Piercing Bullets

[Ed the Bat]

For a long time now, I've been trying to think up a way to create piercing bullets. I'm not aware of any simple way to make hitscans continue through multiple targets.

I've tried things like using invisible FastProjectile actors with the +RIPPER flag, but those present a huge problem in that they die when hitting solid non-targets, such as trees. Normal hitscans go through those, so it seems highly ironic that my piercing bullet can't pierce things that a normal bullet could...

I've tried invisible railgun attacks, but those are unaffected by autoaim, which I'm not too keen on. Plus, they don't leave puffs when they die in most circumstances, which kills some aesthetics for me.

I've even tried weird things like having the FastProjectile fire its own hitscan upon death, so something will go through trees, but this method means that firing up close to a wall or a solid will fill the shooter with hitscans and cause a lot of pain and death.

Are there any other methods I haven't considered that would give me the results I want?

[XutaWoo]

A FastProjectile with +RIPPER and +THRUACTORS.

[Ed the Bat]

Doing that will make it harmless to all enemies. Rather defeats the purpose...

[NeuralStunner]

A FastProjectile with +RIPPER and +THRUACTORS.

Why both?

[Slax]

+RIPPER should be enough, I think. (Do correct me if I'm mistaken.) Could be that it disables autoaim, not sure.

[Gez]

I think people haven't read fully this:

I've tried things like using invisible FastProjectile actors with the +RIPPER flag, but those present a huge problem in that they die when hitting solid non-targets, such as trees. Normal hitscans go through those, so it seems highly ironic that my piercing bullet can't pierce things that a normal bullet could...

I guess XutaWoo suggested THRUACTORS so as to go through trees, but that will also make it go through enemies...

A possible workaround: have the fastprojectile's trail be the one that inflict damage. The issue would be to be sure they do not damage the shooter/

[Ed the Bat]

I was wondering the same thing about the trail causing damage to the shooter. I also briefly considered having the projectile create a series of tiny explosions which can't hurt the shooter, but it would be going so fast that there would be huge gaps between the points of damage, since I can only have it explode once per tic, at most.

Also, Gez, thank you so much for actually paying attention to what my issue was.

[amv2k9]

Invisible rail attack?

[Ed the Bat]

Yeah, I used a RailGun attack set to show no spiral and no central beam, making it invisible. It offers an instantaneous attack that pierces through targets, which is close to my goal, but it doesn't honor auto-aim and it doesn't produce impact puffs except in a few rare circumstances.

[Nash]

Why wouldn't autoaim affect railgun attacks? Could it be a bug? You could try report it as a bug. As for the impact puff... pretty sure someone (Xaser?) fixed that recently...

(Note: I just woke up so this post might be very inaccurate)

[Ed the Bat]

I don't believe railguns were ever meant to be affected by autoaim. The wiki attests to this. Also, the puffs are only supposed to appear in certain circumstances, and otherwise are simply to apply attributes such as a damagetype, as far as I know.

[Xaser]

For the puffs, add +ALWAYSPUFF to make the rail puffs appear. For some reason the function had some odd default behavior in which the puff was never spawned (unless hitting dormant actors), making it only useful for damagetypes prior to the flag's introduction.

Still doesn't fix the autoaim issue, but that's all I can think of at the moment.

[Ed the Bat]

Would +ALWAYSPUFF cause puffs to appear when enemies get hit? If so, it's still not an especially appealing solution to me...

[Xaser]

No, that's PUFFONACTORS. They're separate flags, fortunately.

[Ed the Bat]

Ok, excellent to know. With all that, it looks like a lack of autoaim is the only thing I need that a railgun wouldn't give me.