R27443 - Wrong weapon linked

[Halleth]

My soldier is wielding grenade launcher, shotgun is linked, however. Shooting menu consist only of two possibilities: Single Shot and 3-Round Burst:





And shot itself is typical to shotgun (including sounds):





It had happened also a few times before, so that behaviour is not a result of the recent updates.

[theotherhiveking]

Uh.. weird

So, let me see if i got it right, you wield a grenade launcher, but instead you get something that is not a shotgun, but fires like one.
I dont remember seeing any weapon with those TU costs..

[Halleth]

I just thought about one possibility... Usually I have "normal" grenades, but it may have happened that I had some spare flashette grenades. If this is normal behaviour with flashette ammo, I would be just surprised, but it would explain everything.

[Destructavator]

I saw in the logs recently that many weapons and armors have been re-balanced and changed, I'm guessing that someone accidentally goofed in re-writing one of the .ufo files for weapons.

I'll glance at the .ufo files in the SVN shortly and see if I can find the culprit.

[Destructavator]

Found it - in the file "weapons_human.ufo" near the end of the file, for flechette grenades, there seems to be some entries jammed in there with stats for a shotgun.

Edit:  I'll try to correct this and, after a little testing, commit a fix to SVN.

Edit (2): Wow, how about that...  Looking at various versions in the SVN this issue was actually in the .ufo file since back as far as 2008, perhaps even earlier...  Personally I never noticed this bug because I've never used flechette grenades with the launcher before.

Here's what I'll do - I'll put in a temporary fix with proper firedef entries and tentative values for the stats, and later Theotherhiveking can tweak things as was done with the other weapons and armors and such.

[Destructavator]

OK, r27444 now has the temporary fix as I described, I mostly copied and pasted from the high-explosive grenade values with little changes although I'm not too familiar with all of the stats and what the values do.

[Halleth]

Thank you for fix! It seems that only I have been using this combination of weapon + ammo If this is the case, one could just think about removing flachette grenades from inventory.

I have a remark/question for somebody who will do the final fix, though: other grenades use "explosives" skill. Fleshette, however, uses "heavy" (at least that's what is written in ufopedia). So somebody who wields this weapon with this ammo should use "heavy" skill for calculations and should gain experience in "heavy". Am I right or wrong?

[Halleth]

On second thought...

Maybe it wasn't a bug at all?

1. Let's consider a normal grenade, just made of other material (plutonium, fleschette, alien guts, chewing gum). Does it make so big difference for SHOOTER that he uses another "skill" to operate the grenade launcher? You aim, you press the button, it explodes = "explosives" skill anyway.

2. In Ufopedia flechette grenade entry has "heavy" skill. Maybe the intention of "the first programmer" was to create something like "heavy shotgun" this way? You take grenade launcher, you load it with special kind of ammo, you come very very close and fire like flamethrower? If this is the case, somebody has to think about damage inflicted, weapon range, and scattering radius. Particularly with comparison to flamethrower (also heavy skill), because if one of those weapons is better in all ways, the second one is obsolete and should be deleted.

Ufff...

[Destructavator]

No, it was still bugged - The flechette grenades should still have the six firing options (airburst, 3-shot bursts, etc.), and the launcher should still launch actual projectiles that can bounce around before going boom with some type of damage.

Before I put in the temporary fix the launcher didn't have this, it erroneously turned the launcher into a big shotgun/cannon.

It doesn't have to do with simply the skill used, that's just one entry in a long list of various parameters for each firedef in the script.

In real life we do have grenades that explode fragments in shards that work in such a way, as opposed to a basic grenade that simply has explosives inside that ignite.

I've also heard of grenades that combine the two when they go off, although off-hand I don't know what you call those.

In any case, the launcher should not act like a regular shotgun, it was still a bug.

[Viento]

Cool. And I thought "Hey, Flechette makes this weapon strangely versatile". Took Flechette with me when I entered ufos, used the explosive rounds in outdoor scenarios.

I like the fix, though! It is more what I expected of a grenade launcher.

Andy

[theotherhiveking]

All a confusion, what BTAxis said.

[Destructavator]

Ah!  Glad you noticed this thread, I was about to send you a message so you would be aware of this issue.

I copied and pasted firedefs from the regular frag grenades and tried to change the damage type, but found I don't know what all the options are or how all the parameters work.

I'll leave it in your hands now.

[BishopX]

The US military currently uses a shotgun round for its 40mm grenade launchers, the M576 Buckshot round, which seems to function like the flechette round currently does. Because we already have 2 varieties of explosive rounds (HE and plasma), adding a wide angle direct fire round would give soldiers  a handy tool for close quarters.

This could be accomplished by either describing the flechette round as fire a spray of armor piercing darts, or introducing a buckshot ammunition type.

[BTAxis]

I copied and pasted firedefs from the regular frag grenades and tried to change the damage type, but found I don't know what all the options are or how all the parameters work.

I reverted this. Flechette shells are NOT supposed to be launched - they are supposed to turn the grenade launcher into a sort of shotgun.

[Halleth]

Oh, so it isn't a bug! In this case, sorry for creating the topic. Is seems, however, that not only I was confused.