BFG over shootable things

I have made many things SHOOTABLE in a wad im doing now. But, they got lit with the BFG...

Simple question

This issue reduce the BFG chance of damage considerably?

I've read the BFG faq, and say that there are 40 traces... but anyway i want to know yout opinion

Theres an image for visual reference


http://shinobi.cl.googlepages.com/shootable-things-bfg.jpg

There's no way to make the game distinguish between bullet tracers and BFG tracers - they work on the same principle. If anything is shootable, the BFG can harm it.

well, if this is for zdoom, you can use custom damages types so that the shootable things are immune to BFG damage

Well, the damage to the things is not really a problem. I just gave -1 Hitpoints to the things and they are not destroyed.

The issue is.

I have (for example) 10 shootable things at view. The BFG fires 40 traces, some of the miss, some of them hit their target.

Some of the traces that ´HIT´ are wasted on stationary shootable things. The other traces hit the opponents.

The question is... for an amount of, lets say, 10 things in the BFG hit cone... Do you think that this is a considerable reduction of the BFG power? Or does not matter at all?

Unless you're attacking a bunch of players at once, you will not notice any reduction in it's overall power. The best bet is to test it out with bots or something and see how many you can easily kill. Personally, I think 40 tracers are enough to go around. But then again, if your BFG happens to target 20 decorations or so, then yeah, I can see a problem trying to kill 10 players at once. You might consider this a blessing though :)

Just test it and see if your BFG is still effective.

Just to make this clear (in case it isn't already) - the bfg traces aren't drawn towards shootable things. They simply spread out in a fan, and each trace will either hit something or it won't, depending on whether there's a shootable thing in its path. So, within these two scenarios...

1) One player is standing in the fan of bfg traces.
2) One player is standing in the fan of bfg traces (in the same place as in scenario one) but there is also another shootable thing in the fan.

...the player is equally likely to die (as long as the bfg-shooter and the other two things aren't in line with each other).

It was probably very redundant of me to say this, but I just got the impression from your posts that you may have thought that BFG traces are magnetically drawn to things.

Creaphis said:

but I just got the impression from your posts that you may have thought that BFG traces are magnetically drawn to things.

Maybe because the BFG FAQ says they are?  (section 3H)

I'm not sure that situation and this one are exactly the same, but for our many readers who can't double-check things in the source code (e.g. me), it's certainly one possible extrapolation.

Xeriphas1994 said:

Maybe because the BFG FAQ says they are?  (section 3H)

I'm not sure that situation and this one are exactly the same, but for our many readers who can't double-check things in the source code (e.g. me), it's certainly one possible extrapolation.

Maybe you misunderstood what I meant. I'll do my best to explain it. Here's an extremely small snippet from the code that fires BFG traces (borrowed from the BFG faq):

for (i=0 ; i<40 ; i++)
{
an = mo->angle - ANG90/2 + ANG90/40*i;

The first line is the beginning of a loop which will run 40 times, which is why there are 40 BFG traces (it counts from 0 to 39). The next line calculates the angle of that single BFG trace (each iteration of the loop fires one trace). Basically, it says:

(The angle of this BFG trace) = (The original angle that the BFG was fired in) - (45 degrees) + (2.22 degrees)x(the number of times that the code loop has already been run). So, in a single game tic, all BFG traces radiate outwards, all approximately 2.22 degrees apart, so this "fan" of traces is perfectly regular. There is no code that makes the traces shoot specifically towards shootable things.

However, each trace can only damage one shootable thing, so a player on the other side of a shootable tree will be safer than if the tree wasn't there. Also, you're partly correct about whether BFG traces seek out shootable things - they do this vertically, just not horizontally.

Creaphis is correct about the way the BFG works. The 40 BFG hit-scans are simply shot in a 90 degree fan-like pattern and hit whatever happens to be in front of them. That is why if you shoot a Spiderdemon while standing adjacent to it (if you're invulnerable or something), you can kill it with one shot, because a good deal of the hitscans will hit the Spiderdemon. However, if you shoot the Spiderdemon from farther away, you cannot kill it with one shot because the hitscans will have dispersed some and therefore less will hit the Spiderdemon.

To answer your question, shinobi.cl, the BFG's damage will not be inhibited if the target has nothing between you and it, even if there are other BFG targets. However, if the player were to hide behind the trees in the screenie, they should be fairly safe because the hit-scans will hit the trees instead. The BFG hit-scans work the same as any other. If you're shooting a horde of imps with the SSG, you cannot hit the imps in the back until the ones in the front are dead, and in the case of your WAD, the trees never die so they will always block the BFG hitscans.

Ah, that makes a lot more sense now.  Many thanks Creaphis!

Death-Destiny said:

That is why if you shoot a Spiderdemon while standing adjacent to it (if you're invulnerable or something), you can kill it with one shot, because a good deal of the hitscans will hit the Spiderdemon.

Correct on ZDoom and others ZDoom based ports, not on Vanilla/Boom.
But anyway your explications are right about the bfg behaviour.

K!r4 said:

Correct on ZDoom and others ZDoom based ports, not on Vanilla/Boom.
But anyway your explications are right about the bfg behaviour.

Incorrect. It is quite possible in Vanilla Doom, to kill a Spider Demon in a single BFG shot, (or hit any bad guy in the same way).

However code alterations in ZDoom make it much easier to do, which makes the BFG more powerful in ZDoom than Vanilla Doom.

Oh, never happened to me.

In Doom (or any engine that keeps the blockmap bug) it's very rare. Some of the COMPET-N demos rely on it, though, as it's the quickest way to kill a spiderdemon.

In shinobi.cl's scenario it may be possible that some of the damageable things that would block the tracers in ZDoom and such may not do so using an engine that is "vanilla" in this respect, although this is not predictable to the BFG user in any clear way.

I almost always one-shot the Spiderdemon in E3M8. Just come out running like crazy and fire it into the beast point-blank. Be ready to shoot again in case it does NOT die though ;) You have only a couple of seconds before you wither under its super chaingun (unless you have managed to get it stuck facing away from you, in which case it will whirr in place harmlessly - heh heh).

Ok, question solved then :)

The BFG tracers dont get wasted in anyway.

Now, in my wad, you can hide behind trees and lamps fro a BFG shot :D

I like it :)

The only problem is that they might atract shots on OS mode, sadly, there is no way to prioritize this. If a lamp is near the shooter, and a target player is a on the same line of sight a little farther, the lamp will receive the shot instead :(

No problem for me anyway, i always had NS in mind when making it.