In WWII, there was a lot of research going into napalm. Before bombing the huge city in Japan (I forget which one, darn my American history), they decided on a style which did this:

Bomb lands
Sits for 3 seconds
Explodes
Releases 3 small bombs, throwing them in large radius
Those 3 go off
Releasing hundreds of tiny blobs of fire.

How about this napalm remake? I feel that napalm should have some explosive damage, since we all know how angering it is to hit a tank with one, and have all the fire go downhill, not hurting them much.

As a weapon of it's own, it's workable; and sounds familliar.
There are already several dozen weapons created that use napalm
as a component.

Napalm is only liquid fire. It can flow fast or slow. Burn hot or mild.
Boil away under water or fizzle out.. All depends on the coder.
To make it damage more effectvely take's a little pre-thought. Craters,
river-beds, volcano-covering..
How you use it, depends on your strategy. Napalm itself does
increased damage the deeper it pools around the target.
Little bit of recoloring, and it make's pretty good ice and plasma
weapons too.

There is a flaw with the Napalm that I have witnessed, investigated and reported.

The problem is this:
On a flat map, napalm runs due south. If it encounters a series of small steps in the elevation, it will climb up the steps and continue southward. It is also, no more noticably influenced by a force 5 wind blowing due north than it is one blowing due south. I haven't specifically checked the distance traveled at various gravity settings, but have reason to suspect that the gravity setting does't change the flow.

My post was a tounge in cheek request for anti-naplam (water) that was in reference to one from Pam about her new fountain model. It's intention was to effect some changes in the behaviour of the napalm.

The development team should be able to give you some details on this issue and what is being done to resolve it. Until then, napalm that does what you want it to do is easy ... as long as you want it to run south on semi-flat ground.

Side Note: Don't move to the south of a suspected naplam strike.

Before adopting General Sherman's tactic as the defacto standard, consider the plight of Detroit and the future of Atlanta.

To be more realistic, napalm should spread in a radial fashion on flat ground and be more properly influenced by gravity, the wind and small changes in terrain. Ideally, it would also be initially influenced by it's momentium. In other words, a napalm misslile fired at 15 degrees should intitially spread much further in the direction of travel than one fired at 80.

For those that might wish to duplicate my experiments:
Let me know if you need specifics.

I must go destroy some bots now. Krieg ohne Unterstützung

Sincerely,

Generalfeldmarschall Erwin J. E. Rommel

Napalm in the game is not effected by gravity-levels.

The direction napalm will flow depends on a few things; Wind, slope, and <napalmhight>.


Basically, Napalmhight is the factor allowing your flames to climb cliffs.
In Merge and a few others, I set it to the lowest value, and it now pools
and flows more accurately; only climbing a hill slightly if it's mimicing a
splashing motion.
As for always flowing south on a flat map, that is probably very easy to
cure. I'll make sure its noted in the dev threads later. As for having it
keep momentum, like we can now do with rollers (<maintainvelocity>), it
may be possible.. but since it is liquid, it will still follow land contours more.

Hi Trax:

I played a napalm test round on the Merge Mod yesterday and fired a napalm missile due north onto a flat section of the map. The napalm traveled south until it reached a high cliff. Then it ran up the cliff to the flat spot on top (where I was sitting) and then proceeded south again.

My latest test map is basically flat except that it has a uniform 6 degree rise from the north border to the south border. Not steps but a flat surface inclined at 6 degrees. The naplam still runs basically due south but in repeated tests, a few instances were noted were the napalm would be traveling southward and then send out a short segment due east and due west as well.

According to a post from Robert Hand (WHERE IS ROB?) the <napalmheight> tag is used to control the displayed height of the flames, this is also the way it is documented in the Wikki. If Rob and the Wikki are correct, then this tag does not influence the travel of the napalm. However, since there seems to be some confusion, hopefully this can be resolved easier than the coding.

As before, I urge those with the proper knowledge and access to inspect and update the documentation of the existing features as soon as possible. Each iteration of changes, makes catching up harder and thus even less likely that it will be accomplished.

Furthermore, encouraging people to spend a multitude of hours creating landscapes (map contest) while knowing that the existing docs are wrong or that the physics of the game don't match real world conditions seems detrimental to the continued growth of the game.

For now my advise to the players is:

If you find an opponent sitting to the south of you on relatively flat ground and they are close, lob a napalm missile just to the north of them but never fire a short range napalm missile due north.

