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Max's warehouse of the Unusual and the Strange


Max_Caine

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I've been working on equipment and weapon mods which provide interesting and novel effects. They aren't things that you'd spam, but they provide tools that create specialists who can help the line solider (especially when you get to the shrike and have a larger squad to play with). The first of these tools is the Firewall

firewallscreeny_zps3962aa70.jpg

Weapon Details

A suppression-centric weapon, the Firewall is good at locking down the enemy but not very good at much else. It has a range of 20 tiles, does 20 pts of damage with 0 mitigation, fires a burst shot of 4 shots, with a suppression value of 80 and a suppression width of 5 tiles (so 80 suppression on the target tile and up to 2.5 tiles, then 40 suppression outside of that).

You need to research lasers before you can research the Firewall (it takes a very short time to research the weapon), and it costs 5 units of alien alloys and $50,000 to manufacture. Alas, given the way the game works, if you've already researched lasers you can't research the Firewall and will need to edit the researches.xml file so you can research it after your current subject.

Mod Details

This is a almost-full mod, which includes research, a xenopedia entry, manufacturing, a gui and xenopedia image (made by Ferry Susanto, one of my regular artists), tooltip entries and a custom sound (by me!). The sprite chosen was the scatter laser sprite.

Advice

The mod doesn't seem to work with the modding system Giovanni has created on the installer, so the only way to use it is to overwrite the current files. I haven't included backup files (as I don't know how you have modified your own game files), so please backup your files if you intend to try this mod.

Download the zip here

Any feedback would be most welcome.

EDIT: Wups! Forgot to add the custom sound. All fixed!

Edited by Max_Caine
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Hey Chris, you out there?

Can this be added to the game please? I think that would be excellent.

(With the permission of Max, of course. It's his beautiful, extremely uncomfortable, baby, after all.)

It would give us more options in load out, and a dedicated suppressing weapon would be pretty neat to have. I mean, we wouldn't even need to have a plasma/MAG variant (for one it wouldn't make any sense, considering what it is), just this one lovely device from laser tech. It would keep it's usefulness throughout the rest of the game, I'd expect, because a suppress is a suppress, after all.

To Max, excellent work, sounds incredible. I cannot convey how much I like this idea. :D

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Hey Max, how were you thinking this tool would be used primarily?

My thoughts were that it would be most effective for suppressing targets (needed for interrogation, research, etc) without killing them, so a guy with a stun rod could rush up and knock them out.

Also, does it always suppress the target? What does an suppression value of 80 mean in gameplay terms?

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The design of the weapon is multifunctional, as suppression inflicts certian general staus effects. Providing suppression works correctly for AP deductions, it is, as you say, very good for locking down an alien in place so a shock jock can come up close and kiss it good night. However, it's also very good for stripping reaction shots away from recently discovered aliens. Suppression damage isn't affected by terrain, so it makes more complex play possible as your scouts and spotters can either call in fire from the fireman, or pull out a Firewall and neutralise a target's ability to shoot back before your other troopers get their collective asses blown off.

As for suppression effectiveness, it's more difficult to tell post-Steam, as this was orignally written for Hotfix 3 when aliens were a lot more resistant to suppression, but it was good at suppressing anything up to soldier. Anything up to solider-class had a bravery between 65-80 so taking into account armour even LMGs/Scatter lasers would have trouble suppressing the higher classes before they killed them! The Firewall does lots of raw suppression damage so it could suppress noncoms with a burst, guards (most of the time) with a burst, soliders with 2 bursts. (I think I should have made it more expensive to shoot, tbh. I'll give it some tweaks). It also affects Androns and Drones, which I believe it shouldn't have. I remember Chris saying robots wouldn't be affected by suppression.

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  • 1 month later...

So, I finally got around to doing something I had the art assets to do since last week - an upgrade for the smoke grenade.

glitterglass_zps7cfd021d.jpg

Weapon Details

The Glitterglass grenade is an upgrade of the smoke grenade. It has 100% coverage on detonation, a 70% reduction for shots targeted through it and reduces los by -6. It also only has a 10% per-tile dispersion chance every turn. However, Glitterglass is toxic so anything entering the cloud suffers a 15HP chemical hit, it costs $5000 and a unit of alien alloys per grenade manufactured. It's intended as an outdoors style of weapon, something that provides a useful covering cloud when advancing across open terrain without phasing out the smoke grenade.

