descentchampions.org

According to this website:



Homers should only be doing 27 Damage. Is this right or wrong? In the combat log I am getting hit for 30+ damage. All the other numbers that I see in the log match the website numbers. Same or lower (blast damage or single hit.)

30.1 damage
30.2 damage
30.4 damage

Those numbers come from one of the data files that we (D1X, Rebirth, Retro) don't modify. (Remember Hyper's fusion reduced damage bug a while back? He was using a pre-1.1 file, which had reduced fusion damage.) So, it's not something the source handles directly.

As a curiosity, I pulled the numbers straight from those files. Interesting is that the numbers that show up here don't match either 27 or 30! Note these are per projectile. I have a feeling the missile numbers don't match because you get blast damage, not full damage, even if it hits your ship.

Laser 1 - 10 Damage
Laser 2 - 11 Damage
Laser 3 - 12 Damage
Laser 4 - 13 Damage
Vulcan - 4 Damage
Spreadfire - 10 Damage
Plasma - 11 Damage
Fusion - 30 Damage minimum (60 Damage minimum in single player)

Concussion Missile - 30 Damage
Homing Missile - 40 Damage
Proximity Bomb - 30 Damage
Smart Missile - 25 Damage
Smart Blob - 35 Damage
Mega Missile - 199 Damage

I know I got hit in the face a few times by homers. The highest damage one was 30.5. The lowest one that I took was 1.3. Maybe the log is wrong? I will have to test it again when someone gets on and test it another time when the same person gets back on. Also, is the website wrong or why are some of the numbers the same while others are different?

It probably depends how they were measured. If it was by empirical observation (as the Mega missile number seems to suggest) it's pretty easy to get it wrong. Notably it's all the blast weapons that seem off, while the non-blast weapons are pretty exact, so I suspect the author was indeed just guessing based on how much damage a missile that hit appeared to do. But because Descent scales blast damage by distance, and I suspect it's measuring the center of your ship to the center of the missile explosion which is non-zero, it's always somewhat below the nominal damage, although usually reasonably consistent where it ends up.

I doubt the log is wrong, though. The 1.3 instance feels like it might have glitched and exploded the missile too soon.

You never take direct damage from a missile, only splash damage. The closer to the center of the splash, the more damage.

A missile that hits the outer edge of your ship is apparently around 30. If you try to angle your ship at a wall at 45 degrees so that the homing missile fires out of the same side that's closest to the wall, you can up it to around 33.

If someone lag-phases through your ship and launches a missile at the same time, it might hit very close to the center of your ship, for near 40.

If something hits quite far from you but you're still within splash damage range, 1.3 is possible!

Makes me wonder if the hit detection has changed at all since the Descendarium article was written. It would make sense that the hitbox could have been tightened up in the meantime, so that "direct impact" homers are actually closer to the ship center and therefore do more damage than they were doing before.

I think changing the hit radius of a ship would require .PIG modifications, which Retro has avoided. I wouldn't rule out difficulty settings though. Lower framerates would cause more variance in the numbers, too.

There is no variance in player-fired weapon damage based on difficulty settings. I'm pretty sure D1 collision detection is polygon-based, not a sphere, but someone can correct me if that's wrong.

Looks like object-object collisions (projectiles count as objects) are based on spherical models, i.e. position and radius. Not that fvi.c is the easiest thing to read, but if it were checking each polygon of an object for collision there would be telltale signs (looking up the polymodel and iterating over the polygons).