Damage" ability, which is seen on crystalline armor and leaky shields.

As the tooltips will also explain, the hitpoints is per component. In the box beside that, you specify how many.

The graph shows the hitpoints remaining on your ship in each category; shield points, leaky armor, shield generators, generic noncriticals, and generic criticals.
The left edge is the state of your ship after the first hit, while the right edge is the state of your ship after the last hit.
Mousing over the chart will display the exact values of what you have left in the colour-coded text boxes at the bottom of the screen.

Re: New Tool: Leaky Shields/Armor simulator.
 

Got it, thanks.

Re: New Tool: Leaky Shields/Armor simulator.
 

This is cool. The concept of leaky defenses sounds like it would make the game much more interesting. Although, I guess the 'armor skipping' ability of weapons is usless now, if I understand correctly how leaky armor is implemented. Are there any mods that have decent AI support which use leaky defenses? Perhaps the AI isn't good enough at making repair ships to do this.

Re: New Tool: Leaky Shields/Armor simulator.
 

Skips armor won't become useless, it will just have a different purpose since it won't trigger the SGFD ability on the leaky shields!

Re: New Tool: Leaky Shields/Armor simulator.
 

Skip Armor damage type also does not trigger emissive armor ability. You can bypass non-armor emissive components and leaky shield components (the SGFD part) with such weapons, which brings a whole new sort of usefulness to crystalline shard cannons.

Re: New Tool: Leaky Shields/Armor simulator.
 

Ah, I see http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif Cool, thanks!

Re: New Tool: Leaky Shields/Armor simulator.
 

Very cool SJ.

Re: New Tool: Leaky Shields/Armor simulator.
 

I am not happy with this tool. It probably means that I will have to re-adjust values in my mod, again. Thanks SJ, thanks a lot. [img]/threads/images/Graemlins/Cold.gif[/img]

Re: New Tool: Leaky Shields/Armor simulator.
 

Be sure to run the simulation a couple times for each case.
Each click of the button is a new ship getting pounded on, and it may get unlucky and lose a shield or two from the first few hits.

Re: New Tool: Leaky Shields/Armor simulator.
 

Man too bad it could not load the designs from one of your save game files.... oh that would sweet.

Having a tool like this would be really cool for SE V.

Re: New Tool: Leaky Shields/Armor simulator.
 

having support in SEV for plugins that do stuff like this or files that are exportable to tools like this would be nice.

Re: New Tool: Leaky Shields/Armor simulator.
 

Hmmm... i got a "Could not connect to remote server" error http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/mad.gif

Re: New Tool: Leaky Shields/Armor simulator.
 

I am still having problems understanding the graph... I must be to tired or something.

Re: New Tool: Leaky Shields/Armor simulator.
 

The colours map to the different systems, as seen below the graph.
The height of the bar is the hitpoints remaining.

Each step to the right is another X-damage hit to your ship.

Re: New Tool: Leaky Shields/Armor simulator.
 

Let me take a stab at it, since I think I now get it.

The Graph shows the ship as it is hit by the number of shots you depict on the top. On the left side it is completley undamaged, on the right side it is as damaged as the last shot will make it. If you run out of color before you get to the right side of the chart, the ship is destroyed. The left side of the utility lets you describe the ship to the model, components, shields, etc. The bottom of this area is a section that lets you put in how much tonnage you dedicate to both shields and armor combined. The top slider bar allows you to adjust from 100% shields to 100% armor tonnage, or any combination inbetween. Every time you hit generate the model will shoot the number of shots you list, and you can see how your ship fares as it progresses from right to left. You should see the blue part on the top showing shields first go away, and then you will begin to loose internals.

Re: New Tool: Leaky Shields/Armor simulator.
 

Is it possible to display the graph with a thin line between each "hit column"? I think it can help indentifying which hit # did what.

Re: New Tool: Leaky Shields/Armor simulator.
 

Updated.
It does look quite nice with the borders.

The nearest-pixel rounding on the bar chart does tend to be more noticable with the borders, but overall I like it much better.

Re: New Tool: Leaky Shields/Armor simulator.
 

Just give it another whirl, looks good, but I still won't forgive you for making me consider re-evaluating my mod data.

Re: New Tool: Leaky Shields/Armor simulator.
 

The major thing to take note of is the fact that survivability goes through the roof as soon as both SGFD and hitpoints per armor component are slightly greater than the weapon damage.

Also, mixing weapons does tend to decrease the survivability, since it breaks up the partial damage + SGFD cycle.