[SUBMISSION] Nerve (tear) Gas Launcher

Information:
Name: Riot Nerve Gas Launcher
Class: 5
Type: Projectile and AoE
Palette: Doom
Summon: GasGun
Ammo Type: Sarin Gas Grenades
Altfire: no
Powered Mode: no
Added States: no

Credits:
Submitted: Deathknight
Decorate: Deathknight, MagicWazard, idGamer
Sounds: 3D Realms, Raven Software, ID Games
Sprites: 3D Realms, Raven Software, ID Games, Deathknight
Sprite Edit: Deathknight
Idea Base:Shadow warrior Gas Grenade, and the idea of a half damage/half suppression weapon.
ACS: none

Description:
This was a Riot Gun loaded with tear gas that was used before the invasion to suppress severe civil unrest. Yet once the hordes of hell were unleashed unto earth, many of these guns were outfitted to fire deadly grenades containing the chemical mixtures to form Sarin. Can kill with both direct impact from the grenade and the deadly nerve gas which it produces. Does not work underwater.

Oooo I like this weapon. Very good for crowd control and to keep enemies from getting around too quickly. Not necessarily a kill-focused weapon, but it definitely keeps enemies at bay and in place for one to get a good number of shots into the crowd with another more kill-focused weapon, even if it is difficult to see through the thick smoke.

However, I find that the grenade impact damage is way too high and shouldn't instant gib smaller enemies like the zombies and imps. It might be a fast moving projectile and may hurt a bit but not by that much.

Also two of the graphic names in the file are throwing errors, TRGNA1A & TRGNA5A. Removing the 'A' at the end should fix this.

thanks for the feedback!
The sprite name errors were because i forgot to remove the whole name since i used the rotation sprites again for when the canister spins around.
I lowered the damage, but i did like how the grenade itself could be used for decent-ish damage, but i added a no extreme death flag so the somewhat extreme gibbing effect wouldn't occur on the zombies.

This is loads of fun to play with, but I think it's got a few issues I'd like to make suggestions on.

For starters, I think the projectile should detonate upon impact with a monster. The reason why is that the projectile is easily powerful enough to kill an Imp upon impact, and it's not hard at all to fire the grenade into a group of monsters and watch it pinball back and forth between them, killing a group of them even before the gas clouds are produced.

Speaking of gas clouds, holy crap, can this thing produce a lot of framerate slowdown if you spam grenades! It makes a LOT of the smoke sprites with each explosion--if I counted correctly, 236 of them, in fact. That seems like pretty serious overkill to me. The smoke sprites also seem to drift through level geometry, which I'm not sure is what you intended (though I do see "NOBLOCKMAP" flagged, so maybe that was your intention).

Also, the grenade fizzles upon hitting water, instead of continuing to bounce. I'd give it the "CANBOUNCEWATER" flag, for starters. If you don't want it to bounce, I'd remove the "-EXPLODEONWATER" flag so they at least don't go entirely to waste.

Plus, the pickup sprite needs to be scaled down. You can simply do that in DECORATE with Scale if you like, rather than actually resizing the sprite itself.

Still, potential issues aside, this is a lot of fun to play with, so you're definitely on the right track!

thank you for the input, and i'll look into it. to add to the comments:
I made the grenade not detonate on impact since i figured it was not armed like an explosive and would detonate after it stops bouncing, thought it added a fun concept, but i could see if i could make it drop after hitting an actor

I did make the clouds go through walls because of two things:
1. If the grenade landed near a closed wall, the gas would still seem to get inside the room (which is nice since aiming the grenade currently can be hard)
2. I found issues earlier where if the grenade landed near a wall the gas would not have room to disperse so the grenade would do nothing at all.

As for the water problem and the sprite, thank you for pointing that out and i think i will make it just stop on water and downsize the sprite.
I will also make smaller clouds spawn less, since the smaller clouds are set to continue spawning for a random period of time.

Alright, finished some edits:
1. Reduced amount of gas significantly, but still enough to stun a good group
2. It will just bounce on water now
3. It will drop after striking one enemy, still dealing good damage but now dies on actor impact
4. just in case people dislike random garbage in their maps, the spent gas canisters will now disappear after a short period of time, but easily removed if people love the "litter of war" effect
5. Fixed an unintended bug where i set the horizontal spawns with the values of the pitch angle, so not gas clouds won't spawn 359 units away from the grenade.
6. Not sure if i did reduce the size of the gun pickup sprite, but it seems to be about the size of the plasma rifle.

Overall this does seem like an improvement, though I noticed that the grenades still fizzle upon contact with water, rather than bouncing. (Also, I found that the gas clouds will splash if they hit water. You probably want to remove that, even if it's not likely to happen with regularity.)

Also, I just realized that the gas clouds hurt you as bad as they do anyone else, which is a good thing. I was about to complain that there was still a fair amount of framerate-chug if you were standing in the middle of the gas clouds, but obviously under normal circumstances you wouldn't be doing that.

sadly, for the frame rate parts, its hard to fix that since, not to put myself above anyone else, i do have a rather new computer so it is rare that i have frame rate problems on my system, and is hard to gauge how that would affect other systems. and i also feel that if i remove more clouds then the weapon will not be as effective.

As for the liquid fizzle part, i'll add a +EXPLODEONWATER, if that doesn't work then i'd like a suggestion.
Also, is there a way to stop the smoke from spawning if the grenade lands under the water? it seems like it would become mostly useless underwater, but it would make more sense that way.

Actually, the example for A_JumpIf uses that specific scenario (a projectile that fizzles out UNDERwater) as an example. The expression "waterlevel" is defined at the bottom of the DECORATE expressions page.

I tried adding the fizzle effect in the water but it seemed to not respond, i tried it on zdcmp2 since that was a map that i knew had underwater and was handy. I think i'm going to leave that out for now and leave it up to the modder to add that in if they wish.