Enhanced UFO Crash Sites (Mod)

This mod has been moved here.

Nice! This is surely being part of my first official play through. Thanks!

Great! I'll give it a try give you my comments!

Good job! Any screenshot?

Great! I'll give it a try give you my comments!

Good job! Any screenshot?

It's basically the same as what you get in Fire in the Hole, but I'll see about getting some good screenshots when I do a proper playthrough.

I like this mod so much! It's adds one of those small details that I cant understand why is no present in the vanilla game!

So, there appears to be a bug which might render this mod entirely unserviceable.

It seems to be the case that the game doesn't update whether or not there is fire on a tile until it becomes visible to the player. That means that if there is fire on the inside of a UFO, then it basically stays there until you get inside the UFO. In turn, this means that basically anywhere the aliens move inside the UFO, they will walk into fire and quickly die.

Sadly, I'm not sure there's anything I can do about this. The power core explosions are, so far as I can tell, entirely hard coded so I can't turn down or turn off the fire and just have smoke instead. It's also, sadly, fairly game-breaking as it thins out UFO-bound aliens if not killing them outright.

My only thought is to give all aliens a huge resistance to incendiary damage and change any weapons which do incendiary damage to something else instead. It would come with the cost of aliens not being affected by any kind of fire, but fire is fairly uncommon in the game anyway so it should have a negligible effect on gameplay.

Anyone any thoughts?

EDIT: Incendiary armour definitely protects against fire, so it's certainly a plausible solution.

That means that if there is fire on the inside of a UFO, then it basically stays there until you get inside the UFO. In turn, this means that basically anywhere the aliens move inside the UFO, they will walk into fire and quickly die.

Are you sure that aliens ai would allow them to burn inside instead of avoiding fire and walking them out?

Yeah. The trouble is that aliens are frequently stood on top of fire when they spawn in, so have to move (and to do so often have to move through other flaming tiles). Even if they don't spawn on it, sometimes they will path through a door which they can't see the other side of and therefore walk into fire that way instead (or at least I'm assuming this is what's happening).

In any case, they're definitely taking damage and dying, because I can hear them!

Sound like a serious enough bug then.

Don't know if Chris and co. would fix it at this point though.

At least some incendiary armor for aliens will fix it in that case, but heavily nerf explosives in the same time - they are incendiary too. And if you change that, then explosives wouldn't do increased damage to structures.

No, sadly it's probably not a high priority fix.

In terms of weapons, yeah it would be something of a nerf. That said, it affects a relatively small number of weapons: only C4/Plasma Charge and Rocket Launchers have incendiary as their damage type (Alien Grenades and Plasma Cannon as well but that's less of an issue as the AI won't use those weapons to deliberately destroy props). Oh, and vehicle weapons too.

I guess, personally, this wouldn't bother me actually as props to me feel on the weak side as it is. But then I also don't tend to use explosive weapons those affected weapons, so there's plenty of bias here too!

(Hmm - explosive props are probably incendiary damage too. That's probably the biggest issue.)

I wouldn't do any drastic changes because of that. Maybe compensate with few extra aliens?

There's a few reasons why I don't think that would be a good solution.

Firstly, it would make landed UFOs more difficult.

Secondly, although it's not a huge issue, I'd need to rebalance the value of alien weapons to avoid giving free money.

Thirdly, if I placed them inside the UFO, there's a good chance they'd just die anyway. In some testing I was just doing, I could simply wait several turns in the worst instances and the aliens would just die, so I don't think having more would help much.

Fourthly, if I placed them outside the UFO, it would detract attention away from the UFO. That wouldn't necessarily be a problem, but since the focus of this mod and Fire in the Hole is on the crash sites, it would kind of defeat the point of the mods.

Another possibility is that I could move the power core explosions on the maps. The major problems are where I've put the explosions inside the UFOs such that there's intense fire in the ship itself. If I moved them all, I could probably minimise the impact. It would be a shame, though, 'cause I like the interior to be damaged too.

But then again...

What if I simply make a prop which looked like smoke and placed it manually on the submaps? You can animate props, so I could possibly even use the existing smoke spectres. They'd be persistent, but that's fine (there's no point there being smoke if it doesn't stick around for you to see it). I couldn't have it affect accuracy (actually I could give it a stopping chance, but it would probably look like the smoke deflected the shot so might look a bit rubbish) but I could have it reduce sight range.

I couldn't achieve fire using this method (at least not fire that does any damage), but since it's fire that's causing the problem in the first place, that's fine.

What about that, then. (I'm struggling to think why I never thought of the idea in the first place!)

That sounds fine actually. Smoke persistency wouldn't bother as it could have been smoking for hours or even days before xenonauts even arrive at the site anyways. Visual only smoke is fine too. Not all smoke needs to be that thick that it reduces accuracy. Sight blocking smoke isn't a good idea as no other smoke does that in the game. So go for it!

