Hello,

How hard would it be to change grenades - frag, plasma, dynamite, pulse, incendiary - to detonate when they hit an actor when thrown in free-aim instead of bouncing to the ground, then detonating, like they do in VATS? I always thought this was silly.

If you want them to explode on impact, you can find the projectile for the grenade and change the appropriate setting to "Trigger on Impact"

Right, I can't find where that is in the GECK. I was hoping someone with more knowledge than I have (i.e. greater than 5 minutes) would clue me in.

edit - well, I tried changing the "on hit" from "No dismember/explode" to "Explode only" but nothing changed

"on hit" is controlling how the weapon can maim / kill an enemy. No dismember/explode means that when it kills someone / something, the body won't.. well, dismember or explode. From what G.E.C.K.-O posted, it sounds like there is a flag somewhere that one option is "Trigger on Impact", so I would suggestion looking for that.

In the geck go to special effects -> projectile -> look for grenadefrag (or something like that), and in the edit window there are explosion options. You want to check the "explode on hit" box

Thanks! So close, yet so far away. Using that method, they explode whenever they hit anything - floor, wall, NPC, anything. This removes their ability to be bounced around corners I was looking to make it so that they only detonate when they hit an actor. That way, I actually have to aim and try to get the arc right. If I do this, I just have to get sorta close.

Hmm......... maybe a script to detect when the projectile collides with an actor? I've never scripted anything in the GECK before, wonder how hard it would be...

Well, that's quite hard. If a weapon's projectile has an explosion attached to it, the weapon itself doesn't deal damage or run object effects (unless the projectile's hitscan e.g. the Gauss rifle or Zhu Rong pistol). If you clock someone in the face with a grenade and get a critical hit however, the critical effect will run on them, even though nothing else will. It's possible to use this to do what you want, but it's not easy, and would involve making grenades have a 100% crit chance.

It'd be easier and more practical to reduce the grenade timer to 1 second and give it an activation radius like mines, but quite large (maybe as big as its explosion radius). It would mean grenades you missed with by a large distance didn't explode, but since they wouldn't be hitting anyone anyway, it wouldn't make any difference ...except when someone walked into them later. And people you did hit head on would have the grenade explode just as it hit them if you tweaked the timer to be about as long as it took for the grenade to land at someone's feet after entering the activation radius.

That, sir, is a fantastic idea! Question - say I miss my throw totally, and the grenade falls somewhere. Will it just sit there like a mine, or will it explode after 1 second?

edit - I guess I should ask, SHOULD it just sit there like a mine, or should it explode after 1 second? That way, I'll know if I'm modding em correctly, lol.