The high-damage leaps

[calembredaine]

When a Fiend or a Spawn bumps into me, I sometimes get a HUGE amount of damage, to the point that it instakilled me most of the time, despite being armored and healthy.

Here's an exemple: I have around 120 HP; a Spawn leaps into my face, and I lose 100!

Note that the cases with Fiends were underwater; has it anything to do with the engine's physics?

[Hyper Sonic]

I believe Fiend leap damage is based on speed. I once modded their trajectory physics and the high speed kills no matter how much health/armor you had.

[calembredaine]

Originally posted by 3DMightyMouse:

I believe Fiend leap damage is based on speed. I once modded their trajectory physics and the high speed kills no matter how much health/armor you had.

Yeah, maybe that's the collision system.

I've seen a lot of fiends being stuck during a leap ; maybe they were building momentum, a bit like in the Source engine, when a player is glitched in the game geometry and can break his legs afterward.

However, I don't remember any fiends killing me in such a way.

[Hyper Sonic]

Actually looking at the Demon_JumpTouch in QuakeC I see that it's not based on speed. Now what I'm thinking is that there's a physics glitch that cause fiends to make multiple consecutive attacks. Such as it thinks it's on the ground again so it makes another jump attack immediately after the first. I could place some logging in the code to determine this.

Each jump attack only does 40-50 damage (random)

[calembredaine]

That may be that glitch; one of the fiends which killed me was "swimming" with me.

I don't remember if it really was underwater, though.

[Phoenix]

Fiends can get stuck in the jump frame in certain circumstances, such as in water. This causes the fiend to keep colliding with the player, making the damage function run repeatedly when it should only have collided once. It's an old bug that never got fixed. :p

[Hyper Sonic]

When I modified the fiend's jump trajectory I found that when they jump very steeply and strike underneath the player the damage is insane, probably due to rapid multiple consequtive jumps when they first hit you.

[calembredaine]

Originally posted by Phoenix:

Fiends can get stuck in the jump frame in certain circumstances, such as in water. This causes the fiend to keep colliding with the player, making the damage function run repeatedly when it should only have collided once. It's an old bug that never got fixed. :p

You're right, but after some tests, it either didn't repeated the damage function or killed me, but with a delay between each attack.

Originally posted by 3DMightyMouse:

When I modified the fiend's jump trajectory I found that when they jump very steeply and strike underneath the player the damage is insane, probably due to rapid multiple consequtive jumps when they first hit you.

Interesting!

Did you try the case where it strikes on top of the player?

[Hyper Sonic]

Not yet. It was a flying mod. Unaltered the demon (fiend) wouldn't jump high enough to reach the player, which is why I altered the trajectory to ensure intercept (assuming you didn't move out of the way.)

[calembredaine]

Originally posted by 3DMightyMouse:

Not yet. It was a flying mod. Unaltered the demon (fiend) wouldn't jump high enough to reach the player, which is why I altered the trajectory to ensure intercept (assuming you didn't move out of the way.)

That's not something you see everyday, but it's still possible if the fiend has a slightly higher ground.