Combat critical failures turning critters into containers

[Sduibek]

Anyone else seen this? I thought it was only happening with hirables (Ian, Tycho, et al) but now I've seen it with enemies as well.

For example: BadGuy1 critical fails and his gun explodes. Now BadGuy1 is treated like a container (corpse) in that hovering over him gives the hand (loot) icon/command by default, and YOU CAN LOOT HIM. This is while the critter is still fully alive.

I believe if you let a combat round pass, they go back to normal. Although i have had a few times when this happened to Ian and the only thing I could do was load a previous save. So that sucked.

Any ideas on what the hell causes this bug would be appreciated.

Pretty easy to test with a Jinxed character.

 

[G-Flex]

I've seen issues, in Fallout 2 at least, where a character would be treated as "knocked down" in the sense that you could loot them, but were not actually knocked down. I noticed this with NPCs, anyway, not sure about enemies. Usually it would reset at the beginning of the next fight, accompanied by an animation (I believe the normal getting-up animation).

Basically, the game would get confused about whether or not a dude is knocked over at the time. This causes them to function as containers as if knocked down, so perhaps it's related to what you're seeing?

 

[Darek]

Just a thought, but is it possible that having the gun blow up in his face also knocked him out? If so it's not a bug (or at least I've always thought becoming a container while knocked out was intended).

In Fallout 2 you can check if a critter is knocked out with this code:

if ((critter_state(self_obj) bwand 2) == 2) then begin
        //return random float
end

Not sure if it works in Fallout 1, but you can always try.

 

[Sduibek]

Good ideas, thank you!

That actually does sound quite plausible. I already know that being knocked down as the PC is all screwy -- you can see the message "___ and knocks you off your feet" but you stay standing and lose no AP, so I think the game just detects and administers stun/KO/fall-down badly.