Spring RTS Engine

When I place a flak gun between 2 building with one space between each, the flak shell consistently hits the building instead, even when firing straight forward and up. Is this meant to happen?
On Spring 0.82.3, BA 7.15

This happens with T2 AA kbots as well, pretty annoying.

yeah and units coming out of lab always shoot/damage lab if enemies are in range

Press alt-b to get the debug mode and see the hit volumes.

You will probably see that the weapons of the flak are inside the hit volumes.

The surprising part is that it fires at all. It probably has the aim from point in the middle of the turret, which is clear to fire, but even then im sort of surprised.

Well flak is kind of a wild card, it will explode even if it doesn't come in contact with the plane it is firing at, so maybe it activates on proximity and that same proximity works on friendly buildings?

Gouken wrote:yeah and units coming out of lab always shoot/damage lab if enemies are in range

Ano right, god damn Janus blowin' up their home territory...

This is war, and accidents happen.

Hobo Joe wrote:Well flak is kind of a wild card, it will explode even if it doesn't come in contact with the plane it is firing at, so maybe it activates on proximity and that same proximity works on friendly buildings?

No, that is not how burnblow works. The projectile is fired at an enemy units location, and explodes when it reaches that location, regardless of whether it hit or not. There is no 'proximity' sensor.

Saktoth wrote:

Hobo Joe wrote:Well flak is kind of a wild card, it will explode even if it doesn't come in contact with the plane it is firing at, so maybe it activates on proximity and that same proximity works on friendly buildings?

No, that is not how burnblow works. The projectile is fired at an enemy units location, and explodes when it reaches that location, regardless of whether it hit or not. There is no 'proximity' sensor.

You learn something new every day.


Still explodes on friendly buildings though, either the hitspheres are wack or it will explode without real contact.

Yeah, take a look at the hitspheres (alt+b). I replicated this bug, and the flak shoots while its inside a buildings hitsphere.

Its not really a huge problem, because it does hardly any damage to buildings, and if you are building it that close to things then you arent going to hit anything anyway and it serves you right.

Saktoth wrote:Yeah, take a look at the hitspheres (alt+b). I replicated this bug, and the flak shoots while its inside a buildings hitsphere.

Its not really a huge problem, because it does hardly any damage to buildings, and if you are building it that close to things then you arent going to hit anything anyway and it serves you right.

There is the case of scout planes that are landed in your base... Here, you don't need to take them out fast, but you do need to kill them eventually.

units/buildings block shots, thats normal (why would u place flak in base anyway), aa does shitty damage to ground stuff so who cares anyway

Wombat wrote:units/buildings block shots, thats normal (why would u place flak in base anyway), aa does shitty damage to ground stuff so who cares anyway

The thing is it shouldn't be firing if it doesn't have a clear line of fire.

Flak doesnt really matter, now you know how not to place it, but unit coming out of labs shooting lab can lose you a game

Hobo Joe wrote:

Saktoth wrote:

Hobo Joe wrote:Well flak is kind of a wild card, it will explode even if it doesn't come in contact with the plane it is firing at, so maybe it activates on proximity and that same proximity works on friendly buildings?

No, that is not how burnblow works. The projectile is fired at an enemy units location, and explodes when it reaches that location, regardless of whether it hit or not. There is no 'proximity' sensor.

You learn something new every day.


Still explodes on friendly buildings though, either the hitspheres are wack or it will explode without real contact.

Not sure whether this is how the engine does it, but if that was a description about RL flak, then it is slightly flawed.

Flak rounds simply have varied fuse lengths, operators approximate distance to the enemy plane, and choose appropriate ammo. The spread of the gun and the randomness in fuse lengths combined with high ROF and shrapnel rounds allows them to actually hit once in a blue moon.

Fuse lengths are calculated with consideration to the speed of the projectile and height of the plane, and ammo usually had the 500m 750m etc markings on it.




Edit :

Even more offtopic, the current flak does enormous damage to T2 DT (fortifications) while even arm t2 arty does not even scratch it, and bulldogs take a week to kill them.

This is because flak uses special damages to all land units, but a high default damage, when the logical thing to do would be to have special damage to air units, and a low default damage. This is the same reason the juno wipes out wrecks.

But BA's damage categories are very screwed up. I suspect you'll find flak does full damage to hovercraft too, and a bunch of other zany stuff.

*Note to self to FPS flak at the first opportunity

It's always had high default damage as a hack to give it a bigger engine explosion I believe.

I fixed the hitting own buildings for next release btw.