So. Let’s talk a little about explosions.
First one: while powerful explosives are quite rare they are almost useless. Why useless? Just because they don’t make so much damage that can cover their prices. To be honest - most of powerful explosives aren’t needed for player. The player can have some of molotov’s cocktail and sometimes a grenade to collapse a part of a building.
So, my idea is next:
Shockwave must not be clear.
Shockwave shouldn’t be such small.
Shockwave must not carry only one effect at once.
Shparnel must fly a way more far than now.
Shockwave must move items from their positions and these items must damage everything depending from their weight and volume. Like a vehicle being run on some speed, but the weight is far more lesser.
Obviously, any explosion usually makes smoke, but it seems like smoke and fire cannot be at one tile.
So, we need to rebalance explosions.
Ground zero. It’s epicenter of explosion. Tile and items in that tile will get full force of the explosion.
Heavy damage zone. Every item will be grabbed by shockwave and will be thrown. Than more weight of the item than more damage it will get and than lesser distance of a point where it’s thrown, and than more damage will be applied to the unfortunate who was on their way. Mobs within the range will get heavy overall damage, will be thrown and stunned, deafened, may broke their bones, items in their inventory can be damaged too (ammo explosion in a pocket, lol).
Light damage zone. Everything, which can hear will be stunned and deafened at this zone and will get weak overall damage. Also it’s same way - than more volume - than more overall damage. Windows usually will be broken after.
Flash zone. Some of explosions can illuminate some range. Sometimes they can illuminate too strong and blind everyone who was looking at epicenter. Extremaly high amounts of light could cause burns.
Sound zone. The most widest zone. Seriosly, do you really think that 1 meter (for instance) explosion can be heard from 10 meters maximum? In other words explosions must cause LOTS of attention.
Every lower zone will be included in higher ones, so, ground zero contain all of the zones inside, heavy damage zone contains all except ground zero and so on.
So, next one. Shockwaves must weaken as they go through something. Have you ever seen a weak explosion between a paper box and a metal tank and they both passed the shockwave for same distance? Of course no. I don’t think that if you try to blow up a window and a metal wall and there’s a zombie after these tiles then the zombie should get same amount of damage.
Well, another side of the coin is that fact that powerful explosion will take much CPU-time, but … well, that’s fair price.
And, of course, chemistry. It would be if there was a new craft system where you can CONFIGURE things you do: choose how much light will give your handmade flashlight, or what current is giving a taser you make - big amounts will consume batteries faster and there’s higher chance of zombie will be stunned for long or killed. It same for explosives - choose what amount of element/fuel/oxidizer you want to add in explosive. Added too much plutonium in a mininuke? Well, it will spread the plutonium around epicenter for long distance and explode weaker.
So, i think we need to add more compound reagent in the game: oxidizers, reductants, catalizators and so on.
Oxidizers: MnO4, PbO2, KNO3, NaNO3, NH4NO3, CrO3 and so on. Their only difference in explosives is their speed of dissolving and energy of dissolving.
Reductants: Al, %insert_organic_reagent_name%, Mg, Fe, and so on. They have same difference as oxidizers.
I think we need to remake chemical system in the game completely and make simple and binary reagents.
It would also be cool if shrapnel worked like bullets, so setting off a frag grenade was not a red blob of death zone but more of the equivalent of lighting your stack of ammo on fire -tiny fast metal pieces everywhere.
I don’t know if the engine is powerful enough to handle all of that. I’m pretty sure with all of those implemented properly, blowing up a gas station would crash the game.
To the first half of your idea, do we really need an expanded explosives system to suck up CPU cycles every time an explosion goes off?
To suck up so many CPU cycles we need extremaly big explosion like one made by missile silo. Otherwise the system will make explosives more useful and dangerous both for zombies and player.
Digging many pits with explosive! Or even more - burn a house, place a bomb in center of the house, explode near gas station and it attracts many zombies to the street, the bomb ticks off, nails is thrown and spread over all street, kills many zombies... there'll be new tactics, new ways to die... die stupidly.
About chemistry. The compound reagents it’s just beginning of new advanced chemistry system which pretended to be more interesting than now. Unknown substances and some… “playing” with them. I don’t think if you get a bottle with some liquid you’ll immediately know what’s that liquid unless it’s written on the bottle or it’s become known after you tried to mix that with some known reagents. Something like that.
You have a bottle of sulphuric acid (H2SO4), and a bottle with unknown liquid (it’s lye powder, KOH)
And you tried to mix them, so: H2SO4 + 2KOH => H2O + K2SO4, and player gets message: “Nothing happened”.
But if the player tries to heat up the mix he will get message: “It gives white powder”
I don’t think you need to hear that it will make chemistry more changelling and interesting.
standing behind walls, vehicles, furniture should affect the spread of the different zones somehow. So that it’s not perfectly circular but more dynamic depending on the surroundings.
That would be harder to simulate though. One possible way is to assign “movecost” to terrains and objects. For example a flat land could have movecost=1 while a table could have movecost=2, so an explosion with power of 10 would spread 10 titles on flatland and 5 titles on tables - being slowed down just like the character. Just a hypothesis of course, I’m not a coder.
I think the “death zone” created by an explosions could use a little help and im all for making explosions louder and having ear plugs to muffle too much noise. And on that note explosions are incredibly loud, so if anything make that a thing. Nothing says gamey like surviving a nuke on the adjacent tile to the edge of the explosions… No one else agrees that its silly??
Explosions could probably use some spicing up. Something like the recently-added lightning flashes lighting up your surroundings could be an explosion effect. Some things could probably stand to be more excitingly dangerous, and explosives could stand to be more fun and satisfying to employ.
We don’t get to this point by saying ‘bad idea’ without a single word of explanation.
I’ve already explained the reasoning behind my opinions in my earlier post. If the OP can’t even see those as negatives, I feel like I have to get across that point first before I can further explain my position.
Which part was your explanation? That we didn’t need complex chemistry, which is only tangentially related to changing how explosives work? Or claiming that when implemented properly, blowing up a gas station would somehow crash the game? I don’t think anything that’s implemented ‘properly’ stands much of a chance of crashing things.
I do agree that we need to improve explosions at some point (case in point, land mines don’t really do enough damage because right now damage is directly proportional to explosion size), and there are definitely some good ideas here.
Seeing how rare explosions are for the most part, I think we’ll probably be fine having a slightly more realistic system in place, even if it does take more cycles.
And yeah, at the moment it would be kinda difficult to adjust explosion sizes due to terrain, but one step in getting a working stealth system will be to hopefully add something that lets us know how tall various bits of terrain/furniture are. once that goes in, it becomes much much easier to do dynamically sized explosions realistically.