So hey, about those explosions

[John_Candlebury]

Yeah it seems explosions are actually very weak now, it’s completely possible to have a pack of dynamite explode in your inventory and survive.

[Coolthulhu]

Try something between linear and quadratic powerloss (damageatonetile * distance ^ -1.5 maybe) and test until you got the right amount.

Those require a cutoff that changes with initial power. Otherwise the explosion size gets giant even at small power. And cutoffs look quite weird.

Even military concussive weaponry has a range of only about 3 meters, and the quadratic drop-off is precisely why they have such a small range. Grenades have a 2m radius where everything gets killed in the shockwave

While tiles don’t have a precisely defined size, that’s partially what I was going for: having a small area where the effect is more or less sufficient to kill things. Shrapnel is obviously more effective, because it doesn’t have significant drop in power at range.

The unreliability of shrapnel makes using explosive weapons against zombies unfeasible, though.

Yeah it seems explosions are actually very weak now, it’s completely possible to have a pack of dynamite explode in your inventory and survive.

I may have gotten some numbers wrong. I focused more on balancing it vs armored characters and big explosions than realism.

I’d need some examples to balance it properly, though. Like, grenade in inventory = 100 damage to torso, but grenade at 5 tiles = 10 damage etc.

[kevin.granade]

The unreliability of shrapnel makes using explosive weapons against zombies unfeasible, though.

We can do something about that, for example instead of simulating individual projectiles, the shrapnel could just be an expanding cloud that falls off in “density” with distance from the explosion. It would be entirely reasonable to not draw shrapnel at all, IIUC you can’t see it at all IRL. In fact, since it’s completely LOS based, we could hijack the FoV calculations to determine where it hits and relative distances, then iterate over that to apply the effects.
Like Coolthulu though, I can implement a system, but I don’t know where to find the figures on effective ranges etc.

[Kryxx]

Sources are so easy to find. This is just for grenades.

Standard M67 frag grenade. Standard Male can toss it 35m, casualty radius 15m, lethal 5m.

http://fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/land/m67.htm

here’s an archive of the military spec sheets on them.
http://archive.org/stream/milmanual-tm-43-0001-29-army-ammunition-data-sheets-for-grenades/tm-43-0001-29_army_ammunition_data_sheets_for_grenades_djvu.txt

Wikipedia has an article on it and it lists these two sources also.

What kind of things are you looking for? Manuals for most of these stuff exists.

[condortaco]

Yeah it seems explosions are actually very weak now, it’s completely possible to have a pack of dynamite explode in your inventory and survive.

I had a grenade go off in my pack from a misclick and it took me a while to realize what had even happened. It did maybe half a bar of damage to one of my arms.

[Cowbot]

The explosions are indeed very weak in current experimentals, especially vs buildings. Come on, I can’t wreck a standard house wall with 30 rpg-7 shots? Really? I presume it’s made of wooden planks or plywood plates on a wooden frame like there http://snobzones.com/site/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/house-under-construction.jpg and not from slade-reinforced adamantium.
Well I know the fact that explosives placed not on the surface would damage it less but this shouldn’t be the case for fired munitions and for the placeable ones we probably need some way to attach them to surface if their explosive power is OK as is (which I think is not).

[Coolthulhu]

Come on, I can’t wreck a standard house wall with 30 rpg-7 shots?

Pretty sure it was like that in the stable too. Effects of explosives against terrain were buffed, not nerfed.

RPG ammo only has “EXPLOSIVE” tag, which creates a strength 24 explosion - not enough to damage a wall.

Many other old explosives are underpowered: C-4 only has 40 explosive power, which is barely above the 30 required to break a regular wall.

[Cowbot]

[quote=“Coolthulhu, post:24, topic:9972”]Pretty sure it was like that in the stable too. Effects of explosives against terrain were buffed, not nerfed.

RPG ammo only has “EXPLOSIVE” tag, which creates a strength 24 explosion - not enough to damage a wall.

Many other old explosives are underpowered: C-4 only has 40 explosive power, which is barely above the 30 required to break a regular wall.[/quote]
Can I buff that ammo somewhere in json or that is hard-coded? Or with the new explosions setting the power high enough to break a wall with 1-2 shots will result in explosion size of a megamart? And I don’t understand the “buffed” part. I’m pretty sure that when I’ve played stable last summer I was able to wreck half a street with dozen of rpg-7 shots.
Also if “old” explosives are underpowered which are new ones?

