Gunfire animation & projectiles

[karthink]

The modeling of projectiles at present is like in the original X-COM, which seems to work pretty well. But I somehow can't wrap my head around the fact that it's a slow moving white streak.

The advantages of this seem to be that this tells us how accurate the shot was, and allows us to trace the path and observe any obstacles along the way.

(I'm referring to traditional bullets from traditional arms, of course. I don't know about the alien weapons, etc.)

Have the devs checked out the gunfire in Frozen Synapse? Fast projectiles with trails that clearly show the spread/accuracy, bearing and collisions. In addition to being informative, it looks great and much closer to a realistic depiction. Just throwing the idea out there. If there are other specific reasons to prefer the existing design, I am curious to know.

As a side note, are there any plans to add muzzle flash or (better) firing animations?

[IceVamp]

Welcome to the forums karthink!

I've tinkered a bit with projectiles in the game, and I'm not sure the engine would support what you suggest, based on how projectiles work as a whole. Don't take my word for it though, and I like the suggestion. Fits nicely with my want for beam lasers.

I don't really agree on the muzzle flash though. In daylight, this is not visible at all actually, and it would seem strange to have it just on night missions when there is light "emitting" from your troops. However, it's not like I would mind it being in the game, it's one of those things that if the kickstarter goes really well, might get consideration.

[Buzzles]

While I don't know the ins and outs of the engine, I suspect muzzle flashes won't ever be added during main development (if ever) due to it requiring redrawing of the sprites, it's also quite a lot of work for little gain.

Unlike a 3D game (either being in 3d perspective, or aping 2d) where you can add dynamic light sources to light up groups of individual polygons, a 2d game like this using sprites generally require muzzle flashes to be part of the actual animation frames and therefore, part of the art assets.

Having to re-render the entire art assets to modifiy a couple of frames to add the muzzle flash highlighting for every possible armour and weapon combination doesn't sound like a fun or worthwhile use of time.

[Chris]

Hmm, those FS bullet animations are sexy. We'll look at the firing animations again in beta, probably - it may actually be that no projectile is needed at all for the kinetic projectiles. Just a little puff of dust showing where it hits. But in usability terms, it may mean that it's difficult to work out what happened.

So overall it's probably something we'll just have to test out and see how it works and what looks best. Right now we're concentrating on getting the unfinished stuff done, and then we can think about making the existing stuff look nicer etc.

[Gorlom]

I think traceing the weapons fire adds alot of atmosphere. I would most likely be dissapointed in just a little puff.

How would changes to kinetic projectiles be reflected in energy projectiles?

[Gauddlike]

Frozen synapse projectiles work because you can generally see the whole play area.

If you miss seeing what happened you can rewind and watch it again.

You can probably alter the projectile speed and change the projectile image if you want to try without visible shots.

Use the transparent image from the map folders as a projectile.

[karthink]

@IceVamp: Thank you!

I'm not too keen on muzzle flash myself, I just threw it in to see what people think. I don't think it adds much. And like Buzzles says, it's probably too much work.

Chris, glad to know you'll consider FS style gunfire! Also, in the alpha demo, projectiles sometimes emanate from the tile containing the unit and not from the weapon, which looks very odd. I assume this is because there are only eight possible orientations for the weapon/unit and an effectively infinite number of directions projectiles are required to travel in. Is this something you intend to fix? Is it even possible to fix this?

Finally, I must add that I got completely sucked in by the Kickstarter demo yesterday (Huh? 4 am? How the heck did that happen?).

Despite loving the atmosphere, every attempt to play X-COM has failed because of the interface (oh, the interface); Xenonauts nails everything! This game is already awesome, I can't believe it's going to get so much better.

Edited May 10, 2012 by karthink