Removes guaranteed perfect condition flamethrower drops from burner zombies.

[DoctorBoomstick]

Summary

None

Purpose of change

Burner zombies were continually dropping perfect condition flamethrowers 100% of the time, which didn’t make sense on two points. Firstly, their very description and mechanics depicts them dripping trails of napalm with every passing turn. Given that I assume that this napalm comes from the flamethrower’s tank, rather than a magical octopus-like napalm reserve within the burner itself, this would point towards a damaged flamethrower because, I don’t think flamethrowers are meant to drip their contents. Secondly, whenever burner zombies explode, I believe the assumption’s that the burner’s flamethrower tank catches fire and blows up. This would be rather strange there for, if the flamethrower itself, i.e., the thing that’s meant to go boom, stays perfectly whole and usable.

Describe the solution

I have firstly added the rubber material to the flamethrower. This is meant to simulate portions of the weapon that aren’t exclusively made from steel, such as the hose, and would also lend themselves to burning in some fashion so as to side step the perfect condition exploded flamethrower issue. Secondly, I’ve tweaked the burner’s death drops to spawn damaged flamethrowers, rather than perfect condition ones. Lastly and unrelatedly, I’ve added a flamethrower strap as an integral mod, as flamers generally have a backpack style set of straps and rigging for an operator to carry it around by.

Describe alternatives you've considered

Foregoing the addition of rubber in the flamethrower’s materials, and simply having them continually spawn damaged. I figured that rubber does form a component of real world flamers, cause the hose most certainly is not made out of steel, and as such it’d be worth simulating that within the game as well.

Testing

I spawned in, surrounded myself with burner zombies, proceeded to kill all of the zombies in question, and contented myself with inspecting to see that each and every flamethrower was indeed damaged in some capacity.

Additional context

[ANickelN]

I'm still getting back into the swing of things, but considering the hose is a smaller part of the whole system would this benefit in any way by adding partial composition? ex: "material": [ { "type": "steel", "portion": 4 }, { "type": "rubber", "portion": 1 } ]

[DoctorBoomstick]

@ANickelN, honestly, I didn’t even know you could factor in partial composition, so that’s cool to learn. Secondly, in my testing it was already taking quite a while for the flamethrowers to register any notable burn damage, I forget the exact time right now but it was something in the ballpark of at least 10-20 turns before anything really started to happen. That being said, I guess adding partial rubber composition couldn’t hurt.

[DoctorBoomstick]

So, after some further testing with only partial rubber content in the flamethrower, it looks like the item now takes a matter of minutes for it to burn up/ show any fire damage. I’m guessing that this is down to the rubber content being very minimal. Personally, I think that this would nullify the point behind which rubber was included into the material list to start off with, but considering that it already plays somewhat of a smaller role in contributing to damaging the weapon, as including damage chance in the burner’s drop list is the main heavy lifter, I’m on the fence weather this would make any appreciable gameplay change.

[DoctorBoomstick]

@Fris0uman Re, min and maximum charges. In testing the game worked fine without the addition of that particular set of parameters, and I’ve come across several other enemy drops which use this style of item drop code without issue. Now, I think that it’d be ideal if that particular field was also defined to add a bit more randomness, but I’ve not been able to worm it in without the game throwing a bad syntax error, and I can’t seem to find any other pieces of code which define both a damage and charge field at the same time to copy off of. This is likely just due to me being a code illiterate zombie when it comes to these things, so if somebody could point me in the right direction with regards to this matter, I’d throw it on in ASAP. Also, thanks for cleaning up the last bit of my adjusted description. Given that flamethrowers aren’t supposed to be in US army inventory, I wanted there to be some reason for why, in the name of the Blob, are there flamer units in use by soldier Zs. TBH, I was concerned that I was stepping on somebody’s toes by adjusting the description in that way, and I think it makes more sense after you tweaked the end.

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[Night-Pryanik]

@DoctorBoomstick could you please resolve conflicts?

[github-actions[bot]]

Spell checker encountered unrecognized words in the in-game text added in this pull request. See below for details.

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• flamethrower harnesss

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[kevingranade]

Obsoleted by #62833