What's stopping the cops' from throwing up?

[Abusimplea]

I hope to start a fact-finding process about the phenomenon of cops vomiting puke at players behind cover In A21 horde nights.

So far it looks to me like a wall made of 1m³ cube blocks is still preventing approaching cops from vomiting in the player's direction. But other shapes seem to not be recognized as cover.

 

Is the only rule really "full block between you and cop = no puke"? Anyone seen cops not vomiting at them while cowering behind any other shapes?

 

Any TFP insider wanting to share the reasons for the behavior (please no bashing - i know the effect is basically a nerf of less ugly bases but that obviously isn't the intent)?

[theFlu]

From earlier experience, and some dev comments about pathing, it seems the game is not able to easily decide which way a block is sitting (rotations) for AI purposes. I do not know if that applies here, as this is a los check and as such quite a different beast - but if it does, the behaviour would sort of make sense. If you're hiding behind a plate but the game can't know which way the plate sits, it won't know if you're covered or not. The solution is to puke and hope it can land, if it doesn't, at least it does some damage to the base ...

 

I hope that's not the case, as it might be hard to fix; but I wouldn't be surprised if it is.

[RipClaw]

Erie Knight run some tests on it

 

 

[Abusimplea]

6 minutes ago, theFlu said:

I hope that's not the case, as it might be hard to fix;

The naive fix would be to look at what the code for the actual hit test does and do the same in the los check.

Obviously, it doesn't have to be as accurate as the actual hit test. It could be enough to have a boolean partiallyProjectileTransparent flag for each of the nine planes of symmetry of a cube on every known shape to quickly check whether the shape is considered interrupting line of sight from a direction. That booleans could be calculated for each symmetry plane of each shape on load.

5 minutes ago, RipClaw said:

Erie Knight run some tests on it

Care to boil it down into a list of observations?

[RipClaw]

2 minutes ago, Abusimplea said:

Care to boil it down into a list of observations?

The observations are:

 

* Hatches are a cop spit magnet.

* Cops spit significantly more often when using weaker materials such as wood or cobblestone.

* Any block that does not occupy the full space seems to be transparent to the cops.

 

[Lasher]

4 minutes ago, RipClaw said:

The observations are:

 

* Hatches are a cop spit magnet.

* Cops spit significantly more often when using weaker materials such as wood or cobblestone.

* Any block that does not occupy the full space seems to be transparent to the cops.

 

 

No doubt to once again make the game more, ahem, "Challenging"

Rather than just adding proper content just add another dopey way to get around player bases.

Working as intended - nothing to see here...

[theFlu]

22 minutes ago, Abusimplea said:

Obviously, it doesn't have to be as accurate as the actual hit test.

It also kinda can't; not only would it not match the random, delayed spew anyway, a strict line check from point to point would enable weird abuses where you can block the line of sight while still shooting at the cop freely.. so it would need to be an area check in a sense, "can you see any part of the player" or the like.

 

Likely it's a question of the tech they have available, and perhaps what they're Planning to have available for bandits. No point in spending much effort to make the cops "great" if the bandits will require something more sophisticated later on and thus cover what the cop needs anyway.

[Abusimplea]

11 minutes ago, theFlu said:

It also kinda can't; not only would it not match the random, delayed spew anyway, a strict line check from point to point would enable weird abuses where you can block the line of sight while still shooting at the cop freely.. so it would need to be an area check in a sense, "can you see any part of the player" or the like.

I would expect the check to be done each time the potential shooter changes grid position and towards each block occupied by each potential target (maybe with results cached by grid positions of potential sender and recipient).

It doesn't have to be cheese/dodging-proof and the plane check would already account for creatively placed blocks with holes in them.

No need for actual area checks.

 

But they could even make it super accurate for a potential sniper bandit if they wanted to: After finding potential targets using the cheap inaccurate method, cast some rays with some random small angle spread and see if one reaches its target - then perform the actual shot (which can still fail due to spread and change of scene) following that ray.
You can always stack tests of different accuracy on top of each other to filter the most obvious negatives quickly and then do the more costly checks on the more promising targets only.

This looks like it is possible in Unity with C# code - but it obviously needs time of a coder to implement. So maybe they indeed postponed it till they got their AI needs covered. Cops vomitting everywhere isn't really that big a deal - just annoying to have slightly scratched blocks everywhere after a horde...

[Stranded_Napkin]

Well, @%$#, my entire base is non-full blocks. No wonder why the @%$#s are constantly spitting at me. I've also noticed that pathing isn't as straightforward as it was in A20. Might be due to the same thing though.

Edited August 28, 2023 by Crater Creator
bypassing profanity filter (see edit history)

[8_Hussars]

23 hours ago, Abusimplea said:

Cops vomitting everywhere isn't really that big a deal - just annoying to have slightly scratched blocks everywhere after a horde...

I am currently running a slight variation of a streamer base with no full blocks.  The cop spit is relentless and any electrical fence post traps out front were easily taken out even with plate protection as the spit comes from all angles all the time.

Players will deal with it, but this issue seems like a serious oversight; game mechanic wise.  I do have space to throw in full block cover inside and will see how they work to reduce the spit.

[rateds2k]

On 8/21/2023 at 11:35 AM, Lasher said:

 

No doubt to once again make the game more, ahem, "Challenging"

Rather than just adding proper content just add another dopey way to get around player bases.

Working as intended - nothing to see here...

Or, I don't know, Maybe it is an Alpha and they are trying out new things to see what works or doesn't?

[8_Hussars]

I installed a wall of full size cube blocks behind the outer wall of the fighting position, and cop spit was significantly reduced during the last BMH.

It definitely seems like cops can "see" through any non full block...

[RipClaw]

Erie Knight released a new video on this topic. It shows (starting from 15:00) how broken the cop spit mechanic is at the moment.

 

https://youtu.be/e3Qmy2MeQPY?si=8e3kBNfjBQvyuzWb&t=900