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Smothering grenades/explosions

Trendkill

Grizzled Veteran
Nov 21, 2006
642
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Dorset, UK
To me at least it seemed that in the original RO the blast from grenades seemed to invisibly penetrate players and be able to kill multiple players when a real grenades effectiveness may have been smothered by the bodies of men in front of it. Of course this may have been due to the fact the players immediately turned to ragdolls and may be hard or impossible to change even with the new engine RS will use.

But if it were possible then not only would mean that you could be saved by an unlucky player taking a blast that may have killed you (thus increasing the possibility of successful attacks) it would also allow selfless players to sacrifice themselves in order to keep a lot of other players alive by throwing themselves on a grenade in replication of an act that won many men (on the American side at least) the Medal of Honor, though more often than not posthumously.

Of course, I can imagine some pretty ridiculous scenarios when a whole bunch of players end up blowing themselves up all trying to save each other as well as numerous other mishaps that only online play can provide.
 
Yes, it was in DH. But it only applied if a player actually went prone on top of a grenade. Due to the way explosion damage is calculated in Unreal, simply standing in front of another player wouldn't shield them from damage.

Is it possible to change that so that this idea can be implemented?

Yes - phone up Epic and ask them. :p
 
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Is it possible to change that so that this idea can be implemented?
Yes, but the additional complexity and calculations would be too CPU and network intensive, at least at the scripting level. It should really be done at the engine level and that's out of our reach. i.e. What Nestor said. :p
 
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Yes, but the additional complexity and calculations would be too CPU and network intensive, at least at the scripting level. It should really be done at the engine level and that's out of our reach. i.e. What Nestor said. :p

I don't think it has to be that hard.

All you would have to do is make the grenade a weapon that fired out "invisible bullets" (a.k.a. explosion shockwave/fragments), and give them a penetration value, like normal bullets will have in RO2.

That way if you prone right on the grenade, you'd absorb all the "bullets", and if you were just standing in front of someone, you'd absorb only the ones heading in his direction.

I don't think 10-20 "bullets"/fragments per grenade would be too much strain, given that the server can be dealing with the ballistics of dozens of weapons during a single game moment.

For non fragmentation grenades, you can just have the "bullets" be as wide as a man, so they could only be blocked by a man sized object, roughly simulating a shockwave instead of a fragment.

Of course, this isn't perfect a perfect simulation, but I think it would work well enough that it would seem fairly realistic.

This would also make the damage grenades do more realistic at range, and randomize the damage they do a little bit. Rather than there just being a magical drop off, the further away you are from a nade, the less likely you are to be hit by a fragment (although obviously there should be a range where fragments no longer do damage).
 
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Yes, but the additional complexity and calculations would be too CPU and network intensive, at least at the scripting level. It should really be done at the engine level and that's out of our reach. i.e. What Nestor said. :p

If I recall correctly in the RO mod the grenades (commonly referred to as mini nukes) actually fired individual pieces of shrapnel aka launched projectiles. As in you could get killed 50 meters from a grenade if a piece happened to hit you.

If grenades are somewhat modelled like that like a shotgun blast in all directions, then I guess properties that happen with other projectiles could perhaps be applied to it. Although it would increase the net strain the question is how strain-full it is when compared to regular bullets.
 
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If I recall correctly in the RO mod the grenades (commonly referred to as mini nukes) actually fired individual pieces of shrapnel aka launched projectiles. As in you could get killed 50 meters from a grenade if a piece happened to hit you.
I could be mistaken, but I do not believe that this is true. I know that there was considerable community interest in having it done that way, however from my years of playing the mod, I don't recall any situation where that was demonstrated to actually be the case. Besides which, if they had it in back then, they wouldn't have removed it for retail. With engine access, you can add anything you like in a nice efficient fashion and I know that many features that were added to the mod in a crude fashion were converted into native code for retail.

@Barakas: I know you wouldn't think that 10-20 would be a problem, but the game has to create those and do the calculations on them all at one time. Throw in the randomisation for each new vector and then add everything else that's going on and you get more of a hit than you might think. Ironically, that same 10-20 really isn't many when you're talking about a full spherical radius. Your chances of being hit are actually incredibly low and grenades would become fairly useless.

Also, doing a "man sized" trace would not be a good solution, especially 10-20 of them at once. That's known as a non-zero extent trace and they are extremely slow in game terms. They would be very, very bad for server performance.

The "proper" way to do this would be to write a custom HurtRadius function in native code that handled players the same as world geography so that they "block" further damage checks, but that can only be done at engine level and we don't have access.

TLDR: Yes, we could do it, but it wouldn't be particularly efficient or effective so we almost certainly won't.

For something like this, you'd be better off asking TW. If it goes in at all, then it should be as a fundamental part of the game, not a scripted afterthought.
 
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I don't think it has to be that hard.

All you would have to do is make the grenade a weapon that fired out "invisible bullets" (a.k.a. explosion shockwave/fragments), and give them a penetration value, like normal bullets will have in RO2.

That way if you prone right on the grenade, you'd absorb all the "bullets", and if you were just standing in front of someone, you'd absorb only the ones heading in his direction.

I don't think 10-20 "bullets"/fragments per grenade would be too much strain, given that the server can be dealing with the ballistics of dozens of weapons during a single game moment.

For non fragmentation grenades, you can just have the "bullets" be as wide as a man, so they could only be blocked by a man sized object, roughly simulating a shockwave instead of a fragment.

Of course, this isn't perfect a perfect simulation, but I think it would work well enough that it would seem fairly realistic.

This would also make the damage grenades do more realistic at range, and randomize the damage they do a little bit. Rather than there just being a magical drop off, the further away you are from a nade, the less likely you are to be hit by a fragment (although obviously there should be a range where fragments no longer do damage).


Grenades send out a lot more than 10-20 fragments. If grenades only send 20 fragments out in a full spherical pattern, then it's likely that nothing would get hit, ever.

Grenades just need a more sloping damage curve, intense damage at very close range, and then a shallow falloff out to 10-20 meters. Then again, I don't know how explosion damage is defined. It could just be linear values..
 
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