This question was brought up in the Thunderforge/Unrelenting/Javelin thread:

How does a beam (or any weapon in general) that has a reload rate of 0 frames behave?

Both the Winter Tempest and Ion cannon have 0 frames or reload time, and there might be a few others, I'm not sure.

A question like this is better asked on the Dev board. I suggest asking it there.

it reloads as fast as it possibly can be comprehended, I'm guessing. That's probably the reason why more than just a couple beams in the game being fired at a time will cause even powerful madchines to slow down.

It makes the beam fire constantly, I think. As opposed to a thunderhead lance which fires in bursts.

So the Winter Tempest, for example, instead of dealing one set of 6 damage every frame deals the damage spread out over the frame?

Mispeled, on Dec 31 2004, 10:43 PM, said:

So the Winter Tempest, for example, instead of dealing one set of 6 damage every frame deals the damage spread out over the frame?
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I'm pretty sure it still hits once per frame, but as people said before, it's a continuous beam unlike the T-head Lance, Triphammers, Polaran Cannons, etc.

Actually, having any beam reload faster than it's count will cause it to be continuous.

Having the reload at zero will just create another beam every frame; since they sit on top of each other, they appear as just one.

And PigDog4 has a point, I would have expected this question to appear on the Dev Corner, simply because theres more people over there who could better answer this for you.

This post has been edited by Eugene Chin : 01 January 2005 - 03:14 PM

If I was to take a guess, I'd say that there is a good chance that it's the same as 1. So that's what I say.

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Having the reload at zero will just create another beam every frame; since they sit on top of each other, they appear as just one.

So the damage dealt exponentially increases as the beam is used? :huh:

Mispeled, on Jan 1 2005, 11:30 PM, said:

So the damage dealt exponentially increases as the beam is used? :huh:
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Well, eventually the first beam will expire.

Unless, of course, a developer is trying to crash their machine, and puts a reload of 0 and a count of, say, 5000. Pure computer-cide.

Once the first beam expires, the weapon has reached its maximum damage potential, and damage will level off; at any other time in it's operation, its damage-per-second will never exceed what it was at that moment; as every new beam is generated, an older one would be removed. Before the first beam expires, the damage-per-second might resemble linear growth, as the beams are being stacked on one-at-a-time.

This post has been edited by Eugene Chin : 01 January 2005 - 10:39 PM

Hmm, a beam that "charges up". Interesting...
I'd agree with Zacha Pedro here. If the reload really was 0 then it would try to fire an infinate number of times as soon you press fire - instant crash. Since it doesn't do that we can assume it uses a reload of 1 instead, just like projectile weapons.

Eugene Chin, on Jan 1 2005, 08:31 PM, said:

Unless, of course, a developer is trying to crash their machine, and puts a reload of 0 and a count of, say, 5000. Pure computer-cide
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Hee hee hee. I've done that, for testing purposes.

Anyway, I wasn't testing for this specifically, but I believe I found that the reload field is the number of frames taken to reload, not the rate of fire. In other words, a weapon with a reload of 0 will fire every frame; a weapon with a reload of 1 will fire every other frame (firing on one frame, then reloading for one frame).

That's what I thought, but occasionally I'm exceptionally bad at articulating my thoughts. (so I didn't post earlier)

Actually, it used to increase exponentially - that was fixed in 1.0.8. So, that might be what happened prior to 1.0.8, but it must do something else for 1.0.8 in order to avoid it.

orcaloverbri9, on Jan 3 2005, 01:50 AM, said:

Actually, it used to increase exponentially - that was fixed in 1.0.8. So, that might be what happened prior to 1.0.8, but it must do something else for 1.0.8 in order to avoid it.
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Yes, it increases linearly as would be expected. Unfortunately the bug was only fixed for multiple identical beams. Multiple different beams fired together will still do greater damage than they should.

Weepul 884, on Jan 2 2005, 03:27 AM, said:

In other words, a weapon with a reload of 0 will fire every frame; a weapon with a reload of 1 will fire every other frame (firing on one frame, then reloading for one frame).
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Wow, I never knew that.. heh. That's a bit of a big detail, isn't it? :rolleyes:

Anyway, thanks for clarifying this, everyone. I appreciate it.