Goddammit! I hate these fucking vehicles on bridges. The problem is that I use explosives to break them and for some totally insane reason (code reason, of course) even one puny car survive 3 mininuke blown inside. All that because game won’t allow you to destroy some part that will split a car if it will be destroyed. So you have to deal with vehicle manually - either by breaking this “other part” or by moving this vehicle aside. Whatever you choose - it’s boring and irritating. Using explosives would be solution, but they will leave such parts anyway.
So I suggest to remake this part and allow to split cars. Moreover, by abusing this, urm, imperfection, you can build nearly invincible car. Just arrange frames like so:
# #
###
###SXA#
Every # (frame) is support to other frames. X is empty space. S - seat, A - the only weak spot. Even if you have every # broken - the vehicle should work. (I didn’t check this design yet, though)
It’s not something that’s very important, but it’s extremely irritating. I don’t think it’s only me who thinks so.
I’ve got a ram on the front of my car shaped like this:
#########
#
#
car
The ‘wings’ on the side have to be destroyed before the main body is. I’ve also hard-plated the entire ram, so it’s even harder to break.
There are a painful amount of vehicle-related weirdness… Though one thing that could probably stand to be fixed in the meantime as a temporary measure is fixing whatever the hell spawn-code is telling everyone to immediately go “Oh no, the world is ending. I should go park my car sideways on a bridge, siphon off the gas, and then trash the control console/wheels/engine”
Seriously, why does a broken down car need to spawn on every “bridge” tile?
I always carry a rubber hose and a gallon jug for this. I simply fill the car with a gallon jug of gasoline and drive it out of the way.
Solutions I see:
[ol][li]
Making a proper vehicle splitting system
[/li]
[li]
Remembering vehicles in explosion code and then smashing them in proper order - for example always picking the parts with least number of neighbors (bad for big vehicles)
[/li]
[li]
Remembering vehicles in explosion code and then smashing all 0 hp frames until no smashable 0 hp frame exists
[/li]
[li]
Remembering vehicles in explosion code and then pushing them with the explosive force
[/li][/ol]
Point 1 would probably require someone who knows map code and vehicle code relatively well. It could (but not necessarily would) make AoE vehicle smashing much slower (in real time - noticeable lag when bombing a car).
Point 2 would fix mininukes not wrecking cars. Unless clever data structures were used, it WOULD slow down car bombing, but possibly so little that it would not be noticeable even when nuking tanks.
Point 3 would be the most similar to current behavior. Naive implementation (just scanning the car for 0 hp frames, smashing it and scanning again until no 0 hp frame exists) could be slower than taking a turn in a burning 10 item density mall. A proper solution would slow it down no more than point 2.
Point 4 wouldn’t cause a noticeable slowdown even if done badly, but wouldn’t really be a fix, just a feature that would make fix less needed.
I’d try fixing this one, but I’m currently trying to get in 2 of my relatively big PRs, each of which is more useful than proper car explosions. When (if) they get in, I might try to help here.