Killing Fire Elementals only sometimes counts towards "others killed?"

sneaksie415 on 1/10/2022 at 09:03

I was playing the lost city, shooting every fire elemental that was in my way with a water arrow, but I noticed sometimes they count towards deaths when usually they don't seem to.

For example, I used the end mission cheat to check if I had any deaths up until the Market area in Lost City. I had zero "others killed" even after extinguishing several fire elementals. However when I shot one near the "theatre" it counted towards a death. I decided to skip that one to attain no deaths, but I forgot about this completely and killed more fire elementals towards the end of the mission. All in all I killed upwards of ten fire elementals in the mission, yet my "others killed" ended up being "4."

I don't understand the logic here. Does anyone happen to know why?

downwinder on 1/10/2022 at 21:12

maybe some of the fire elemental's were once human and an evil fire mage turned them into a fire elemental so if you kill one of them it counts as a kill but if its just a fire elemental that a fire mage summoned by magic and no human it don't count as kill

^^of course this is just a way to express it in lore so it makes sense but ,the correct answer lies in the code=i got no idea

RippedPhreak on 1/10/2022 at 21:36

Are you using broadheads to kill some, and water arrows to kill others? Just spitballing here, I really don't know if this matters.

sneaksie415 on 1/10/2022 at 23:02

Haha, good theory even though I imagine these Fire Elementals originated in the Lost City.

I made sure to kill each one with a single water arrow, so no broadheads or other weapons were used.

Jax64 on 3/10/2022 at 08:34

The reason this occurs is that contact with the water arrow itself as well as the splash that it makes on impact can put out a fire elemental, as they are both sources of the "WaterStim" stimulus. The game manages culpability for weapons and projectiles, but not for the particle effects implemented in the way they are for the water arrow's splash. Thus, if the fire elemental happens to be doused on contact with the water arrow itself, this will count towards "others killed" in the debriefing statistics. On the other hand, if it is the splash effect that destroys the elemental, which is typically how it plays out, it will not count towards the player's statistics.

This is an issue in both Thief and Thief 2 but is trivial to fix with just a few minor modifications to the gamesys. Installing this DML to your main installation directory, if no such file already exists, or to its own mod directory should make extinguishing fire elementals always count towards the debriefing statistics.

Code:

DML1

//T1 and T2: Fix water arrow culpability. File: gamesys.dml

-ObjProp "water" "ParticleType"
+Link "water" "H2OCore" "Corpse"
{
}
-ObjProp "HolyH2OArrow" "ParticleType"
+Link "HolyH2OArrow" "HolyH2OCore" "Corpse"
{
}

Renault on 3/10/2022 at 20:00

Good stuff there. And...I had no idea that you could kill Fire Elementals with Broadheads. I can't imagine even trying it, thinking it would actually work.

downwinder on 3/10/2022 at 21:56

i forgot the name of the mission but it had one of the best things ever "a broad-head arrow shot through a torch ,then it became a fire arrow and was used to open a door by hitting another dry torch with the then fire arrow"

would be interesting if a fire elemental could be used in same way for a tricky shot for maybe a secret as they are patrol-able