Mod Details

The mod is an almost total conversion with research, manufacturing, new art assets (grenade art assets by Ferry Susanto, gas art asset by me) and uses the standard sound assets. I'm not certain about the new smoke asset I made - I went through 6 different versions before I settled on one that looked reasonable but I notice it's hard to tell which square it's on - I may have to make further adjustments. This has been tested with v18 and v19.4 and seems to work with both. To prevent savegame breaking and ensure backwards compatability, the glitterglass grenade research predicate is the datacore of a scout, corvette, landingcraft or cruiser. There also seems to be a problem with research, in that the game will bring up the Xenopedia, but it wont open the appropriate article (which is under "Xenonaut Weaponry") - I don't know why.

Download here

Feedback is always welcome.

Other

For anyone wondering about the Firewall, I am having difficulty making it work in v19.x. I shall endevour to make it work.

Edited by Max_Caine
changed "alenium" for "alien alloys"
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This one isn't quite the oddity the last one was, but I gave it my best. I was inspired by games like S.T.A.L.K.E.R. where one has a tendancy to hang on to the good stuff and never use it because you don't know where the money for more good stuff is going to come from (or that there might ever be good stuff again). 5 grand might not sound earth shattering, but that's 5 grand you aren't going to see again any time soon if you throw a grenade, and manufacturing glitterglass grenades can quickly become a costly business, so I'm hoping the play style will alternate between smoke grenades which are free, and glitterglass which is awesome but hella expensive in comparison.

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  • 1 month later...

I've put off this particular new weapon for almost four months - ever since I got the art back in v18.5 and was testing it then. There was a lot of fiddling to get it right, and I couldn't be arsed with all the fiddling. However, over the weekend I was able to get done a new weapon for my warehouse. This being...

toxigun_zps886c3a2c.jpg

I worked out quite a while ago how sort-of to do minefields. You see, a gas as defined in gas_gc can have a disspation rate of zero. That is, it will never dissapate. And while the file is called "gas_gc", you may as well call it "semi-permanent land-based effect_gc", because you can point a "gas" at any animated or non-animated sprite with the appropriate spectre. This is actually quite exciting. With the proper extensions, you could do cool shit like make a decoy hologram, because the underlying functionality is present in gas_gc.

Anyway, I said a sort-of minefield. It's sort-of, because this is a self-resetting minefield. Each time someone steps into a non-dissapating gas tile, they will suffer damage, but it won't vanish on being used. Furthermore, unlike "proper" mines, there isn't a set-up time. So I looked for a reasonable rationale for a self-resetting minefield. And I hit on it! Chemical weapons!

The toxigun is your stereotypical "goo gun", inspired by Unreal Tornament and Awesomenauts' goo guns. It fires a blob that does 40 chemical damage and leaves behind a patch of death - each gas tile causes 80 chemical damage! I'm currently testing it out verses the New and Improved aliens of v19, to see if it will need tweaking, but I thought I'd release it now.

Here's some screenies of before:

toxibattle1_zps497ec249.jpg

And after

toxibattle2_zps3799337d.jpg

The art was made by Ferry Susanto. I made the firing sound in BFXR, but I couldn't work out how to make a satisfying splat noise, so I have used one taken from freesound, by Audionautics.

This particular research topic is live capture locked. You have to capture a live Caesan - any will do - in order to unlock the project.

In addition to the Toxigun, I also updated the Firewall and the Glitterglass grenade to v19 standards, and packaged them all in one. This may cause problems for you, dear reader. The Firewall is research-topic locked. So if you've gotten past lasers, you won't get the Firewall, and it's possible that it might play hob with your saves, so BACK THINGS UP BEFORE APPLYING THE MOD.

Here's the mod, in all its glory

Edited by Max_Caine
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bonus points for having the Aliens counter on there.

Extra brownie bonus points for labelling it the X-Com Apocalypse Toxigun. :)

I just loved the UT reference. I LOVED that game. It was all I was thinking about when reading that weapon's description. I'm really looking forward to it. Love the art look.

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Noirwolf, unfortunately, I can't make something like oil which would improve the flammability stat of a tile. And there isn't a damage over time flag or stat, so the sticky-burn of weapons like Napalm wouldn't work. However, I have made a version of the toxigun which does cause fires - it's quite an easy thing to do. I can in fact make an "improved fire" as a type. however it won't be classfied as actual fire.

a333, I am trying to make a proper animated goo tile. It's a lot harder than I thought it would be!

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Noirwolf, unfortunately, I can't make something like oil which would improve the flammability stat of a tile. And there isn't a damage over time flag or stat, so the sticky-burn of weapons like Napalm wouldn't work. However, I have made a version of the toxigun which does cause fires - it's quite an easy thing to do. I can in fact make an "improved fire" as a type. however it won't be classfied as actual fire.

a333, I am trying to make a proper animated goo tile. It's a lot harder than I thought it would be!

That could work too o.O, granted not as satisfying to my inner physicist ( getting lasers to be more deadly even late game ) but still good o.O.

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