Martial art styles are using Bashing Weapons instead of Unarmed Combat

[papersplease]

Game version: latest

Operating system: Windows 7

Tiles or curses: tiles

Mods active: N/A

Expected behavior

When using martial arts without a weapon, the unarmed combat skill should be used.

Actual behavior

The bashing weapons skill is used instead, the damage output is very low.

Steps to reproduce the behavior

Create a Blackbelt character, choose Muay-Thai as a preffered style (should work with any style, it's just the one I typically use), try to punch some zombies. Watch yourself dealing ridiculously low damage and training Bashing Weapons instead of Unarmed Combat. Upon selecting "No style" everything works as intended.

Looks like the bug was introduced in one of these commits 651fce6 4c1e7f3 063f797 cc3b717

[illi-kun]

Added 'confirmed' tag because I saw some complains from users in some forum.
@BevapDin could you take a look on this?

[MisterFox]

@illi-kun Unable to duplicate. Tested builds 7297 to 7310.

I did not have any existing characters to test with (they died) but I did experience this bug in 7308 on an existing character which led to me testing in the first place.

My control variables:

All stats 8
Unarmed combat increased to 3
Brawling style
Attacking a zombie

On all builds, unarmed damage and experience gain was as expected. I have a feeling that this issue is with characters that existed prior to the introduction of the changes in an unknown build, possibly pre-7297.

@papersplease -- please create a new character on your current build and see if the issue persists. If things are working normally, that confirms my theory that it could be because of changes somewhere not being applied retroactively.

UPDATE: Did some additional testing -- created a character on build 7300 and then updated the same character to 7310. Issue was not present.

[papersplease]

@MisterFox Well I was specificially talking about newly created characters, although I'm getting this with old characters too. Styles are broken for me in every build starting with 7299 and up. Verified it once again just now on 7310 with all default settings and a new character as described in the OP, still the same.

My build was: Infected, Blackbelt, 10-8-10-10, dodging to 12, Muay Thai; the traits were: Animal Discord, Far and Near-Sighted, Heavy Sleeper, Poor Hearing, Lactose Intolerance, Squeamish, Thin-Skinned, Truth Teller, Addiction Resistant, Packmule, Robust Genetics. However, I was able to repro this on entirely different builds. Muay Thai, Taekwondo and Zui Quan all seemed to be broken by this.

[ZhilkinSerg]

Seems to be reproducible - power kicks have very low damage:

[ZhilkinSerg]

I guess it is related to UNARMED_WEAPON flag which is not set in item() by default, so bashing skill is being trained and other things work not as intended.

Cataclysm-DDA/src/melee.cpp

Line 275 in 085b6e2

p.practice( weap.has_flag( "UNARMED_WEAPON" ) ? skill_unarmed : skill_bashing,

We could add UNARMED_WEAPON flag to null item by default or use more proper fix.

---

EDIT:

It seems it already has this flag in its definition, but not in the memory.

Cataclysm-DDA/data/json/items/generic.json

Lines 58 to 67 in 085b6e2

	"type":"GENERIC",
	"id": "null",
	"symbol": "$",
	"color": "red",
	"name": "none",
	"name_plural": "none",
	"description": "seeing this is a bug",
	"price": 0,
	"volume": 0,
	"flags": ["PSEUDO", "UNARMED_WEAPON", "TRADER_AVOID"], "//" : "Fist is internally represented as 'wielding a none as a weapon'"

[MisterFox]

Aha -- I can confirm this is happening to Muay Thai, but not Brawling. I'm going to check what martial arts styles are affected.

[MisterFox]

After testing with all the martial arts styles it seems that this issue is only happening to Muay Thai and Taekwondo as of build 7312. I was not able to reproduce this with Zui Quan

[ZhilkinSerg]

What if we change null itype flags in the code to:

std::set<std::string> item_tags = { "PSEUDO", "UNARMED_WEAPON", "TRADER_AVOID" };

[kevingranade]

Please don't add properties to the null item. An "unarmed_attack" pseudo item would be ok, special casing skill and attack code when the null item is encountered is ok, but treating the null item as a real item is not

[ZhilkinSerg]

Please don't add properties to the null item. An "unarmed_attack" pseudo item would be ok, special casing skill and attack code when the null item is encountered is ok, but treating the null item as a real item is not

null item is kind of fists, but what I don't get is why do we need this null item in data\json. It has some flags and other properties defined there.

Could be related - #23466.

[ZelteHonor]

Unlike what is said above, I can confirm it's happening to more than just Muay Thai and Taekwondo. I am trying to play with the Dragon Kung Fu martial art and I am dealing with the same bug.

[papersplease]

It's definitely not properly fixed. After creating a Blackbelt character with Missed scenario and everything else at default, Muay Thai still does 2-5 damage per attack.

[ZelteHonor]

I can say that in the case of Dragon Kung Fu, it is fixed. Martial art is trained properly and the damage gets higher when it level up, meaning it use the proper skill. Since it still affect Muay Thai and Taekwondo, maybe it's related to the fact that those martial art can be use while still holding something in your hand?

[papersplease]

@ZelteHonor In my experience it only affects particular attacks, not styles. For example, only power kicks from Brawling deal lowered damage, while all special attacks from Muay Thai, Karate, Taekwondo, Judo and probably some others seem to be affected.

[ZelteHonor]

It's true that I haven't reach special attack yet with my character. I'm still at level 3.

Edit: I did reach level 4 and I have to say, I do feel like the grab attack and the counter-attack aren't doing as much damage as they should. So yeah, it's still a thing.

[NotFuji]

I can confirm that kick attacks still aren't doing damage correctly, skill gain works fine, though.

On a side note, Coolthulu is right in that reach attacks with Force Unarmed give unarmed skillgain, and they're also using unarmed attacks rather than the spear's reach attack.