[Coolthulhu]

[quote=“Cowbot, post:25, topic:9972”]Can I buff that ammo somewhere in json or that is hard-coded? Or with the new explosions setting the power high enough to break a wall with 1-2 shots will result in explosion size of a megamart? And I don’t understand the “buffed” part. I’m pretty sure that when I’ve played stable last summer I was able to wreck half a street with dozen of rpg-7 shots.
Also if “old” explosives are underpowered which are new ones?[/quote]

Semi-hardcoded: you can select from 3 explosion sizes: EXPLOSIVE, EXPLOSIVE_BIG and EXPLOSIVE_HUGE
_BIG is comparable to dynamite, _HUGE to fertilizer bomb.

New ones are fertilizer bomb, ANFO etc. Old ones are C-4, grenades, pipe bombs and (less so) dynamite.

Last summer might have been the 0.A version, which as far as I recall had the old terrain destruction mechanics.

[John_Candlebury]

Would a tag of [Explosion:“Numeric-Value”] be possible to code without much difficulty? I mean it would be leaps and bounds better than what we have.

[Coolthulhu]

Would a tag of [Explosion:“Numeric-Value”] be possible to code without much difficulty? I mean it would be leaps and bounds better than what we have.

Not much difficulty, but could be more work than it looks like.
Currently we have a mildly hacky system where each ammo effect has to be a string and it has to be checked for with “does this projectile have this effect”, with the effect being a string.

[kevin.granade]

Also realism check, the RPG should easily penetrate the wall, but I’d actually expect it to go through without causing much damage. The main issue here is we don’t have a way to handle “wall with hole punched in it”.
Probably what we’d expect given the limitations of our system is for it to take out a section of wall on a direct hit, and also cause a moderately large explosion (larger than a grenade, but not as large as a similarly sized concussion or HEAT round)
A quick slowmo firing of a RPG at a building highlights the problem, it’s not applying the RPG direct damage to the wall it hits, instead it’s just exploding in the square before. If we fix that the full 1,000+ damage of the RPG should easily take out any single section of wall.

[John_Candlebury]

[quote=“Kevin Granade, post:29, topic:9972”]Also realism check, the RPG should easily penetrate the wall, but I’d actually expect it to go through without causing much damage. The main issue here is we don’t have a way to handle “wall with hole punched in it”.
Probably what we’d expect given the limitations of our system is for it to take out a section of wall on a direct hit, and also cause a moderately large explosion (larger than a grenade, but not as large as a similarly sized concussion or HEAT round)
A quick slowmo firing of a RPG at a building highlights the problem, it’s not applying the RPG direct damage to the wall it hits, instead it’s just exploding in the square before. If we fix that the full 1,000+ damage of the RPG should easily take out any single section of wall.[/quote]

It would be awesome if we actually got RPGs and the like to blow up in this way:

[tt]
…88888…
.8888888.
…88888…
…888…
…888…
----8----
…8[color=red]|[/color]8…
…|…[/tt]

[Cowbot]

The main issue here is we don’t have a way to handle “wall with hole punched in it”.

Why don’t add it? Currently we have wooden door -> broken door -> empty space stages and for a wall there can be the wall -> wall with a hole (traversable with more move cost than broken window) -> rubble/empty space

[kevin.granade]

Because that whole thing is a terrible hack that requires having a different terrain type for each and every variant, so adding “with a hole in it” increases the number of wall terrain types by about 50%.
I made a PR for highly-damaging projectiles having a chance (in the case of a RPG, certainty) of destroying walls they hit.

[Random_dragon]

So, turrets and other bots seem to just flat-out ignore 120mm tank shells now. And zombies can soak multiple near-misses unless they eat the actual projectile itself.

So explosions look bigger but don’t hit as hard. owo

EDIT: To be specific, has it been tweaked any since cf3ca08?

[Coolthulhu]

So, turrets and other bots seem to just flat-out ignore 120mm tank shells now.

Direct hit from a 120mm will vaporize a tank bot but not with the explosion (which was always quite weak), but with the physical damage from the hit itself.
Explosion itself is comparable to grenade explosion, but without the shrapnel.

Made a PR buffing explosion damage:

Buff explosions

[Random_dragon]

Maybe what’d be better is if we had a way to vary explosion power to the same extent as grenades? As it stands we only have normal explosions and big ones.

[Coolthulhu]

It would be.

[Random_dragon]

Though that would be more complexity adding it as modifiable properties at the ammo level, instead of just making a few additional flags for different additional explosion intensities.