(TFT) Re: VFSM for damage

[Mark Tapley <mtapley@swri.edu>]

At 20:25 -0400 5/6/09, Jay wrote:
> Okay here goes Toto, I dont think were playing TFT anymore.

pretty sure we are not. Dunno whether it plugs in easily to make an 
"extended TFT"; I'd try to keep that as a goal.

> Now Ive talked about the visible-flexible-scale-man before, but 
> heres where he kicks in.
>
> At this scale I draw out 13 body locations as 3d fold-ups on a page 
> of graph paper.
> I glue the page to the back of a beer box, cut out the parts, fold 
> em up and connect them together with rubber bands tied around beads.
>
> Head, Chest, Hips, Upper and Lower Arms and Legs and Feet.

I dabbled with something like this to try to make a fencing game, 
with extensions to serious (melee) swordplay. Pick your attack region 
and tactic, pick defense tactic, apply modifiers based on skill, 
weapon, dexterity, etc., see what damage (if any) was done, segue to 
ripostes, etc.

I think I never became convinced that it would be accurate, and did 
become convinced that it would be too much work.

I've also never seen a computer game that really did that, although 
some of the Wii/Lightsaber trainer/etc. genre are coming close.

At 11:53 -0400 5/8/09, TFT Digest wrote:
> If the game can do combat but it can't do sports without a separate 
> ruleset then there is something fundamentally wrong with the game as 
> many sports are ritualized combat.

Depends on what you mean by "wrong with". There are plenty of 
wonderful games that abstract only a subset of life. Chess, Risk, etc.

Too big a ruleset means only a very limited number of people will 
ever play it - see "Air War" (SPI, 1978 or so) (ah:

http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/1629

). (Yeah, I played it.)

At 22:09 -0400 5/10/09, TFT Digest wrote:
> The angle is ~45 degrees.

I think this is coincidence, but when a (homogenous) material fails 
in compression, it often fails by splitting along a 45 degree line. 
This is because the compressive strain can be resolved into a shear 
strain at that angle, and most materials are weaker in shear than in 
pure compression.

That's probably mostly useful for structural mechanics but not for 
combat injury or damage studies; neither bone nor skin nor wood are 
really homogenous, and they often will fail completely differently 
from the above.
--
						- Mark     210-379-4635
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