Rommel

Where did you find this?
I've done several searches of the forums using a variety of terms and can't pull up the post from Gavin that you quoted.

Knowing that documentation would be never be intentionally hidden from those of us that have an interest in bettering the game it must surely be a defect in the search engine.

If it's not too much trouble, please provide a link to that post so that I read the entire thread.

Thanks,

Rommel

http://www.scorched3d.co.uk/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=5131
scorched3d.co.uk Forum Index -> developer private -> Scorched3D V42 Ideas
Except it's the Developers area.. so it won't help you much.

We were discussing the idea to add Deform capacity to napalm, and
Gavin explained the method it uses.
While the wiki isn't perfect, we can still answer a question manually..
I've learned more of modding by Exploring and Experimenting than the
wiki holds.

Although, it does bring up a thought. Making some parts of the
Developers discussions as Read-only to the commons.
Some parts of the developers private involve thing's that the public
may wish to view, but other sections contain sensitive info.
Except it'd be a nightmare trying to pick thru and sort each post
for sensitive info..

Hi Thrax:

Right you were, the link was of no help at all but thanks for the effort. Sensitive info in the developers forum of an open source game, eh? Fasinating!

Hmmmm, not wishing to be offensive, and knowing that you don't set the policies, all I'll say is that I find that excuse to be totally without merit and unacceptable. Everyone should have read access. However, this secret treasure trove of coding information, does help to explain the extended delay in proof reading and completing the public documentation.

Being firm in my belief that enlightenment is always a good thing regardless of what is revealed, I remain hopeful that the monster you have shown hiding in the closet is susceptable to my poison ink.

DIE MONSTER DIE!

Sincerely,

Rommel

Ink isn't what i'm worried about..

It's obvious that the writer of the hacked exe's is a current member of
the forums, reading everything we do to try to protect our community.

When admins/developers are discussing the problem and solutions, the
last thing we'd like is to have this or any other prospective idiots getting
in on the process and making the next hack sooner..

Of course, we'd love to have more help going over new ideas and how
to shape them, but not every line of code is relevant to the common
player, only the theories and rammifications of the changes we do.

If I myself had been able to see thier progress sooner, Maybe the
server-windows wouldn't have had thier Control-interface so cruelly
chopped off...

Hi Again:

Back to Napalm :

I've been kicking that idea around as well.
It seems to me that if the texture files actually had an effect on the height map instead of just being eye candy, then the scorched bit map currently used on the landscapes could easily cause a slight depression.

The texturing technique I was thinking about should allow the dark areas of texture files to depress the height map while allowing the light areas to be built up. This would allow bumpy looking texture files to actually produce a bumpy surface, instead of a bumpy looking surface.

A few control tags would be a nice complement to this feature so that the effect on all of the texture filles could be adjusted. This would allow adujustments to be made to the textures on a map by map basis. Thus the same height map could use the same texture files, yet produce several different actual playing surfaces.

Example:

<effectradius>5</effectradius>
<napalmtexture>flames</napalmtexture>
<deformtexture>data/textures/landscape/defaultscorched.bmp</deformtexture>
<deform>
<highlimits>
<min>0</min><ave>0</ave><max>0</max>
</highlimits>
<avelimits>
<min>0</min><ave>0</ave><max>0</max>
</avelimits>
<lowlimits>
<min>0</min><ave>1</ave><max>2</max>
</lowlimits>
</deform>
<napalmsound>explosions/napalm.wav</napalmsound>

A new game is about to start ... got to run,

Rommel

About the server interface, yeah, I wish I'd have had a heads up too.

I'm getting slaughtered ... gotta go.

Begging your pardon for disagreeing but as I've tried to point out in the past, there is nothing you can do in the code of an open source project that you can hide from those wishing to peruse and abuse the code. Thus the only sound reason for concealing proposed changes to the code is to prevent dissent. The kind of dissent you and I would have surely raised had we known about the intent to kill the server interface.


Sometime soon I hope to propose a method of allowing server side options that can be implemented to afford various levels of protection from assisted shooting of all types. The protection scheme itself must be open to inspection but by allowing the servers to set the parameters used, the code alone would not reveal enough of the protection information to hack the server. Not feeling that any proposals should be hidden, or that anyone could gain a dishonest advantage by having the information, I intend to post the proposal publicly.

Hog ya later,

Rommel