Dart Gun, shots aren't connecting properly

Ok, this is about the Dart Gun mod I made, and I'm not entirely sure if it should be posted here or in X:CE, but this is definitely a bug.

The gun itself is a copy of the normal pistol, with the damage changed to 1 and given stun damage of like 90. I also have the hit cap raised to 100% (default is 95%). If I get within range to have a 100% chance to hit, sometimes I will go through an entire clip and not a single hit will register. The bullet animation will stop at the target like it should, but then nothing happens. It doesn't pass through and hit another tile/wall, it doesn't hit the ground under the target, it hits where it should normally hit and does absolutely nothing. I'm pretty sure others have had this issue with it, I recall someone mentioning it in the thread I made to release the mod.

Using Cheat Engine today, I locked a soldier's TUs at max, gave him a dart gun and 4 clips (15 shots each) and solo'd a light scout. Of the 7 aliens I had to take down, it took me all but 8 shots of the 6th clip to do it. That's 52 shots fired at 100% chance to hit to take down 7 aliens! Each alien went down with one hit, so that means 45 of them did absolutely nothing.

When the shots actually DO something, it works as it should - hits them for 1 normal damage and some amount of stun damage. (I noticed the stun baton does normal + stun, that's why I gave it the 1 normal damage).

What needs to be done so it works like it should? Is this a problem in the game itself?

It might be something to do with the low damage? With random variation, 1 damage can result in less than 1 which might block all application of damage (can't remember the code off the top of my head, but I think this might be the case). Best way to test this would be to set the damage to '2' or else turn off all random variation - if it works fine after that I suspect that's the cause and if not then at least it's ruled it out.

(Also, what difficulty are you playing on and with what other mods, if any. If you're playing with a mod that gives aliens armour that might have the same effect as I described above, and Insane doesn't show the 'resist' text I don't think.)

I bumped the damage up to 10 and everything seems to be working now. I may actually bump it up to 20 just to be safe, although that might make it too powerful.

So what you're saying is the gun has to do ACTUAL damage BEFORE the stun damage is applied? Like, if I completely removed normal damage and just left it as stun, the gun wouldn't function at all?

So what you're saying is the gun has to do ACTUAL damage BEFORE the stun damage is applied? Like, if I completely removed normal damage and just left it as stun, the gun wouldn't function at all?

I've just had a look in the code and it looks like this is true. Basically, the game only calls the function that applies damage if the *regular* damage value is greater than 0, although this is before applying armour (so in the vanilla game should never come up). I note that aside from stun grenades/rockets, all stun weapons do a small amount of normal damage as well; this might be the reason. Not sure why stun gas/rockets are an exception - it's possible the damage is applied differently as they're a different weapon type or it might just not apply anything immediately (I barely use stun gas so don't recall whether or not it throws up stun damage numbers when used).

Stun 'nades do post stun damage if an enemy/ally is in the initial explosion radius. Not sure with the over time bit.