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[R-26 Lightspeed]

I tried to use the Phasing AFG to get the SGEMP in Testing, but for some reason it never reached me. I checked several times that i was in range, but nothing.

Either it got blocked by one of the doors to the SGEMP lab (which shouldn't happen, since the Phasing AFG pulls items through solid materials),
or it never existed in the first place. (Possibly relevant, i'd killed Zhirov at -4/Zhirov. I was trying to get the SGEMP to get the 2000 "SGEMP aquired" bonus points, which i'm somewhat annoyed to have missed.)


This happened in the manual seed "GreaterGarrisonLooping" (without the quotes).
I used the Phasing AFG in the vertical corridor to the left of the Potential Cannon lab.

Automatic backups of my run are attached; Hopefully they're all what their names say they are.

[Kyzrati]

It exists just fine there, and is still at its original point when you left, but it was at the very edge of the radius and couldn't be pulled. It would come if you took one step closer (or just north). At certain angles at max or close to max range, at least according to what's shown, radius visualizations are not perfectly accurate.

Notice this applies across basically all mechanics and radius visualizations, they are just approximations.

[R-26 Lightspeed]

I know it's an approximation, but in every other case i've seen, the approximation is wrong on the radius, not inside of it. (And i've seen a lot of cases.)
After finding another instance where i was even closer to an item i wanted and the AFG did nothing, i loaded my bugtesting Cogmind install to test the range.

It's not that the radius visualization is inaccurate, it's that the Phasing AFG's range itself is inaccurate/buggy :
https://imgur.com/a/qD1pIsH
The ruler overlay marks some of the unaffected items as being in range "15"!
The only item that seems to have moved correctly when barely in range was the one just out of sight, directly to the left, at range 16 exactly!
No other item that i know of has a range that weird.

[Kyzrati]

Yeah depends on range and angle, this in particular being even more different because it does not use direct range, but is a special effect that calculates all of its target cells through different means.

[R-26 Lightspeed]

Range matters more for this item than it does for most other items, since times where you'd want to use it are usually times where you can't get too close to the items you want.
So if the Phasing AFG's range is calculated differently from every other item in the game, perhaps that should be clarified in some way?

As it is, it's directly misleading. I trusted the range working the same way as other items so much that i even thought the item i wanted didn't exist, and i bet most players would make similar mistakes.
In addition, a player can't even calculate the true range through anything other than trial and error,
which isn't great when you might be pressed for time retrieving some important part from within a Heavy's sensing range, like in [redacted], one of the biggest reasons to keep the Phasing AFG.

[Kyzrati]

I'll just lower the stated range to 14 to avoid possible confusion then, since that's the only range in which it's guaranteed to work

[R-26 Lightspeed]

Thanks, that solves the problem i had perfectly.
Though now that i think about it, there's a chance someone will make a bug report about "the Phasing AFG having a greater range than stated, which caused some items thought out of range to get damaged".

[Kyzrati]

Ha nah, I changed the description so that it still has a possibility of catching stuff close but just "outside" the range