Small Ship warheads with multiple bugs and problems

EDGE shared this bug 2 years ago
Reported

I've been wasting three days trying to build a rocket that's supposed to detonate a warhead on impact and figured out that it does not work.

I've tried mounting the Small Ship Warheads on a Small Hydrogen thrusted remote controlled rocket that slams the warhead in to a Large ship heavy armoured wall with two layers of light armour behind it.

I've tried multiple approaches to this but none of them work.

These are;

- Mounting the war head on the front on a rotor with different numbers of armour in front and on the sides from 0-20 blocks. Work ones with 8 blocks indirectly in front of it.

- Mounting it directly on the rocket in multiple locations with different distances to the front and to the sides. This never worked.

- Using a sensor to detect the wall and detonating the warhead on approach at different ranges. This had the most results but became unreliable as there seems to be a variable delay between when the sensor detects the wall and sends the command to the warhead to detonate.

- I also experimented with localized detonation to figure out optimal range for the detonation. and the results don't make any sense.

So far the warhead even though armed and ready to explode, will not detonate on impact ether through direct or indirect contact to the wall even if the hole rocket disintegrates on impact. It wil also not do this if mounted on a separate grid (rotor) in front of the rocket.

If detonated manually ether on approach or stationary it will cause damage. However, when detonating it closer than 4 small ship block it counter intuitively causes less damage and will at very close proximity not cause any damage at all.

If you need a save file for this, I would like to keep these builds for my self as I plan to use it for Pvp. Therefore I need to ether send it though Email or somehow make this post private.

Replies (8)

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Curiosity: Did you try a test of a bomb and warhead with absolutely no "Armor Blocks" in the mix (on the small grid)? There is another bug with armor blocks on small grid causing non-armor blocks to simply 'pop' out of existence when the armor is damaged.

However, I know they did screw with warheads awhile back making them buggy as fuck... so I don't doubt the issue with there as well.

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I've tried everything I could possibly come up with, so I probably did at some point as I did strip it of all unfunctional blocks but I'm still messing with this and will make a point out of testing it with no armor blocks. I'll let you know what I figure out.

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I've concluded that adding a few armour blocks on the small grid mounted in front, together with the Warhead doesn't seem to have anything to do with the problems.

However, even though I've previously done multiple tests on this with a non stripped rocket, adding only 5 "(small ship) light armoured blocks" directly in front of the warhead punched a hole right through the wall. This could indicate that mounting some types of armour blocks does affect it but I cant be certain. Now if you add 4 armoured blocks instead of 5, it does 0 damage.

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Changing my conclusion: Further testing has revealed that adding any type of armour blocks or Blast door edges has a negativ effect with a few random exceptions. It makes the impact sensitiv to impact angles and for the most part renders the rocket useless.

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Would also like to add that detonating one armed Warhead does not detonate other armed Warheads in it's proximity. It just destroys them. This might be a clue to what the problem is as it shows that if the an armed Warhead receives to much damage it get's destroyed instead of blowing up.

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Further testing has showed that the sensor stops working after it passes a distanse of about 385m from the player this makes it useless to use as a way of detonate the warhead.

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Strike that,.. Seems the Sensor is working at further distances but the randomised delay of action activation coupled to the sensor made it seem like it wasn't working at all. Also since the sensor field stops showing after that distance wile in free camera mode it creates the misconception that it's not working anymore.

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After wasting my life testing this out for about a week with multiple builds, I'm pretty sure that there are 5 main problems here.

1. The warhead does not detonate half the time if receiving indirect damage by other blocks on the missile when impacting the wall.

2. At extreme close distances the Warhead does little to no damage at all and given that the Missile often glitches inside the wall before being destroyed the Warhead ends up doing absolutely no damage as it is exploding inside it.

3. The sensor does not react fast enough to be used as a detonation trigger in addition to it being unpredictably laggy. Some times it doesn't detonate warhead at all before it is destroyed by the impact and other times it blows up the warhead before it even reaches the wall. No amount of tweaking has given a reliable result.

4. The explosion radius around the warhead vary. The distance to the target should not change the "Explosion sphere" around the warhead even if it has glitched inside it.

5. There seems to also be a big differences with how light armour, heavy amour and blast door blocks react to colliding with the wall and how the warhead reacts to them being a part of the missile. Not only that but the different blocks within each group have completely different results. You would think that this would be a good thing to figure out a workaround, but it doesn't help and has only made the testing extremely time consuming.

If you think you finally got it figured out, try launching the missile again from a slightly different angle.

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Hello, EDGE!

Sorry to hear you're experiencing this issue. Could you please supply a save file with reliable reproduction steps of the issues you're facing? That would be the best way to look into this for you :)


  • You can access your save files by typing %appdata% into your Windows search bar and you will be redirected to the hidden Roaming folder. After that just follow: \Roaming\SpaceEngineers\Saves. There should be a folder with your SteamID and your saves.
  • Please zip the file and attach it here. If you are having difficulty attaching files you can optionally use Google Drive. When sharing a google drive link please make sure it is set to be downloadable by anyone with the link.

