What can be done with damage numbers that pop off the top of a mob? If the source of each damage number was known to the creature's context, then it could be calculated the amount of damage from all directions. If a circle was around the mob and the circle was divided into 10 equal segments of 36 degrees. For each damage number, determine which segment faces the damage and add the damage to that segment. To make it useful for creature reaction it could calculate damage over time. Each segment could be 5 layers or a 5 deep queue of integers. Every second the queue pops the oldest layer and adds a new one. The new damage is always added to the new layer. Adding the layers provides damage over 5 seconds. For creature reaction, a low intelligence monster may either defend or attack a close target in that direction. A high intelligence monster may evaluate creatures in a triangular area from creature center with sides of triangle along either side of the circular segment with far end of triangle terminated by monster's sensory range. It is complicated but with a good supercomputer, ya know.... Edit1: The circle is 2d but I guess the circle could be a dome for ground based creatures (on flat ground) or a sphere for airborne creatures. Edit2: Actually, the granularity of the segmented circle provides perceptive accuracy. A very intelligent creature like a dragon BOSS might have 20 degrees of accuracy rather than 10. This would allow for accurate breath weapon attacks. The intelligent dragon could then also order the segments giving it the ability to prioritize areas to attack if it had more than one attack such as breath, wing blast, claw strike, tail swipe, magic powers, etc.
What I really wanted to figure out was if there was any alternative to hp numbers to communicate to the player damage being done. After realizing what utility the numbers might be able to serve for the monster context, I think they could serve the player differently. If the hp number was delivered to the player with source, target, and skill used...the client could animate the entire combat scene with 3d graphics. Fireballs could impact on the target, arrows could stick in the model, melee people could strike the target. Stuff like that. Then instead of hp numbers, the creature could react audibly and visually to more meaningful hits. The accuracy might be a little fuzzy depending the synchronization between positional changes in the monsters location and when those combat animations begin but you could potentially make it look like the attackers are aiming.
When working on this type of mechanic Id imagine you'd have to be extremely careful.. This is one area where the pie isn't in the sky. It may work well for a single character, perhaps even up to 6 (a group), but 40, 60, 100, 500? Too much calculations can choke servers fast on the back end.. The server needs to calculate this, then keep everyone in the area all 100% up to gate in nearly real-time (or there would be combat lag), a long while calculating this same information for their attacks. If i remember correctly, this backend combat information is even impacting EQ2 with a simple combat system (relativity speaking). It wasn't an issue when EQ2 started with people doing tens of DPS, then Hundreds, thousands... now we are in the billions. I'd really like to see a more complicated system.. But.. Perhaps... again.. I'm going back too, if we can slow things down... then perhaps?
You also do not want to calculate any combat data on the client side, server side only.. People will cheat.. They currently find ways to cheat in games.. And while detection has improved, so have ways to cheat.. Sadly..
