Car bomb

[brian1996]

Dunno what happend with it, but it should be brought back.

[Ki-Reddy]

Car bomb was used for trolling and not for actual RP. So thats probably why it was removed. Personally I don't want to see a comeback of the car bomb.

[Kessu]

It has potential, lots of it, just like /c loot, but when it's used for completely different reasons and 100% off rp (bombing all VCPD cars for fun) the script has no use and would be pointless to script it.

Yet, I did love some bombing here and there

[Luca Man]

No need for it back. Only used for random killings and trolling around.

[Ramis]

I am not VC:MP Player , but i guess it must be available only for some-requirement-passed players etc. ,but not those newbies and others , famous with rulebreaks and stuff. Like its requirement should be a X number of months played.

[Kessu]

I am not VC:MP Player , but i guess it must be available only for some-requirement-passed players etc. ,but not those newbies and others , famous with rulebreaks and stuff. Like its requirement should be a X number of months played.

We're not going to restrict scripts from players who hasn't been playing for a long time so you can forget about your "divide players to newbies and requlars" mentality.

[Huntsman]

I wouldn't be against returning this feature. Since we're a small community such abuse can be easily regulated and those responsible for it punished.

[Klaus]

Punished? Why?

[Nylez]

Because there were several moments of "trolling" by bombing every police car in the server.

It is obviously fun to do that, as I was involved myself occassionally, but if this script returns, it shouldn't be used like this.

My idea is though to first create the bankrob script before thinking about this, as there is where the car bomb was used most of the times.

As for adding roleplay into it.
This car bomb is actually quite nice to combine with /c dumpcar script, if it appears.

That you get a detonator spawned in your weapon inventory which you can press to make your car be exploded and therefore dumped.
Would add some realism into the whole dumping script.

[Klaus]

Because there were several moments of "trolling" by bombing every police car in the server.

Why is this deemed as "trolling"? So if someone was pissed off at the police and decided to rig their vehicles with bombs that's trolling to you?

[brian1996]

There's a difference between "trolling" as you people like to call it and using it for RP purposes, like for instance using it in a bankrob to stop the robber's escapes or using it to bomb police vehicles as a payback because they did something to you that you didn't like as Klaus has already said.
The bomb was used rarely in 1.9d since less and less people bothered with it. It was primarily used in bankrobs and assassinating people which happend a lot in RP sense.
I absolutely see no trouble with it and i support it.

[~Legend~]

Was a really good concept - a hitman's perfect tool.

With a time limit and cool idea like this...

That you get a detonator spawned in your weapon inventory which you can press to make your car be exploded and therefore dumped.

(A detonator system if players want as an added extra)

... It might be a great script.

Because there were several moments of "trolling" by bombing every police car in the server.

It is obviously fun to do that, as I was involved myself occassionally, but if this script returns, it shouldn't be used like this.

It has potential, lots of it, just like /c loot, but when it's used for completely different reasons and 100% off rp (bombing all VCPD cars for fun)

Yet, I did love some bombing here and there

There's a difference between "trolling" as you people like to call it and using it for RP purposes, like for instance using it in a bankrob to stop the robber's escapes or using it to bomb police vehicles as a payback

Some really good points.
The people who raised concerns were of course pointing out the instances when it was used out of RP, just to annoy players. It can happen a lot and no one needs to encourage it.

However if we can minimise it then it would be cool to have some unique features in the future.

[stormeus]

Right, so apparently I haven't added my own two cents here. Be warned, this goes beyond car bombs alone, and I'm just spitting out whatever comes to mind.

The idea of a car bomb in and of itself isn't bad, but the way it was implemented in 1.9 was awful and lent itself to excessive use. If car bombs are going to be added:

• They need to be expensive and time consuming to manufacture. Individual components need to cost hundreds if not thousands of dollars, there need to be a number of components required, and they must be assembled carefully, else the bomb should explode in the process of manufacturing and kill the producer.
  
  Excessive? Maybe, but there needs to be a substantial risk in producing a car bomb so that criminals are absolutely certain that they want to invest the money and effort into killing someone this methodically. It shouldn't be as simple as going to Phil's Place, dropping $1,000 (which can be made easily) twenty times and running around the VCPD parking lot.
  
  
• They need to be effective. Setting vehicle health to 0 and locking the player in was ghetto and lent itself to evasion too. 0.4 offers the ability to immediately detonate a vehicle. For a premium, a criminal could also create a large enough explosion to possibly trigger other nearby vehicles and hurt or kill other nearby players. Explosions in VC don't have an overly powerful maximum though, so only players with < 33 health nearby would probably end up dying.
  
  
• They need to be (slightly) unreliable. Perhaps there could also be some sort of tracked statistic where players who make more car bombs can make more stable bombs. Still, there should be a baseline of a 1% chance that a bomb fails, which is further randomly determined if the bomb will randomly explode or simply not detonate at all.
  
  
• They need to be detectable and destructible. This should also be expensive to carry out or else police officers would just /bombsniff or something every time they're about to get into a car.
  
  Here's how I imagine it so far: FBI Agents+ and VCPD Senior Officers+ could be considered "trained" in bomb detection and use such a command. Like criminals, they could also have some sort of baseline rate of failure that either completely fails to detect the bomb or rips out some critical component of the car, disabling the engine and requiring a mechanic to fix it.
  
