Or: Everything you ever wanted to know about bleeding, but were too dead to ask.

So I want to make some custom wounds so I can tweak the way my actor takes damage. I know that wounds are emitters, and they damage the actor when they burst and when they emit regularly. My questions are mainly about exactly how this works.

I see the variables BurstDamage and EmissionDamage. It's pretty obvious what they do, but what I'm not sure of is when and how they apply. My experience with emitters is limited to jetpacks, so I don't know what the burst does in this context. Does it just happen once as the wound is applied, or is it more complex than that? Apparently, you can have float values for EmissionDamage, so does this damage add up invisibly while health is only displayed as an integer? Is there anything else I should know that isn't immediately apparent, like a variable that isn't named clearly?

Burst Damage is the amount of damage the parent takes when the wound is immediately created.

EmissionDamage is the amount of damage taken per emisison. On a standard emitters, where you've got a few thousand particles per minute, that adds up rapidly.

Health is a full variable with at least three decimal points; it's just rounded (down) for display and for ingame calculations.

In b18, I made an actor with 0.5 health. It displayed as 0, but functioned effectively normally.

As of b19, the Health variable rounds down; 0.5 went to 0, and the actor automatically died.

Thanks for the quick reply. One other thing: Is it possible to make a wound disappear after it's done emitting?

EDIT: And then does it still count against GibWoundLimit?

LifeTime.

Maybe.

And yes.

EmissionCountLimit just makes it stop emitting, not stop existing.

1. What Grif said. I'm fairly sure that it disappears entirely.
2. Unfortunately not. I tried it myself previously, and the object still broke.
Of course, can't say if it's been changes in the newer builds, but i doubt it.

All right, thanks again for everyone's help. If there's anywhere else I can go for quick questions like this, I think I'd be better off there rather than adding another thread to the clutter.

Until then, I've encountered yet more problems. I've put wounds with negative EmissionDamage on a dreadnought, and it heals up to full as expected. However, hitting its turret seems to inflict five times as much BurstDamage and it emits for roughly five times longer. Also, the regular time for the wound to stop emitting is longer than I thought. 100 particles at 1200 particles per minute should burn out in five seconds, but I'm not getting that here. Am I really that bad at math, or is there something I've missed?

Calculated, yeah, you've got this right.
But there's usually some kind of unforeseen circumstances that change things, lag and bursts might be throwing it off. It would be simplest to just tweak particles per minute until you get what you're looking for, but if necessary, you can test things to find out how and what is throwing it off.

Ingame seconds and minutes aren't realtime. The sim runs at highly variable rates; it's never perfect and so even something using quite precise numbers can vary wildly in practice.