Your 1-sentence posts aren’t quite clarifying your reasoning for this. Maybe you should try explaining in a better manner?
If a full remake as originally proposed is going to suck up too many CPU cycles, why not settle for a couple of tweaks?
1 - Greatly increased noise. Explosions should be horribly loud, and using a grenade in the middle of a city should be as risky a decision as blasting away at stuff with a shotgun.
2 - A “blast radius” and a “concussion radius”. A zone that actually deals damage, with an outer zone that only stuns. Perhaps a standard grenade has a flashbang “embedded” in it. That is to say, a grenade will have the stunning effect of the flashbang, but with the 3x3 blast at the center. This would make it so that even enemies not hit by any shrapnel aren’t totally unfazed by a grenade exploding a few meters away.
Side note - I’m all for more craftable explosives (beyond pipe bomb, grenade, mininuke), but leave the chemistry out of it.
Sorry I’m so late to the party, I’ve been super busy for the last month.
My basic reactions, in very general terms:
All the special effects sound reasonable to add, and explosions are for sure underpowered right now. At a quick glance I don’t think the suggested features would be THAT bad on CPU use, outside of perhaps some pathological cases with a very large chain reaction and lots and lots of items lying around, even then there are ways to throttle CPU usage when something like that happens, so it’s feasible. Probably the biggest issue would be flinging items, but I think it would be manageable.
As for highly accurate chemical reactions… well I don’t see personally adding anything more complex than the current crafting system, if you have individual recipes for the various effects it’s just a matter of perhaps adding some refining steps to making the chemicals and having some components with technical names. A system that takes into account various chemical ratios and determines the explosive effect… that seems overboard for this game.
I also like the idea of making explosions more varied and powerful.