Talk:Shocktrain/@comment-31886371-20180716090512/@comment-34929636-20180717003625

Because of the way explosion damage in games is calculated, the damage is applied separately from the blast wave.

In a game, A blast wave is just a graphic. There is a geometry layer running underneath the graphics in most games (not doing so leads to massive unsolvable bugs involving frame-rate dependencies, like the ones with aphids, except worse).

In the geometry layer, an explosion such as the one from hellburner would be defined as a solid sphere (or possibly cylinder), and any object with a hit box that intersects the sphere will take damage. This sphere technically begins and end instantaneously.

The same model could be done with an expanding hollow sphere but unless the explosion takes more than half a second or so, this is too computationally expenseive to consider.