Smart Missile Testing

[Drakona]

So, quite a few people have noticed that direct smart missile hits are easy to dodge. As long as you're moving away from the smart when it hits, the blobs won't do damage on contact -- they have to chase you down, and you can generally get away.

A number of people have asked me if this a Rebirth artifact, and I've said I'd look into it.

The short answer, though, is no. They've always done that.

DKH did some testing with me in DOSBox Descentr 1.4a. He was able to avoid smart blobs by moving backwards when the missile hit in 2/2 trials. I suppose we could have done more trials for better statistical significance, but bottom line . . .

Smart missiles have always done that.

I wish they didn't. I think probably a lot of us wish they didn't. I hate to get hit and get out of it on accident, that feels pretty cheap. And I'm not exactly fond of being 'robbed' occasionally when I use smarts like fusion. But it's Original Descent, and not something I'll be attempting to fix.

Use it, abuse it . . . smarts bounce off. For the blobs to get you, you have to fly into them and/or let them catch up to you.

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Blarget also demonstrated to us why you sometimes appear to 'eat' a smart missile. It's a latency artifact. When you execute the above maneuver -- making a smart missile bounce off on purpose -- if you do it with pretty tight timing, your opponent may see the smart blobs go into your ship, while on your screen you backed away in time.

This is an expected effect of latency, and not something I'll be attempting to fix.

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I've also been told that smart blobs sometimes disappear. The going theory seems to be that it happens when the person who shot the missile dies. Testing with Blarget, Lionclaw, DKH, and Bahamut, we couldn't replicate that effect.

However, we COULD make the blobs disappear. Apparently, if the host sees the blobs die, after a delay, he tells everyone they're dead and they disappear on other screens. The effect was observed while doing the above bounceoff trick -- the host saw the blobs die on a ship that really dodged them, the rest of us saw them bounce off and chase him down, and then a few moments later, they all winked out.

I'm not completely comfortable with that behavior, as it transgresses more than a little bit on the peer-to-peer nature of the game.

[LotharBot]

tl;dr

1) Smarts have always bounced off of players, we're just good enough to make it happen a lot more nowadays
2) smart blobs sometimes fake-disappear when the smart bounces off and is chasing someone, but lag made it appear as though the blobs hit
3) smart blobs can real-disappear if the game host sees that effect, and then sends out a "those blobs died" packet, which wouldn't happen under true p2p

[RiTides]

[Drakona]

A further smart missile quirk:

Icewolf pointed out to me what when a smart missile times out and explodes (NOT when it hits a wall), it creates 12 children instead of 6. True of smart mines as well. I verified that this happens in D2 and D1 Rebirth 0.58.1, D1x143, and Descentr 1.4a. This is almost certainly a bug, but . . . one that has been with us since the beginning.