[6.31.1 - Ground Combat] Smoke grenade behavior inconsistent

[PeterRibbit]

I had a soldier throw a smoke grenade over a hill in a desert map, to land on the edge of the hill at a low % but on detonating it didn't generate any smoke at all. I reloaded and confirmed it wasn't a flashbang or other kind of grenade. I haven't been able to replicate that bug, but I did find another oddity while testing:

Smoke grenades thrown to level 2 product smoke only on level 2, while smoke grenades thrown to level 1 will produce smoke on neighboring level 2 areas as well. While this might be intended behavior (smoke rises?), it may also be a bug.

To replicate this, have a soldier throw a smoke grenade onto a patch of elevated ground and also onto a patch of low ground near the elevated ground. The smoke grenade on elevated ground will only generate smoke on elevated ground (left), while the smoke grenade on low ground will have its full effect (right).

[Kouki]

7 hours ago, PeterRibbit said:

I had a soldier throw a smoke grenade over a hill in a desert map, to land on the edge of the hill at a low % but on detonating it didn't generate any smoke at all. I reloaded and confirmed it wasn't a flashbang or other kind of grenade. I haven't been able to replicate that bug, but I did find another oddity while testing:

Smoke grenades thrown to level 2 product smoke only on level 2, while smoke grenades thrown to level 1 will produce smoke on neighboring level 2 areas as well. While this might be intended behavior (smoke rises?), it may also be a bug.

To replicate this, have a soldier throw a smoke grenade onto a patch of elevated ground and also onto a patch of low ground near the elevated ground. The smoke grenade on elevated ground will only generate smoke on elevated ground (left), while the smoke grenade on low ground will have its full effect (right).

Thanks for the bug report! The first issue (smoke grenade thrown not generating smoke) is an issue that we've also encountered on testing last week, we're working towards figuring out what's causing said bug.  For the other bug (smoke not propagating to lower levels when thrown on higher elevation), I'll have to double check with the team as I'm not sure whether this is intended behaviour or not.

[gG-Unknown]

3 hours ago, Kouki said:

  For the other bug (smoke not propagating to lower levels when thrown on higher elevation), I'll have to double check with the team as I'm not sure whether this is intended behaviour or not.

Smoke  spreading is wierd in general. It  requires the proper floor. It means, smoke is not able spread (on same level) when floor is water OR  air.

It behaves wierd when smoke blast on edge on pond or edge of cliff or edge of roof building.

I guess, that smoke should spread in a spherical volume, not only in one level or limited by certain floor.

Edited February 2 by gG-Unknown

[Chris]

13 hours ago, PeterRibbit said:

I had a soldier throw a smoke grenade over a hill in a desert map, to land on the edge of the hill at a low % but on detonating it didn't generate any smoke at all. I reloaded and confirmed it wasn't a flashbang or other kind of grenade. I haven't been able to replicate that bug, but I did find another oddity while testing:

Smoke grenades thrown to level 2 product smoke only on level 2, while smoke grenades thrown to level 1 will produce smoke on neighboring level 2 areas as well. While this might be intended behavior (smoke rises?), it may also be a bug.

To replicate this, have a soldier throw a smoke grenade onto a patch of elevated ground and also onto a patch of low ground near the elevated ground. The smoke grenade on elevated ground will only generate smoke on elevated ground (left), while the smoke grenade on low ground will have its full effect (right).

Yeah, this probably isn't ideal - but I'm not sure it's worth too much time to try and fix it. What we don't want is multiple stacks of smoke stacked on top of each other, but as you say ideally the smoke should fall down to the ground if thrown on the level above. I'll check with the coders how much time it'll take to fix and we'll balance it against other issues in terms of priorities.

[gG-Unknown]

3 hours ago, Chris said:

Yeah, this probably isn't ideal - but I'm not sure it's worth too much time to try and fix it. What we don't want is multiple stacks of smoke stacked on top of each other, but as you say ideally the smoke should fall down to the ground if thrown on the level above. I'll check with the coders how much time it'll take to fix and we'll balance it against other issues in terms of priorities.

Spread smoke as expected in volume, then check camera position and do not show stacked smoke tiles. Do things properly. I see certain patternt in  bugs and issues, it looks to me, that lots of  coding and "solutions" are result of previous  fake or mockups.

[Chris]

2 hours ago, gG-Unknown said:

Spread smoke as expected in volume, then check camera position and do not show stacked smoke tiles. Do things properly. I see certain patternt in  bugs and issues, it looks to me, that lots of  coding and "solutions" are result of previous  fake or mockups.

If problems were as simple to fix as you seem to think they are, they wouldn't be problems. 

[PeterRibbit]

11 hours ago, Chris said:

What we don't want is multiple stacks of smoke stacked on top of each other

Why not? are we talking smoke on lvl1 and lvl2 and lvl3 or multiple stacks of smoke on lvl1 (which yes would be the buggiest-case scenario)

I do remember some graphical oddness (with smoke getting in the way of playervision but not soldiervision) on levels above the one I was looking at when using smoke on multiple levels of a Harvester UFO. So I can see how smoke on level 2 and 3 could be graphically annoying and therefore undesired. 

[Chris]

4 hours ago, PeterRibbit said:

Why not? are we talking smoke on lvl1 and lvl2 and lvl3 or multiple stacks of smoke on lvl1 (which yes would be the buggiest-case scenario)

I do remember some graphical oddness (with smoke getting in the way of playervision but not soldiervision) on levels above the one I was looking at when using smoke on multiple levels of a Harvester UFO. So I can see how smoke on level 2 and 3 could be graphically annoying and therefore undesired. 

