Talk:Explosions

Zombie, even gas station explosions don't hurt anybody nearby? - MikeTheRed 18:37, 3 August 2007 (PDT)

I'm pretty sure I've gotten civilians killed by stray shots blowing up gas pumps before. Arrow Quivershaft 19:59, 3 August 2007 (PDT)

Friendly units are not affected by any explosions caused by battlefield objects on UFO (on TFTD and some of my mod terrains this does not apply). There's some sort of quirk however concerning explosions that only generate smoke: I've seen often aliens/civilians get killed because of those explosions: I think (not confirmed) one factor might be if those units are already standing on smoke and the game wrongly allocates them damage everytime a barrel explodes. Hobbes 02:07, 4 August 2007 (PDT)

On that note, I've most certainly killed aliens by blowing up fuel barrels in the Hangar during base defense missions. Arrow Quivershaft 07:48, 4 August 2007 (PDT)

Just to throw a spanner in the works, sometimes I've seen aliens that weren't near the bowser or fuel drum die after it explodes. For Quite the explosive odd ball out. - NKF

Ok, this is what I know. MapView lists those "explosive" objects as having a damage type of smoke, not high explosive. This checks out on the battlescape as when you shoot one of these objects, the explosion doesn't damage terrain and it produces a dense smoke cloud just like a Smoke Grenade does. Moving X-COM soldiers near the fuel bowser and then shooting it doesn't do them any harm - that's basically a given.

However like NKF and Hobbes mentioned, Civilians and aliens can sometimes die after you shoot one of the objects. It doesn't happen all the time though and a quick round of testing reveals they normally don't take damage from the explosions either. This leads me to believe it is a bug of some sort. I did have a civilian die last night after shooting a fuel bowser: it was about 6 tiles away and wasn't standing in a smoke cloud. But, I did shoot a couple pumps out in the previous rounds which may be incorrectly allocating damage to nearby non-human units like Hobbes points out. Still, more testing needs to be done before we can come to a logical theory. Right now we have nothing to stand on other than our words. ;)

A main problem with the civilians is that they never get close enough to a fuel bowser on a terror mission to test this out properly and you can't use MC on them as that changes their ownership flag. I might do a little map editing and intentionally force civilians to spawn surrounding the pumps, and also give the civilians no energy or TU to force them to stay put instead of wandering off. Then , if the pump gets shot out and they all survive we'll know that thay don't take damage normally. (By normally, I mean no other object explosions happened on the map in previous rounds). After this I can go nuts and shoot off a whole bunch of pumps to see what happens. If the civilians die when standing in smoke, then we can come to a conclusion. --Zombie 08:06, 6 August 2007 (PDT)

Update:

I managed to construct a testing scenario for civilians against a fuel bowser explosion the other day. The gas station map was edited so that the fuel bowsers were inside a large structure with some lighting sources (lamps) aroung the perimeter for giggles. Since I didn't have access to the internet and since Daishiva's MapEdit doesn't allow you to change the spawn points, I ended up decoding the RMP structure and editing the spawn points myself. Of the 16 normally occurring spawn points on the gas station map, I changed all of them to be civilian with a spawn priority of 10 (meaning a high probability of a civilian showing up there) and clustered 8 of them around 2 fuel bowsers with links which circled the pump to keep the civilians from wandering off. Then I kept going on a terror mission until the structure showed up with enough civies spawned around a pump.

First thing I did was to edit all civies to have 200 health. After this, I shot a pump with 3 civilians standing around it and checked to see if any of them were harmed. Only one was injured. The picture at the right details the scenario. G stands for the gas pump (er, fuel bowser, whatever you call it), C1, C2, and C3 are the civilians and S is the soldier. The solder shot at the pump with a Laser Rifle and the civilian injured in the blast was #3 (red square). No other civilians were ever injured. I didn't have time to check out anything else but the orientation of the shot and the location of the civilians play a role in who will get hurt.

Just for the heck of it, I decided to see how much damage was inflicted to civilian #3. After writing down about 20 numbers I realized that this would be a perfect job for BB's logger and AutoHotKey. I wrote a script, automated the whole process and then came back an hour later. Now, the fuel bowser has a listed damage potential as 46, so I half-guessed the damage would be between 23 and 69 (1/2 and 3/2 the ave damage). Wrong. It was between 0 and 120! This is more like a normal ammunition type than an explosion. After sitting there in disbelief for a while, it hit me that the Laser Rifles damage potential was probably being wrongly allocated to the civilian. When I changed the weapon to the Heavy Laser, the civilian got between 0 and 170 points of damage - exactly what would be predicted with ammo having 85 average damage. And no, the Laser Rifle shots were not missing the target and hitting the civilian directly, I can't stress this enough.

The only conclusion I can draw so far is that the more powerful of weapon that you use to shoot the fuel bowser, the more damage will be dealt to someone standing near it. Of course, more testing is in-order here, but at least we have a workable theory on damage. --Zombie 18:40, 9 August 2007 (PDT)