Shooting a Rifle through a fence?


RazorOH

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I am in Signal Hill at Pleasant Valley. There is a chain link fenced around the Radio Hut. There is a bear outside of the fence - does anyone know if I can shoot the bear through the fence? I don't want to waste a bullet, I only have 2 left.

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I sure hope Hinterland Staff take note of this and make it possible to shoot through chain link fences.

It'd be a bad oversight if bullet/arrow-proof chain link fences remain in The Long Dark.

You should be able to shoot through a chain link fence, but to be realistic there should be a chance of the bullet or arrow being deflected by it. OK, granted the .303 round will likely chug through without any great effect on it's trajectory (unlike a lighter round such as the .22 or 5.56), but the arrow would be knocked right off course if it grazed the fence.

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a chain link fence is going to deflect a 303 bullet if it hits any of the links. It's power would mean it would make a bigger impact, do more damage, but absolutely would not punch through and keep going straight the way it would through a paper target.

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I tried to shoot a bear through a fence yesterday, wasted 5 bullets, nothing. As you can see from the screenshot, it was impossible to miss ;) Sound of shot attracted a bear, but only for a moment. He didn't get angry or anything, he just walked away soon.

I also went very close to the fence and tried to shoot through gap between fence post and net, but I don't think it's intended to be penetrable. B262FD0B52FDA362D647E4D01800E56D960BF26D

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I sure hope Hinterland Staff take note of this and make it possible to shoot through chain link fences.

It'd be a bad oversight if bullet/arrow-proof chain link fences remain in The Long Dark.

You should be able to shoot through a chain link fence, but to be realistic there should be a chance of the bullet or arrow being deflected by it. OK, granted the .303 round will likely chug through without any great effect on it's trajectory (unlike a lighter round such as the .22 or 5.56), but the arrow would be knocked right off course if it grazed the fence.

The chain link should offer extra stability, much like a tripod does on big snipers, not make the bullet deflect, unless ofcourse you're going to shoot at the fence pole, you said it yourself a .303 round will slice clean through any fence, probably even through most fence posts.

And i don't see why arrows should go trough a chainlink fence, since an arrow trajectory is curved most people won't even be able to shoot trough a fence with holes twice the size of a chainlink fence, even at only 5 meters away, let alone hit a target on the other side.

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From what I recall you cannot even shoot through the completely open windows in the farm house in pleasant valley. I understand that to the game it's simply a wall, but from our point of view it's pretty awful. It would be nice if it made a little more sense in that way.

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Guest jeffpeng

Yeah, I remember that window in the small outdoor part of the Maintenance Shack in Broken Railroad and he I thought I was smug to shoot a wolf through it. Of course it didn't work, and that put me off real hard, to be honest.

From a developers perspective ..... I guess those windows are fixable, because it would require relatively little geometry to make that work. Fences .... that's harder. You see .... when you fire a projectile the game calculates the next object in its path by "casting a ray", which is basically drawing a straight line in 3D space, until that line intersects with another object. That object has a geometry, something people might refer to as "hitbox", other might know as a "wireframe", but it is essentially the same thing: an abstract representation of the dimensions of an object.

The geometry of a fence will most likely be a simple flat surface that has height and width, but no depth. As such any point of that fence are equally solid to the before mentioned ray, and as such the trajectory of a bullet will intersect with that fence, and subsequently register you hitting the fence. That you can look through it is due to the fact that the applied texture is partly transparent, meaning it has an alpha channel that the rendering engine then allows you to see things "behind" the texture, just like a transparent layer in programs like Photoshop or Gimp would allow you to see the underlying layer. That such partly transparent surfaces actually cast shadows is due to the fact that shadows are actually generated after the renderer has already determined which parts of a surface are transparent and which are not.

Now there are two ways to fix that .... in theory at least:

The first would mean giving some objects a property which would allow them to pass projectiles through them, like "permable", then updating the collision logic so that objects properly marked as "permable" would not intersect the ray, or even better, would return a collision based on a probabilistic factor. Like, e.g., shooting a bullet through a fence would register a collision in 20% of all cases, an arrow in 50% of all cases, and a flare shell 95% of all cases. This way you could somewhat simulate, albeit roughly, your chance of actually hitting a target through the fence or not.

The other way would actually mean casting the ray against the actually rendered world, not just the geometry of it. This would imply that the game actually checks if the renderer has deemed the exact location of where the ray is intersecting the object it is colliding with as transparent or not. This might sound more intuitive at first, but is much more complicated to achieve (and I would actually put to question if at all possible in Unity), as it basically requires you to get the finished rendering of a frame back from the renderer and calculate against that. This would be rather computationally intense, and also prone to errors as it would rely on the quality of the texture you are calculating against. The same pixel might be 100% transparent with a higher quality texture, but actually partially opaque with a low quality texture.

This doesn't go to tell Hinterland how to implement this or even if they should do it. But maybe a few people are interested how such things actually come to be, and why it isn't as trivial as one might think to fix them.

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On 11/21/2019 at 2:06 PM, odizzido said:

From what I recall you cannot even shoot through the completely open windows in the farm house in pleasant valley. I understand that to the game it's simply a wall, but from our point of view it's pretty awful. It would be nice if it made a little more sense in that way.

I'm was sure I'd shot and killed wolves and bears through the open windows on the PV kitchen porch, until I read this, and now I'm doubting! I've definitely shot a bear through the open window of a little guard house, near Hibernia processing.

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