It turns out there are a bunch of reasons the hit location won't show. While not applicable here, no location will be listed if resistances prevented all damage, or the damage couldn't be applied for any of a number of reasons (usually special weapons/mechanics), or the robot was destroyed by an earlier weapon in the same volley. Of course there's also the lack of a listing during part destruction because that's in the log (the intention there was to keep duplicate data out of the calculation log, since it's rather small and scrolls fast).
It also won't show if the shot was
accurate but didn't connect; in other words the target is behind something else like a robot, wall, or machine so the projectile didn't actually reach it. Technically the "hit" is recorded immediately on firing rather than on projectile impact, which was a compromise to ensure complete object data was available for the log since any number events could destroy reference objects once the projectile is in motion. (I.e., internally it was less complicated to do this way, and it was done back when the game was much simpler
)
None of the above conditions really apply to what we're looking at here, so I poked around for over an hour and found the source
. Turns out it
is a side effect of the dislocated hit + location messaging system. This is because even when you succeed at the accuracy check (and therefore get the "HIT" text), when firing at a small target (e.g. Swarmers, Watchers), the projectile still might pass through their location without hitting them because they have such a small profile (in Cogmind robots actually take up an area of 2D space within their cell based on their profile). You can test this by lining up along an axis and firing at a tiny/small robot, where you can clearly see if/when the projectile appears to shoot straight
through it--consider this passing above/below the robot.
I'll take that into consideration when revamping the calc log and see if those can be counted as misses as well.
