what affects environmental damage?

[trihero]

If you're interested in the science, just try some simple experiments. Set weapon damage to 0, but environmental damage to like super high. Run around with the invincibility cheat and keep shooting at enemies near objects and sees what happens. If the environment is blowing up with 0 weapon damage, then you've falsified the theory that weapon damage impacts the environment. To investigate the theory more completely, go to the other extreme and set weapon damage to like 50, and environmental damage to 0. If you never break the environment after a lot of test shots, this completes the model. I'm not saying that will be the result, but that's how you do basic science.

[seananigans]

If you're interested in the science, just try some simple experiments. Set weapon damage to 0, but environmental damage to like super high. Run around with the invincibility cheat and keep shooting at enemies near objects and sees what happens. If the environment is blowing up with 0 weapon damage, then you've falsified the theory that weapon damage impacts the environment. To investigate the theory more completely, go to the other extreme and set weapon damage to like 50, and environmental damage to 0. If you never break the environment after a lot of test shots, this completes the model. I'm not saying that will be the result, but that's how you do basic science.

To be fair, this isn't a conclusive study at all. All this tests is if weapon damage ALONE or environmental damage ALONE will destroy objects. It doesn't test any possible interaction between the two.

But I think we've gotten as far as we can by "testing" things and digging in files. There's definitely mechanics at play that aren't readily apparent, but nobody in this thread seems to know what they are.

[trihero]

For practical use, we have settled what the player needs to know about environmental damage with explosives. It's a little bit amusing to make a mountain of an anthill that we don't get the weapon part, which has no practical application.

Again I'm just putting out the basics and giving hints how to do the science, if you want to do the "complete" picture you have to fill in the blanks (combine the two factors) and actually do it properly. I have zero incentive or interest to carry out the test. To be fair, the test I proposed answers the question that I'm interested in - which is it the envir damage or the basic weapon that dominates the calculation? Your question is different, what exact interaction between envir/basic damage? You can't ever be 100% sure without seeing the source code that something stupid like 1% of base damage does contribute, that just takes too much testing, but you can ask reasonable questions and get reasonable answers with simple testing which is much better than these amazingly false assertions that people just put out.

But again bottom line - if you're interested go do the testing then -> less arguing/fishing here, more testing. Nothing to be gained by talking about it or adding one tiny data point here and there, just do the test properly, or don't, nothing in between.

[justdont]

If you never break the environment after a lot of test shots, this completes the model. I'm not saying that will be the result, but that's how you do basic science.

It is already quite evident (from grenade experiments and digging through the code) that base damage is not related in any way to environmental damage. So this particular bit of "science" isn't useful at all.

It doesn't explain why very low environmental damage values affect the world as much as they do. Especially given that destructibles can't be "drained to 0 health", they're either damaged in a single attack or they aren't.

[trihero]

Instead of playing with words and poking holes in your "observations," I'm going to go do something productive and await your brilliant tests and hypotheses. I've already done far more than my fair share in discrediting the grenade theory. The burden of proof was on you guys to show your false assertions were correct, but I went above and beyond and took the burden of proof to show you were wrong.

[justdont]

Some basic tests suggest at least that damage from explosives and normal projectiles isn't applied in the same fashion. I've chucked over 50 frag grenades on Gatecrasher with env. damage = 1 and then env. damage = 3, which corresponds to env. damage of conventional and plasma rifles, respectively. And I failed to produce any meaningful damage (apart from visuals and broken glass). Cars and trikes couldn't be blown or even "sparked", flimsy half-covers known to be easily destructible (2nd floor guard railings in "shanty town" environments, wooden crates, etc) weren't affected at all.

Testing rifles is a bit more annoying, but I managed to produce some kind of environmental destruction against "flimsy" walls quite easily, in no more than 5 hits each time over 10 attempts. Rifle stats weren't edited at first, then removed normal damage to 0, env. damage of assault rifle stated to be 1.
For instance, environmental destruction with normal weapons usually happens on hit, rather than on miss, such as here:

Spoiler: show

Changing normal weapon damage doesn't affect this, as suspected. Tried to "make holes in walls" with grenades in a similar fashion, and it feels like it's even taking longer (not enough tries to get decently valid averages). So there are some unknown factors in weapon damage application vs. environment, that make even env. damage 1 to be effective quite often. The capacity of environmental destruction of projectiles vs. explosive is pretty different from what can be assumed just by looking at numbers (frags with env. damage = 9 are not even remotely nine times more powerful than a rifle with env. damage = 1, it is even not very clear if frags are more powerful at all).

I've already done far more than my fair share in discrediting the grenade theory.

You were really good at discrediting in this thread, but unfortunately, failed to bring anything productive for the observable inconsistencies, instead again preferring to engage in pointlessly heated outbursts even though nobody even tries (until now) to attack you or your viewpoint. To be honest, this is getting pretty tiresome. Can't you at least avoid making another post if you have nothing useful to say at all?

[trihero]

Can't you avoid throwing insults at me?

Your tests still don't answer the question you raised

It doesn't explain why very low environmental damage values affect the world as much as they do.

[justdont]

Your tests still don't answer the question you raised

You're free to do such a test if you know how. I don't.

[johnnylump]

Take it easy, folks. No need to get personal.