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)
- You can edit the .rmp files with Map View but you seemed to have managed quite well by your own :)
- What you described is the effect when a weapon's hit completely destroys a terrain feature it transfers the excess damage to units (and objects?) closeby. Or, the shot destroys the target and carries on. At least that's what it seems to me on the rare occasions that i witness that behaviour, since it's hard to get it with either bullets against human buildings or plasmas against UFO walls.
- Still that leaves the question about far away aliens dying from gas pump explosions. One thing I remember that can help is that the smoke is generated on the alien's square before it dies. - Hobbes 22:44, 9 August 2007 (PDT)
I think he means if you destroy a terrain feature that subsequently blows up, the explosion damage to nearby units would be the calculated in the same way as if they had been shot directly.
- Bomb Bloke 19:45, 10 August 2007 (PDT)
- Correct, BB. @Hobbes - I'm still a little confused on who gets hit. See, if the "bullet" were to "kill" the bowser and then continue on, the civilian damaged should be #2 (not #3). Unless the line of fire was screwed up in the intermediate effect somehow. Also, the amount of damage to the civilian is exactly what is predicted if you shot it directly. If the bowser were to "absorb" some of the damage, I'd see that reflected in the log file. And for the time being, this is only true for civilians. I haven't got around to testing if aliens suffer the same fate. --Zombie 15:35, 12 August 2007 (PDT)
- Well i was *convinced* that shots would continue after destroying its target until I ran a couple of limited tests to verify this: on the first one I tried firing at soft walls with an unarmored xcom unit behind it. The unit suffered no damage at all. But then I remembered how sometimes objects when hit aren't replaced with their wrecked version (like crates....they just disappear). The crate supposedly would be replaced with the wreck but instead it simply disappears, which would mean that the wreck that replaces it gets the excess power of the shot and is obliterated as well. I can't really explain it but I feel this might be related to the dying civvies/aliens. -- Hobbes 17:22, 12 August 2007 (PDT)
If you shoot a piece of terrain, the "armor" of that tile is subtracted from the damage the shot did. If the result is still positive, the tile is destroyed, or replaced with the "damaged" version.
In that later case, the armor of the new tile is again subtracted from the remaining damage total, and so on until you run out of "damage" or you run out of tiles to replace with.
(This is how my damage testing tileset (which shows the shot power against a given floor tile, on that floor tile): By drawing a number on each, giving them an armor of 1, and setting them to change to the next numbered tile when toasted).
In this situation, you see one "damage" figure used to destroy multiple tiles (I've done no testing to see whether the damage can then be passed on to units). Each tile takes a reduced amount of damage as the ones before it suck it up.
In the case of Zombies test, a new damage figure is calculated for every unit (or one for all?) that is harmed by the explosion of the tile (assuming it can explode): and that's based on the weapon used to damage that tile in the first place, not on what the tile was. The units take full weapon damage (not explosive damage, or it wouldn't be a random value).
That said, if I ever feel the need to pass on damage after destroying terrain I find an autoshot works quite nicely. But then, I always use autoshot, so go figure. ;)
Also worth a mention (whether or not it's relevant I dunno) is the IN (or was it HE?) bug. If you shoot a unit with an IN bullet of some sort, all units standing in fire (and smoke?) will take the damage of the shot (regardless as to whether they were in range of the blast).
- Bomb Bloke 06:37, 13 August 2007 (PDT)
Months ago, I was working on the probability that UPSs and their Elerium would survive a crash. This involved the individual chance of engine explosion upon crashing, the blast damage of an exploding engine, and the configuration of UFOs (and whether blast damage could spread to other engines). But Arg, I've looked all around and can't find that work on the wiki. Or maybe it was in a forum? Anyone recall? :P - MikeTheRed 09:23, 9 October 2007 (PDT)
- I think it was in a forum. Abstract:
- Individually, each power source has a measured probability of 70% explode, 30% intact.
- If a power source is in the range of the explosion of another power source, it is destroyed and does not explode.
- I don't recall the calculated damage off-hand. It is possible for the navigation consoles on a Medium Scout to survive their power plant explosion, but far from certain.
- Power sources are checked in coordinate lexicographical order. E.g., for the terror ship the order of checking is N, W, E, S. [This also entails that for a Terror Ship, all four explode or none explode. Assuming no RNG problems, this translates to a 0.81% chance of seeing four power sources. Battleships are notable in that power source explosions do not destroy other power sources, unlike other UFOs with multiple power sources.] - Zaimoni 12:51 9 October 2007 (CDT)