  Anyway, such police officers may end up needing to spend several minutes using the command to scope out the entirety of the vehicle for a bomb (where unstable or poorly made bombs are more easily detectable). This discourages sniffing for bombs 24/7 as it's not 100% guaranteed to succeed after a while, and it needs to be proven beyond pure paranoia that there is a threat for the time spent to be worth it.
  
  
• They need to be traceable. Upon finding a bomb, police can attempt to remove the bomb and disable it. Removing or disabling the bomb also has its own chance of failure (exploding immediately if the bomb is functional), and decreases if officers are better at detecting bombs. A successfully disabled bomb could be dusted for prints and compared to a database of fingerprints. People would only be in the fingerprint database if they've ever been jailed before.
  
  Alternatively (since that would remove some incentive for criminals to surrender), certain public areas like police parking lots, banks, and properties with security systems could have surveillance cameras that, upon recent suspicious activity, provide a description of a suspect based on the skin they used (e.g. "white individual with dirty blonde hair, missing left arm, green shorts and a black shirt") for police to go off of. Or it could just spit out the name of whoever did it. I don't know.
  
  EDIT: Or have purchase logs available for business owners for the last X days (probably 10 days) and allow police to obtain warrants for it.
  

Obviously a bomb wouldn't go off if the car's engine is off either, though using /engine to turn it back on would yield an explosion.

[Kessu]

It seems in your idea Stormeus, there's lots of RNG included. Elaborate on the numbers if you have any in mind.

Also would this "detect bomb skill" be included in your other idea of having different "skill levels"? If so, please do create a topic for the idea as a whole and post reference link(s) to idea(s) that would be supported by such a system

[stormeus]

It seems in your idea Stormeus, there's lots of RNG included. Elaborate on the numbers if you have any in mind.

Aye. Some rough ideas:

Chance of a bomb failure
rawFailureRate = random(0, 800) / 1000
realFailureRate = rawFailureRate * (100 - skill)

skill is some rank between 1 and 100 judging how well a player can construct a bomb. A player with zero experience making bombs will encounter a failure rate of 80%. The reason the failure rate for unskilled players is that unskilled police also have more hurdles to overcome with finding and defusing bombs.

A player with full experience constructing bombs will encounter a failure rate of 0%.

A bomb is predestined to successfully explode or fail upon construction based on whether or not random(0, 100) < (realFailureRate * 100)

Bomb failure result
result = random(0, 1000)

A result between 0 and 499 will cause detonation at some random time between 0 seconds (immediate) and 5 minutes. A result between 500 and 999 will just cause the bomb to fail. This only ever occurs if the bomb is predestined to fail (see above).

Chance that a bomb is never detected
experience = (min(timeSpent, 240) / 240) * skill
rawFailureRate = random(0, 150) / 1000
coefficient = (1 - experience) / 100
realFailureRate = rawFailureRate * coefficient

An officer would need to spend four minutes searching the car for experience to perfectly match skill. From there, an officer with no experience has a 15% chance of never finding the bomb. An officer with full experience will always find the bomb, if there is one, within four minutes.

The first time an officer tries to sniff a car for a bomb, it is already determined if they will find it or not, and how long it will take for them to do so. This is recalculated per officer as they attempt it.

Chance that an officer damages the car
rawFailureRate = random(0, 250) / 1000
coefficient = (100 - skill) / 100
realFailureRate = rawFailureRate * coefficient

The first time an officer tries to sniff a car for a bomb, it's pre-determined if they will break the car doing so. If the car is predestined to break, it will immediately do so when the officer starts sniffing. An officer with no experience has a 25% chance of breaking the car. An officer with full experience will never break the car.

Chance that bomb defusal results in detonation
rawFailureRate = random(0, 750) / 1000
coefficient = (100 - skill) / 100
realFailureRate = rawFailureRate * coefficient

An officer with no experience has a 75% chance of detonating the bomb in the process of defusal. An officer with full experience will never detonate the bomb accidentally.


It does place heavy emphasis on tried and true criminals and police officers, and especially puts pressure on police officers to clear the bomb somehow. An interesting idea tied to this might be allowing bombs to be detonated using cell phones, at the expense that the criminal loses their phone and has to buy a new one, or an unexpected call detonates the bomb.

Another idea to prevent cheap police tactics is that an attempt to move the car by pushing it will also detonate the bomb.

While the emphasis on random chance and skill may put new players at a disadvantage, it does allow for some diversification. Criminals might end up placing more faith in members who they know can reliably construct a bomb, while police officers may train by obtaining materials to construct their own bombs, go out into a field and have officers try to find and defuse them.

(ARPD Bomb Squad, anyone?)

I'd also consider this a script on the scale and complexity of a bank robbery event (which is why everything is so damn expensive) while being able to be started by players. Would be interesting to see how this turns out. It could fuel some great RP with people making legitimate bomb threats with consequences, or it could be terrible. Who knows?

Also would this "detect bomb skill" be included in your other idea of having different "skill levels"? If so, please do create a topic for the idea as a whole and post reference link(s) to idea(s) that would be supported by such a system

Will do later, I'm wiped out from all the math.