Suggestion: Ignite Barnacles If They Try To Eat Lit Flares

[Admiral_Sakai]

At the moment they will grab lit flares and try to eat them, but spit them out without being harmed like any other physics prop. As the title implies, I think that trying to bite a lit flare should set the barnacle on fire and kill it.

There are not a lot of places in the vanilla game where barnacles and flares can interact, but it is entirely possible in Office Complex and of course map modders can put together two mechanics commonly found in the earlygame however they please.

I think if this worked flares would actually be a fairly valid tactic for killing barnacles because in the early game before the player has accumulated a lot of firepower barnacles are kind of time- and ammo-consuming to kill and if a bunch of barnacles are in a tight grouping a single lit flare could potentially kill more than one with a single use as one barnacle spat it out and it was picked up by another, rinse, repeat.

[TJHL]

You can (Technically) make something in hammer, but yeah an offical feature would be better.

Note: I whipped this up in about 5 minutes, but it technically works.

What I have is a trigger surrounding the barnacle (Named burny). The trigger_multiple is set to ignite burny once a physics object hits it, which if the trigger is placed properly, looks like it did eat the flare. (Although burny does spit the flare out after it ignites.) Visually this looks terrible, (it’s a HL2 command not meant for barnacles in the first place) which is why i’d rather have an offical feature over this. Also, this current model doesn’t actually have any sort of filter preventing other physics objects from triggering the same effect, but that’s just me having no clue what i’m doing.

[Admiral_Sakai]

@TJHL

(Although burny does spit the flare out after it ignites.)

Actually that’s behavior I wanted, since the barnacles presumably do have some kind of pain sensitivity and would not hold onto an object that was actively hurting them (although by the time they made contact it would be too late); and also that allows one flare to be grabbed by multiple barnacles as outlined above. I also don’t think the animation they play looks that bad (the things don’t really move much as is so playing the ‘hurt’ animation over and over again does a decent job of representing thrashing) but I agree it could definitely be improved.