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Picture it, the squad has finally cleared the top of a large plateau from a mass of pods. The aliens are milling around at the base of the plateau drawing straws to see who has to go up the vine ladders and face the overwatch fire.

Suddenly, the ground under my soldiers feet explodes as if from a rocket direct hit. How?
The shinobi goes to look - yep, there's a heavy rocketeer hanging at the base of the plateau that has managed to pixel hunt up a terrain hole that lets him shoot at the underside of the plateau as if it were a ceiling.

I felt justified in reloading a save because you shouldn't be able to hit troops 10-12 tiles back from the edge of the cliff with a rocket. Cliffs are solid! The AI really loved choosing it though, so my only counter was to use Incoming... which kinda worked. I wish the terrain like cliffs and plateaus were more solid, or known to fill a volume rather than just be floors and ceilings with a different skin.

Advent Engies can launch grenades through the solid ceilings as well. As can do you, although it's much less useful to you - it's highly unlikely that you'll ever be ambushing pods from below.

Suddenly, the ground under my soldiers feet explodes as if from a rocket direct hit.

Rekt!

Interestingly, in my experience muton grenades and mec micromissiles aren't able to blow up healthy ceilings/floors. Maybe the higher tier ones can. But those rockets....aye aye aye I feel your pain.

Currently, snakes can also spit poison through solid ground in much the same way, without having line of sight. I'm pretty sure I saw it on the list of things to fix for 1.3.

Yeah, the AI targeting code has some oddities in it. xwynns has it on video where a MEC fires micromissiles about three screens away at a target nobody on the alien side even has LoS to.

I've had issues with snakes displaying perfect awareness of unseen troops as well, even if they intend to shoot rather than spit. It's why I keep the console handy just in case somebody needs a time out.

Yog_sothoth wrote: The shinobi goes to look - yep, there's a heavy rocketeer hanging at the base of the plateau that has managed to pixel hunt up a terrain hole that lets him shoot at the underside of the plateau as if it were a ceiling.

It's not pixel hunting, it's a bug allowing some troops to fire special shots through solid objects (i've never seen actual rifle shots behave like that)
And yes, you were totally justified to reload.

Yog_sothoth wrote: I wish the terrain like cliffs and plateaus were more solid, or known to fill a volume rather than just be floors and ceilings with a different skin.

Unfortunately we'd need stronger computers to allow 3D objects made of voxels in real time games.

I appreciate the explanation LordYanaek and all. Good to know I'm not alone in this bug. Rekt is right, those heavy rocketeer rockets HURT!

I get that voxels would make performance grind to halt. Maybe some sort of bounding box that defined the space inside as solid?

I wonder if the clipping that occurs sometimes when an arm or head pierces through a complex piece of terrain might be the cause of the bug. Now suddenly the unit has a path to fire because it's no longer on the outside of the terrain, but inside looking up at you with part of it's body.

Or maybe the Ayys just know we're living in a hollow world.

Yog_sothoth wrote:I appreciate the explanation LordYanaek and all. Good to know I'm not alone in this bug. Rekt is right, those heavy rocketeer rockets HURT!

I get that voxels would make performance grind to halt. Maybe some sort of bounding box that defined the space inside as solid?

I wonder if the clipping that occurs sometimes when an arm or head pierces through a complex piece of terrain might be the cause of the bug. Now suddenly the unit has a path to fire because it's no longer on the outside of the terrain, but inside looking up at you with part of it's body.

Or maybe the Ayys just know we're living in a hollow world.

Well, if it _was_ clipping that did it (although proving that would be a pain) it would actually be easy to fix, at least for larger objects... put a textureless second object inside the larger object, about half a tile smaller, such that it wouldn't be clipped through.

I just popped in to say "Explosives on the Ceiling" could be a great name for a song, for a punk band, or something.