Medical Damage - Add alternate armor penetration

[LinkIsGrim]

When merged this pull request will:

• Add alternate damage calculation that takes ammo's penetrative ability into account (aka "caliber"). Includes CBA setting to disable if players prefer previous balance or have custom ammo configs. The idea is that AP ammo should actually make a difference against armored infantry, rather than just cover and vehicles.
• Pass ammo classname to wound handler data (validation for return data remains the same).

Requires #10573.

Armor is converted to RHAe ( pulled from \a3\Data_F\penetration\*.bisurf) based on its scaled value and ignored based on projectile's ability to penetrate material.

Balanced around ACE ammo values. We don't have to worry about 3rd party armor values because of #9216 and an armor soft-cap (at RHAe 110m) implemented in this PR. Overpenetration and angle of incidence are taken into account naturally by using impact damage to calculate impact speed, I actually trust the engine's handling of this more than whatever math we cook up.

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[LinkIsGrim]

I've realized a way to improve performance on this would be to move it to medical_damage instead, but I don't want to separate damage handling from engine (or add more things to the woundReceived event)

[LinkIsGrim]

I'm happy with this for now. Ready for review.

[LinkIsGrim]

Then I'd say the custom wound handler system is new enough that we can break BWC and help users in updating if that's the case. Still need a better approach though.

[johnb432]

Then I'd say the custom wound handler system is new enough that we can break BWC and help users in updating if that's the case. Still need a better approach though.

If it was added in #8278, then I'd agree it's recent enough, but other opinions are welcome.

[johnb432]

Doesn't this change the balance compared to before?

I haven't looked at it in detail, so forgive me if I'm wrong.

[LinkIsGrim]

Yes. Changed back to vanilla levels except for stupid armor which gets capped. Works well enough IMO.

[johnb432]

Modded ammunition from RHS, NIArms and 3CB Factions performs all over the place with this enabled. I'm not going to pretend to know anything about penetration of body armor by small calibers, but balancing between mods is very noticeable.
I guess it's not an ACE issue though.

[LinkIsGrim]

It's already a problem without this PR. NIArms ammo goes hard on hit but low on caliber for example. This at least finally sets a hard line in the sand for what works and what doesn't, IMO.

But thinking of fixing it:

• I don't like the idea of having more compats we have to manually patch for. Dynamic projectile replacement to use ACE ammo based on some lookup would be great but performance-intensive.
• This could be moved to a separate addon (medical_armorpen) with its own sub-compats for altering ammo stats (through hard patches). Hard-edits would disallow disabling this without removing the addon though.
• Hard patches could target magazines and change their ammo instead, but again it's compat work. Probably the most compatible option going for that though.
• Base penetration/damage on some other property, preferably from ballistics as that's mostly accurate across all mods, but I'm not a material expert either and there's some things you just can't derive from just ammunition weight, shape, and size.

[johnb432]

It's already a problem without this PR. NIArms ammo goes hard on hit but low on caliber for example. This at least finally sets a hard line in the sand for what works and what doesn't, IMO.

I was just comparing the behaviour of when the setting is off vs. on. I use Sum of trauma as the fatal damage source, which makes it, with alternate armor pen off, take more or less the same amount of hits to kill an enemy with the same caliber. From a balancing point of view that's neat, mod provenance doesn't matter; however, from a realism point of view it sucks, as AP or any enhanced ammo like EPR doesn't make a difference.

Turning alternate armor pen on makes EPR and AP shine, although the amount depends on from which mod the ammo is from - is what I originally meant to say.

I don't like the idea of having more compats we have to manually patch for.

If we add patches, then it would have to be compats via ammo. Mod makers don't always use inheritance to the full extent when it comes to magazines, i.e. readding the ammo attribute every time. If we edit the ammo class itself, it's far less to deal with imo.
But as you said. this isn't ideal either, as disabling it means needing to remove the PBO(s). I'm also not a fan of doing things at runtime - need to think about this more.