[SUBMISSION] Nerve (tear) Gas Launcher

I'm with MagicWazard on the name change. "Tear Gas" doesn't suit it well if you can kill a bunch of powerful, supernatural creatures (i.e., barons of hell) with two or three grenades. After all, it is a powerful weapon.

A few notes:

• It doesn't make much sense for the weapon to have a high (800) weapon kickback. I suggest using the default kickback.
• You should use BounceType to set the type of bounce instead of relying on the flags. The flags are deprecated.
• The INFO lump is missing.

MagicWazard wrote: I definitely think it needs +FORCERADIUSDMG, though, because otherwise it won't hurt certain bosses at all, except for the canister impact, which is minimal (against a monster with 3000 - 4000 HP).

I did a test with that flag set. The result was that I was able to kill a cyberdemon with four grenades. It could barely move or even retaliate, which made it very vulnerable and helpless.

It needs balancing if the flag is to be considered.

Blue Shadow wrote:

MagicWazard wrote: I definitely think it needs +FORCERADIUSDMG, though, because otherwise it won't hurt certain bosses at all, except for the canister impact, which is minimal (against a monster with 3000 - 4000 HP).

I did a test with that flag set. The result was that I was able to kill a cyberdemon with four grenades. It could barely move or even retaliate, which made it very vulnerable and helpless.

It needs balancing if the flag is to be considered.

It's a shame that pain chance can't be overridden on a weapon-by-weapon basis. The (UTNT) Flamethrower (the one with sprites by Eriance), has a very similar problem. All the damage is dealt by a huge number of explosions and burning flames, which can stun-lock the average monster to the point that they can't retaliate at all--and, since the damage is explosion-based, the flamethrower is useless against bosses (but overpowered against anything that isn't a boss due to the ridiculous damage values). When I decided to implement the flamethrower into my resource set, (in addition to lowering the damage dramatically,) I had to assign a custom damagetype to the projectiles, and individually give each monster an unusually low PainChance to that damage type to offset the sheer amount of damage calculations the weapon generated. But I'm not sure that would be a fool-proof solution in this case, due to the massive number of clouds generated. Even if a monster had a PainChance of a single-digit value towards this damagetype, there's still a good chance they'd get heavily stun-locked since so many clouds are generated. It's worth a try, though, as far as I'm concerned.

I guess a weird alternative would be to make it so that the coulds ONLY stun, and don't actually cause any damage. I'm not sure what combination of flags and settings would allow that to work, though.

Still, I've said it before, and I'll say it again--this weapon is tons of fun. So I hope the balance issues get ironed out.

Ill probably end up renaming it, and i lowered both poison and explosion damage by about 1 or 2 points.
As for the boss thing, I can live with the bosses being almost immune to the grenades, making this a weapon aimed more towards handling the peons. A nice feature I assume the gun has is that if a boss can't be affected by the grenade doesn't mean it won't affect smaller monsters that a boss might spawn.

The bigger question i have is that are the gas clouds at least still hurting the boss monsters a bit (not direct impact)

Although, a Nerve grenade launcher sounds nice, i also like the idea of it being an old fire grenade launcher, not a very common thing but i liked the one they had in "Enter The Matrix"
http://www.imfdb.org/wiki/Enter_the_Matrix#Power_Plant_Methane_Gun

Edits have been made, but i'm sure it might still need some more tweaking

Not a bad weapon. There still appears to be a rather high number of clouds being spawned, which may attribute to monsters getting stuck. While fighting a cyberdemon, I fired a whole bunch of grenades at it and it really started to chug my computer. Being able to kill a weak monster with the grenade itself is alright, but (80) damage sounds rather high when compared to the 20 that a rocket does (that being said, I'm not 100% sure on what the brackets around that number do).

I was told that by putting brackets around the number (based on the zdoom wiki), it would override the random damage function by substituting your own random damage function (with it being a flat 80, I assumed this would translate as the damage would always be 80 and not 80* (1-)

I tested some new damage values, and it seems like it takes 2 full grenades (3 plus some gas) to kill a revenant.

If its a huge problem I can try to tone down the clouds once again, I personally like the look of all the clouds (to look like 1 big cloud maybe instead of 1 big sprite of a cloud). But I can see where performance might be an issue.

I made the base grenade damage lower, decreased the amount of large clouds by a third or a half, but made it more likely for smaller clouds to spawn, and their radius was increased. Other than that just some little cloud physics/behavior was changed.

The clouds still chug my computer a bit, but it's probably not the best system around. The weapon seems alright otherwise.

So, apart from the potential slowdown issue, is this ready to go?

Yeah, unless there are any other ideas or advise on how to better fine tune the weapon. I'd Say i'm happy with it. If i could better fix the slowdown issue I would, but I feel that the sacrifices to make that work would make the launcher act in a way that I would not want it to.

I'm fine with how the weapon currently is.

Alright, then, added .