Kind Regards

Laura, QA Department

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I'm going to have to create a complete new save and construct a test site as the save I'm doing this in leaves no PCU to be able to do all the tests you need. If possible you need to also "stress test" this as I have been doing all the tests on wave 400 of the never surrender scenario and that puts a strain on performance much the same way a PVP fight might do. I'll send the save file to the Email you gave me in previous bug reports and link it to this post when I'm done.

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E-mail was sendt 2 days ago to laura.knight@keenswh.com with the title "Small Ship warheads with multiple bugs and problems"

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Hello, EDGE!

Thank you for this. I think we will need to split this up a bit as we can only have one issue per thread for linking on the back office. Am I right in saying this is two issues? One is the Warhead and one is the the Missiles with the wall and waypoint? Just to double-check. If so, we can keep this thread for the Warheads. If this is just the one issue with different approaches of explaining it, we can keep it as the one :)

Kind Regards

Laura, QA Department

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If you read through the list of issues it all has to do with the Warhead in relation to other blocks,.. The Missile in it self is not the problem. Listing them again with the word "Warhead" highlighted:

1. The warhead does not detonate half the time if receiving indirect damage by other blocks on the missile when impacting the wall.

2. At extreme close distances the Warhead does little to no damage at all and given that the Missile often glitches inside the wall before being destroyed the Warhead ends up doing absolutely no damage as it is exploding inside it.

3. The sensor does not react fast enough to be used as a detonation trigger in addition to it being unpredictably laggy. Some times it doesn't detonate warhead at all before it is destroyed by the impact and other times it blows up the warhead before it even reaches the wall. No amount of tweaking has given a reliable result.

4. The explosion radius around the warhead vary. The distance to the target should not change the "Explosion sphere" around the warhead even if it has glitched inside it.

5. There seems to also be a big differences with how light armour, heavy amour and blast door blocks react to colliding with the wall and how the warhead reacts to them being a part of the missile. Not only that but the different blocks within each group have completely different results. You would think that this would be a good thing to figure out a workaround, but it doesn't help and has only made the testing extremely time consuming.

So this thread has all to with warheads and practical problems when trying to use them in order to create a missile. I therefor don't see why it should get divided up as using them in order to create a missile should be one of a few primary functions. If they can't test and se the problems in relation to one and other, it's just not going to get fix.

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Hello, EDGE!

I have been looking into this and understand the scenario created for the Warhead distance. I can see that a much smaller blast area is created when the Warhead is further away. I have reported this internally. I am slightly confused on the second part relating to the ships and wonder if there is another example you could provide as the outcomes seem quite random or if you could clarify some more reliable steps? If so, I can add the extra information to the other issue.

Kind Regards

Laura, QA Department

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I'm sorry but there is no better way to show this, and it seems you're having at bit of difficulty understanding. Firstly the warhead does naturally have a smaller explosion area when it's further away, but it also has a smaller explosion area when getting to close and that's the problem here.

Also If you're referring to my 2. point about the missile glitching inside the wall there is no other way to make that happen other than to keep firing missile towards it. If you pay close attention to the impact by switching to free camera mode an look at the impact from a close distance you will from time to time see the missile go in to the wall and after being partly destroyed, some of the parts that survived the impact suddenly reappears as they get pushed back out from the wall. But that's not the problem. The problem is that when this happens the warhead is even closer to the target as it is in fact inside it, but it still does no damage. It still has to do with warheads not doing damage at close distances. The fact that the results are random is also proof of the bugs and a result of the listed problems working together. So I'm sorry to say that there is no relabel way of making the missile reliable as that's exactly what I have been trying to achieve this hole time.

However If you want a reliable way to see that the warhead does no damage at close distances, I've already given you the recreation steps necessary to do so by mail and there is no easier way.

This issue is a bit complex and will need both time and probably multiple people looking in to it and I can't do anything about that, but if you think that this will be one of those times where you can isolate one problem at a time it's not going to be possible.

After hitting a ridicules amount of game breaking bugs, I'm sad to say that my time in Space Engineers is over, so I wish you guys good luck with the game development and hope you will be able to at least get some of these bugs fixed at some later date. I'm therefore not going to be able to assist you further. Good luck

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I've been doing some tests with both large and small warheads and i've been noticing a similar issue to your #2 point - at close ranges warheads do very little damage against blocks, but it increases as you space the target and warhead apart, until it drops of suddenly (presumably the edge of maximum blast radius). Heavy armor targets create the most obvious difference, but i've tested it with different armor blocks and combinations.

At first i thought it might be a similar effect to air bursting, but the depth of damage also increased, which shouldn't happen realistically.

It seems almost as if individual rays from the explosion were making more damage the further they travel - perhaps a distance calculation working backwards?

If there's an interest i might redo the tests and post screenshots/savefile.

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Not sure how long has this bug been marked as "Reported – Awaiting fix", but I hope the bug is being worked on. Recently I've spent hours trying to make a rocket but it all comes down to this bug making it impossible.

I've included a very basic and easy to use rocket to this comment - I avoided using any armor blocks etc. as they've been reported to remove nearby blocks when destroyed. The warhead is armed, you can try slamming the rocket full-speed at voxels or other grids several times, the warhead will only explode if you're lucky enough. Doesn't matter if you use the remote control or just CTRL+V the rocket while flying full speed, you can use whatever method you find more convenient.

One thing I found noteworthy is that pasting only an armed warhead with nothing attached to it does seem to result in it working properly.

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