Sight reduction wouldn't need to be much - could just be down by 1/4 or something like that. There is a consistency issue with other smoke, though, so maybe I won't bother. In most instances it won't matter anyway.

(I'm still astounded I didn't think of this sooner. It's such an obvious solution!).

If you want the inside of UFOs to be damaged but avoid aliens dying from the fire could you have a different type of explosive prop in those areas?

For the internal explosions you could set a low chance of fire but keep a higher chance of smoke while any external explosions have a higher chance of fire.

If you want to give an excuse you could say the lower oxygen content of the internal atmosphere reduces fire chance or that the UFO has an internal fire fighting system.

If I could do that, it would be perfect. But the difficulty is that the power core explosions are hard coded so I can't alter them.

That said, I'm coming up to half way through redoing the maps with manually placed smoke and fire and I think they're looking pretty good. The only limitation is that there's not really much space (if any!) around the UFO hulls so the external smoke and fire is all quite close to the UFO. It's not a big problem, but I'd have liked to have spread the damage over a wider area!

How are you planning to move the power cores to prevent internal fires? I'm not aware how the system works, but as the ufo submaps don't have that much free space around them, can you move them so far that they won't cause problems inside?

Or are you using powercore explosions at all anymore? It was a nice effect how they destroyed the scenery around the ufo, so I hope you don't need to get rid of them completely.

While I like the effect they have around the outside of the UFO, I think it's better to get rid of them.

With some of the UFOs I've maybe be able to get away with putting some in the corners, as there's quite a big space between the corner and the inside of the UFO (thinking in particular of corvettes, landing ships and battleships). Other UFOs, however, it would be hard to do without some internal fire.

In addition to this, there are also some distinct advantages to removing the system anyway. In particular, I can reset all the power core variables to vanilla values so the mod will be more consistent with vanilla in terms of alien numbers. It will also free up some files (gameconfig, gas_gc, config) which I won't need to mod any more, which will make comparability with other mods easier. Finally, it eliminates the UFO floor bug, although this would be mostly eliminated by moving the explosion centres to the extremes of the submap anyway.

So while I guess I don't *need* to get rid of them, I think overall the mod will be better without it. It's sad, because I liked the effect too. But reduced risk of problems seems a good trade to me.

(EDIT: In particular, no compatibility issues with Oppressive UI, which will save me some work when I come to play the game properly!)

Yeah, the mod does sound a lot more solid now. Oh, so you are using my oppressive ui? Nice!

Oh, so you are using my oppressive ui? Nice!

Not yet. I've been holding off while I do modding things and waiting for final release. I'm planning on it, though, when things have settled down (same for Lore+). I was going to ask whether you'd mind me putting together a package, but it won't be necessary now.

Ok, I'd love to get some feedback from a seasoned fellow modder like yourself.

So, redone crash sites seem to be fine. Nevertheless, I'm feeling the loss of the power core explosions outside the ship. There's not enough damage spread because everything's so tight against the UFO. It's not a problem per se, but it feels little hollow compared with previously.

So, in spite of the problems I listed above, I'm seriously reconsidering adding the explosions back in outside the UFO. Still not entirely sure, though, so I might wait to see what people thing. I'm currently uploading a video of a corvette assault, so you'll be able to get an impression from that.

I've updated my other mod with power-core explosions back in. They're going to need a little tweaking to get the placement right: the ones on the scout ships look a bit odd where they are at the moment, for example. But it seems like its mostly workable. Only the Corvette and Light Scout have given be issues, and the Corvette won't be a problem in vanilla I don't think due to the different layout.

So, I'm going to rebuild the mod with the power core explosions back in. I'm going to leave this a little while as I want to do some testing before putting the work in to build this. Once I know where the placements should be, though, it should be quick enough to put together. I'll see how busy I am with work stuff this week then.

I checked out your youtube video of the corvette breaching and it didn't look that bad, but I'm sure you can polish the power core system into perfection. Does this mod contain vanilla interiors, btw? Also, have you removed the burned ground around the hull?

This mod is vanilla interiors, yes. The video was made using the hull breach mod, though, since I've not actually updated this mod with the changes yet.

There's damage marks around the outside of the ship, but there's nothing like what I previewed a while back in the other thread. I couldn't quite get it to work well: it looked rubbish before you actually found the UFO, and on some of the UFO maps (like the scout) it wouldn't have worked because the hull goes right up to the edges of the submap. I could possibly have done something vaguely effective if I'd have partitioned the ground image into individual tiles, as it would have revealed naturally rather than all in one go hanging over the black. But that would have made the task vastly more time consuming, as I'd be looking at hundreds of spectres which need producing and aligning.

So, in short, I went for the easy option!