Flare-guns in addion to electro-flares

[7Saturn]

I just wondered if it would be possible to create flare-guns. In standard Openxcom you just have the old electro flares. But on a real battlefield you will find, that they often use flare-guns to shed some light on the area ahead. I was thinking to a one-shot-clip, pistol like equipment item, that you use on a desired point of the map and then the bullet is flying above that point for, lets say, 5 rounds, lighting a greater area than the normal electro-flares. So you will have the benefit of a greater area to see but for a limited time, with the usual aiming disadvantage when you let a soldier with low aiming accuracy use it.

[Sectoid_Soldier]

So many good suggestions.

[Gifty]

Say, this is a good idea! Might end up stealing it.

[Falko]

its not possible (at the moment) and yes i tried to do something like that a "grenadelauncher" that shoots flares, a "shotgun" that shoots multiple flares or flares with timelimit with the current code its not doable

[7Saturn]

its not possible (at the moment) and yes i tried to do something like that a "grenadelauncher" that shoots flares, a "shotgun" that shoots multiple flares or flares with timelimit with the current code its not doable

What a pity. :-|

[yrizoud]

Just wanted to report a somewhat successful experimentation with a pistol whose ammunition is an electro-flare :

• I chose an ammo amount of 6 incendiary, power 10 to make it single-tile blaze
  
  • -> The target tiles catch fire, and the fire tile itself causes illumination of neighbor tiles (note: like in vanilla, each tile on fire illuminates 9 tiles. Same as an electro-flare )
  • -> On non-flammable grounds (mountain, desert, steel), fire illuminates during current turn and your next turn.
• Setting the clip's battleType to 10 makes it shine like a normal electro-flare
  
  • -> You can throw it
  • -> The extra clips lying in the transport shine too
• With the correct listOrder, the clip can appear right under the gun in lists. Minor annoyance : it's not indented like a clip
• Auto-equipment correctly fills the gun with the flare ammo.  I've even tested if the gun allows multiple clips : Auto-equip favors the first one to load the weapon, and assigns one extra clip of each type (including the flare ammo)

[Solarius Scorch]

Can you set Sectoids on fire with this?

[yrizoud]

Of course - I even killed a muton using only flares and stubborness.
Unfortunately vanilla UFO doesn't consider blazing aliens as light sources, I'll make some tests to check if OpenXcom mimics this behavior. (If it does, I'll file a feature request : I want human alien torches to lighten my nights)

[Solarius Scorch]

I wonder if it can be extended to carried items. To enable torches, lanterns, lightsabers, this sort of stuff.

[TKO]

You know, I think flare guns are worth consideration, even if they behaved just the same as electro-flares currently - in that they fly in an arc, grenade style, and land on the ground immediately, without any hover-time. 

Just being able to avoid the routine: inventory -> move flare to hand -> exit inventory -> throw -> repeat.  I like the darkness missions, but this flare-throwing procedure it just tedious.  I now try to avoid night missions purely to avoid all the flare-throwing.

Perhaps then there could be a heavy flare-gun, that shoots three or five flares in a (kinda random) spread pattern too?  That would be a neat upgrade.  (Even more so if the aliens had some cockroach-like intelligence where they suddenly find themselves exposed in the middle of a lit field and scamper for the shadows.)