The game already prevents multiple stacks of smoke spawning on the same tile, but we want to avoid vertical stacking of smoke too.

It's for several reasons - partially because stacked smoke would be extremely hard to see through and navigate in general, partially because when shooting up / down a level you'd get into situations where a bullet passing through a single ground-level tile might end up hitting both the ground floor smoke and the upper level smoke (which would be very confusing for a player), and partially because the smoke particles look a littlle strange hovering in mid-air. It can also be quite difficult to figure out where a smoke tile actually is if it's not on top of a ground tile due to the perspective of the camera.

[gG-Unknown]

6 hours ago, Chris said:

we want to avoid vertical stacking of smoke

we want to avoid vertical stacking of smoke too. // that is sad. Majority of players consider it as a bug, worth to announce, but you see it as intended feature. We had similar conversation yesterday.

 partially because stacked smoke would be extremely hard to see through and navigate in general, // I  have asked several times, make smoke less thick. Smoke visual should be an information for player not actual hindrance. partially because when shooting up / down a level you'd get into situations where a bullet passing through a single ground-level tile might end up hitting both the ground floor smoke and the upper level smoke (which would be very confusing for a player), / I dont see any problem here. and partially because the smoke particles look a littlle strange hovering in mid-air. // perhaps you need two types of smoke item, one anchored to the ground, second which is a mid-air-smoke so it is properly attached to top of the ground smoke. It can also be quite difficult to figure out where a smoke tile actually is if it's not on top of a ground tile due to the perspective of the camera. // no, see the sentence before

There is long time bug/feature  (several times announced as  bug in bug section with zero response) that smoke do not spread on water. Are you going to fix it or keep it as "intended" ?

Edited February 3 by gG-Unknown

[Chris]

1 hour ago, gG-Unknown said:

we want to avoid vertical stacking of smoke too. // that is sad. Majority of players consider it as a bug, worth to announce, but you see it as intended feature. We had similar conversation yesterday.

 partially because stacked smoke would be extremely hard to see through and navigate in general, // I  have asked several times, make smoke less thick. Smoke visual should be an information for player not actual hindrance. partially because when shooting up / down a level you'd get into situations where a bullet passing through a single ground-level tile might end up hitting both the ground floor smoke and the upper level smoke (which would be very confusing for a player), / I dont see any problem here. and partially because the smoke particles look a littlle strange hovering in mid-air. // perhaps you need two types of smoke item, one anchored to the ground, second which is a mid-air-smoke so it is properly attached to top of the ground smoke. It can also be quite difficult to figure out where a smoke tile actually is if it's not on top of a ground tile due to the perspective of the camera. // no, see the sentence before

There is long time bug/feature  (several times announced as  bug in bug section with zero response) that smoke do not spread on water. Are you going to fix it or keep it as "intended" ?

The players don't spend 40+ hours a week developing Xenonauts 2, so they don't understand why particular features are set up in particular ways. That means they don't properly understand the trade-offs involved in many of the things they're asking for - players are great at finding problems, but rarely very good at suggesting solutions. Sometimes I'll find a few minutes to explain why we made a particular decision, but the problem is you always want to debate my posts and suggest much more complex solutions to everything, and then tell me my ideas are bad if I disagree with you.

Look, it's fine to make suggestions (smoke is already going to be less thick in Milestone 7 based on your suggestion), and it's fine to report things that you think are bugs (yes, smoke not spawning on water is a known bug that's on our to-fix list), but none of the points you've raised above are valid counter-arguments for why smoke should be stacked.

If you want less transparent smoke, why would you want to allow it to be stacked? If smoke is transparent enough to be clearly visible against all terrain types, layering two of them on top of each other (let alone three) would make them largely opaque. Hiding them on upper levels like you previously suggested just makes things even worse, because then people wouldn't know they were there when trying to plan shots or pathing with jetpacks.

You might not see a problem with a soldier on a roof shooting through four tiles of smoke and seeing the shot calculation applying the smoke penalty six times, but I can. There'd be plenty of other players coming on here telling us the game was broken if we did implement it.

The fact a smoke tile exists on a higher tile doesn't mean there's necessarily a smoke tile below it to connect to. Smoke despawns randomly, and terrain objects like walls could affect smoke propagation and lead to "floating" smoke spawning in any situation. Fundamentally the problem is that without a drop shadow it's very hard to judge positions of any object that's not on level 0 when you have an isometric grid like this (the bug with "floating" units on top of hidden shipping containers was another good example of this), and you can't have drop shadows on a floating object. It only becomes obvious where the object is relative to the battlefield when you rotate the camera. Plus, the artist who did our particles did his work years ago and isn't available for freelancing any more, so we can't just make more smoke particles unless we go through an entire hiring and onboarding process that would be expensive in terms of both time and money.

So there's a lot of reasons why we don't want smoke stacked. Hopefully that makes the decision make more sense to you.

I read your suggestions and comments, and sometimes there's useful stuff in there which we incorporate into the game. Other times your ideas aren't useful. I don't have time to reply to many posts, and I don't really have time to argue with you. Ultimately you're just going to have to trust that the development team are the best people to make decisions about fixes and features, because we're the people who are most familiar with the game design and the project setup and what is possible within it (even if we don't explain all of it to you).