Home on the Ranged Target Cover

I had gotten to the point over the weekend where I was fairly comfortable with the final state of melee cover checks (with its weird alternate source points when attacking downward while standing on a ledge), and really began testing the ranged cover checks. What helped me in testing was adding the interaction alterations (for the attack interaction) to the status feedback so that the client could see cover and concealment affecting the attack. I’m going to need to examine the StepStatus a lot more closely to “pretty-up” the structure, and ensure that the right amount of information is sent to each client. I’m also going to need to put a facility to always send observed-activity info to various clients when an actor acts (right now, I only use ObservedActivityInfo when making an OpportunisticInquiry).

But anyway, back to ranged attacks. I noticed that a creature whose feet were blocked by only a small step was getting a lot of cover lines flagged (so that they could get a +4 cover bonus to armor-rating). I tried to compensate for this at first by proportionally moving the bottom points of the lowest cells upwards towards the top points, but this still kept them behind the step in certain cases.

Then, I planned to do some magic with checking the back-most low point(s) if the front-most low points were blocked. But I finally decided on boosting the low points upward again by an “absolute” amount relative to a fraction of the creature size (similar to how land movement has a maximum up-step size beyond which a climb check is needed, and representing the “bulk/core” of the creature’s body), rather than a fraction of the vector between low and high. If the low point boost is longer than the vector between low and high points, than the low point is simply omitted from the target corner set.

In the light amount of testing I performed, this seems like the best balance so far. But I’ll need more testing, and ultimately I need to vary the amount of low-point boost by creature body type, and whether the creature is prone or not.