Changed Ion Blaster Damage in Singleplayer?

[Former user]

Hey, i just noticed that on the most recent version of the patch, it takes me 2 shots with the Ion Blaster to kill the normal worker guys. This was not the case in at least the version from the 6th of October, 2016. One shot was enough back then.

I wonder whether this was changed consciously, i tried to find some kind of changelog but did not succeed with that. If it was in fact an intentional change, i wonder whether it would be possible to add a CVAR that enables the use of the original damage values.

Thanks for your great work,

Sphere

[Frank Sapone]

I made it two shots on purpose, everything else in this game requires two shots from an ion blaster even the frogs. The fat workers require two shots. Is a CVAR really necessary for something like this?

[SphereMJ]

The frogs take only one shot, even in the most recent version (at least on Ronin difficulty).

Because of the great improvements that come with it, we are using patch 1.3 for speedruns of Daikatana. The difference between killing those workers in one vs. two shots would be kind of a big deal for speedrunning. We would prefer to stay true to the original game for things like damage values and similar, that's why I'm asking.

[Frank Sapone]

Apparently it easier to kill frogs on easy skill. Are you only concerned about it on easy? Is this a huge deal? I mean, I'd rather not push another update out for something mostly trivial. I think you should be able to see what these guys do if you get an accidental shot in. Did you know they have scripted sequences but most people never see them because they got killed too easily and also because of how fucked up the code was? I think a CVAR just for this purpose is silly. But, the only compromise I can come up with this is moving the health value into aidata.csv (which is what I should have done that was a mistake on my part) and if it bugs you so much you can change it in that file. There's too many CVARs as it is and just having something like sv_old_skinny_worker_health is such a waste for something that only affects a few people.

[SphereMJ]

That's fair enough. I was thinking of some CVAR "sv_original_damage_values" or something like that. Or maybe "sv_force_worker_hit_scripts", hinting at the premise of why you changed it? I only proposed the CVAR assuming that it would be the easiest way for you. Any other way that gives the ability to play with original damage values would be great too.

While only speedruns on easy difficulty have been done so far, there might be runs on other difficulties in the future, so it would matter for all difficulties.

I understand that this might seem very minor, but it would be kinda unfair to compare speedruns that are done with the modified damage values to older runs. It's a small benefit, but it might easily be enough for speedrunners to choose to play on old versions of patch 1.3 that have the original damage values, and I think it would be a shame if we would miss out on using the most recent versions with all its improvements only because of this ;)

Edit: Oh btw, the fat guys take one shot on easy in the original game too.

[Frank Sapone]

You can't compare v1.2 to v1.3 speedruns because of the fucked up lerping that is applied per-frame in single player on v1.2 anyways. The jumping was also fucked up until last year because of post-processing applied to velocity in the game DLL (very bad!). The movement isn't even the same.

[Frank Sapone]

Next build will have updated aidata.bak. Rename this to aidata.vsc. This has the original health values for the workers and sidekicks.