Thanks for the feedback and bug reports, everyone! Much appreciated. Will try to get another RC out today.
Dalas120 Bug: railgun shots can pass through armor without dealing damage
Thanks for the save file, I think this should be fixed in the next RC.
jbox1 Probably due to the change in how penetration works, but railguns don't do damage to tiles inside the ship, but considering this is a synthetic test dummy made out of corridors, it naturally has no walls, sooo...
Yeah, a bullet passing from a corridor tile to a corridor tile will deal no penetration damage. This is intentional.
SpaceCat Is it intentional the Railgun having autofire only on the launcher?
The launcher is technically the "weapon", but I realize that's kind of unintuitive. I might make it so that when you select one railgun part it auto-selects all of them.
SpaceCat MP crashes whenever a part is destroyed (seems no matter what part).
The multiplayer crashes should be fixed in the next RC.
Dibs i found that often the projectile would pass through a single sheet of armor doing no damage, i presume its traveling too quickly to register a hit.
Yup, this is the same bug that Dalas found. It's actually related to the physics optimizations I made and can theoretically happen with any projectile, though it's by far the most common with the railgun due to its speed. I think it should be fixed in the next RC.
SpaceCat But should "part specific targeting" not have a single shortcut.
Now it is shift&click for targeted ship and ctrl&click for non-targeted.
Huh? I don't understand what you mean. It's ctrl+click if you aren't already attacking, and just click if are already attacking. Shift is not required.
Dalas120 High impact damage, low penetration damage, and high explosion damage also feels unintuitive, though I think I understand why it was done that way.
Currently the impact and explosion damage scales with the railgun buff, but the penetration damage does not. My thinking here was that total penetration damage already scales with penetration distance and so doesn't itself need to be buffed, but that does leave penetration damage feeling pretty weak. I might try buffing penetration damage as well.
Dalas120 - improve the stacking efficiency of extenders slightly. This reduces the cost, and also increases the optimal railgun size.
- reduce extender power cost. This reduces the cost, and it also discourages railgun spamming. Low power draw per extender means that a single reactor will either waste power or require tons of crew if it's powering only railguns.
- increase launcher cost/ammo usage. This increases the optimal railgun size.
- increase max range slightly. No particular balance reason (range isn't the biggest issue right now), but it just seems like a really really big railgun should go a little further than it currently does.
- change how damage works. IMO remove the explosion at the end, buff the impact damage, and allow the impact damage to "bleed forward" if it can kill the impacted part. This feels a lot more like a penetrating railgun to me, and would solve the problem of massive, massive impact overkill/wasted damage that long railguns suffer from. (other ideas: AOE penetration damage? partial shield penetration?)
I'll try some of these for the next RC and see how it goes.
Dalas120 Right now the 4 second firing timer starts when the railgun is completely powered and loaded, not when the previous shot fires. It would make sense if the timer started as soon as a shot was fired, like the other weapons (at least I think that's how it works).
I believe all weapons should work the same in that their reload timer starts the moment they start firing but resets to zero if it ever goes offline. So I suspect what you're seeing is the railgun going offline a lot and getting its reload timer reset.
Dalas120 It would also be great if the railgun could fire without all extenders/launcher powered, and just have reduced damage+speed+penetration+range.
Hmm, not sure how I feel about this. I suspect it would lead to it firing under-powered most of the time, which probably isn't what the player wants?
Dalas120 I would suggest increasing the density of the railgun by a LOT, maybe to 5 or 6 (up from 2).
I'm going to increase it to 4 for the next RC. At some point it starts to feel weird compared to armor, which is 3.
Dalas120 Penetration changes feel unintuitive to me,
Can you elaborate on what feels unintuitive? The whole reason I made the change was to make it more intuitive/natural.
Dalas120 The damage might grow a little too slowly.
Certainly possible, but I want to wait for actual multiplayer testing before changing it.
Dalas120 Could the RoD be graphically changed to indicate the new damage?
Yeah I'll try to think of a way to indicate how much damage you're taking.
Equalizer Maybe the penetration damage should also be buffed by the accelerators.
Will try this in the next RC.
Equalizer I also find it rather odd that the penetration damage is registered only once regardless of how big the part is. This contributes a lot to the 'shot can fly though ship without doing any noticeable damage' effect.
This is true of all penetrating weapons. Per-tile is how it used to work a long time ago. I'm not wedded to the current mechanic and am open to changing it back.
Lafiel Also some code snippet would be nice. (OverrideBulletLifetime, CommandToggle)
{
Type = OverrideBulletLifetime
LifetimeComponent = Death
Lifetime = 5
Mode = Set // Optional, 'Set' is the default. Can also be 'Min' and 'Max'.
}
{
Type = OverrideBulletDistance
DistanceComponent = Death
Distance = 5
Mode = Set // Optional, 'Set' is the default. Can also be 'Min' and 'Max'.
}
MyCommandToggle
{
Type = CommandToggle
}
(Note that command in general is kind of broken in this RC and will be fixed in the next RC.)
Dibs Testing with a railgun broadside, my game crashes every time when 6x guns fire at the same time. 5x guns works fine, but at 6x the game crashes.
Yup that's a bug that will be fixed in the next RC. Thanks!
samepage What's the changes to the engaging AI?
This update reduced the frequency and amount at which the A.I. will change positions when fighting.
Yep, will be fixed in the next RC, thanks!
Dalas120 To elaborate on this, right now a 999999 damage railgun bullet will still only be able to destroy one part on impact, and only a few parts in the explosion. It seems intuitive to me that if a railgun bullet hits a part, destroys it, and has damage left over, then that damage could carry forward to the next part hit (and the next, and the next). This mechanic could apply to shields as well.
IMO this is more how you would expect a railgun to function, and would make it's damage a lot more useful. Right now the damage is spread out, difficult to target/predict, and prone to severe overkill.
I'll think about this, though it'd be a big technical change to how damage and penetration is coded. Not going to do it for the next RC. Let's see how we like the buffed penetration damage first.
