How come epic games didnt put in the effort of implementing realistic armor properties for armored vehicles in ut2004? I mean, cmon destroying a tank with a assault rifle is not real. I know that Red Orchestra had realistic armor properties so there must be a way to solve this problem for ut2004

I think the way that is done is to say that each gun does X damage against vehicles and Y damage against other players/bots.

But the X damage done by a rifle or a rocket will be similar. The basic idea is that bullet weapons should do extremely little to no damage against armored vehicles and that only explosives and the railgun can do effective damage against armor

I think a static damage reduction should be in place, as well as a damage scaler. This way, small arms would simply be ignored by the static damage reduction, and then weapons could further be scaled to reflect their overall effectiveness against vehicles. The second part is already implemented, but I wonder how hard it'd be to add in the static damage reduction. Probably not too bad, just have ReceivedDamage = Damage - X And If Received damage is < 0, ReceivedDamage = 0, with X being whatever is appropriate for the vehicle's armour.

I think it'd be even better to separate small vehicles and tanks.

Small vehicles would be affected by small arms but tanks would not. Small fries like the manta should be able to be destroyed with concentrated machinegun fire. The code could simply state that vehicles with greater than around 600 health are tanks.

That could work, or you could lower or remove the static damage reduction in smaller vehicles. Like the Hellbender, it'd probably be resistant to small arms fire, but assault rifles could probably pierce its hide, so you give it a static damage reduction of say 25, the first 25 damage of the shot will be ignored, leaving most small arms (I think, just kinda guessing here) dealing none or next to no damage, while assault rifles will have more damage pass through.

Just looked at damage ranges for small arms vs. ARs, and WOW. Those damage values are kinda all over the place...

So I guess the method I mentioned wouldn't quite be ideal, but eh, just needs some work. Personally, I think if damage was adjusted based off the penetration power of the shot, you could get much more interesting options. Penetration power affecting personal body armour's effectiveness would be sweet too.

Nice idea

But with some weapons like the Tic railgun that can penetrate through anything there'd be no damage reduction, right? Or maybe a damage bonus?

Edit: Maybe mines would do some extra damage too, just like every other explosive weapon