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(Proof of Concept) Destructible UFO Hulls!


kabill

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By the way, kabill, the new UFO interior, with more rooms, are also part of your work, right? It's awesome but wouldn't be possible to have both multiple rooms interiors and vanilla large interiors at once? I mean, that way even when fighting the same UFO types multiple times, you will never know what to expect when opening the UFO door. And since both types also demands differents approachs, it also add more game diversity.

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Hmm makes me wonder if it is possible to make submaps within the UFOs. Would be pretty nice.

The UFOs are in fact submaps! So, yes.

By the way, kabill, the new UFO interior, with more rooms, are also part of your work, right? It's awesome but wouldn't be possible to have both multiple rooms interiors and vanilla large interiors at once? I mean, that way even when fighting the same UFO types multiple times, you will never know what to expect when opening the UFO door. And since both types also demands differents approachs, it also add more game diversity.

I take your point that having a diverse set of of interiors would be quite interesting. However, I'm not convinced that it would work with this mod.

Originally, I'd planned to do two versions: one with vanilla layouts and one with modified layouts. However, as I was designing the mod I decided that it wouldn't work very well with the vanilla layouts. Because they're so open, especially in the smaller UFOs all you'd be doing is opening up further lines of fire into the interior. Worse, they'd be lines of fire outside of the aliens' facing and therefore basically enable you to clear out the interiors with little to no risk. UFO assaults are already easy enough with door-related tricks and I didn't want to make it worse.

The redesign, then, was done partly to counter door-spamming, but also to make the breaches tactically useful without being overpowered. By making the interior cramped and limited LoS, it's hard to get more than a few soldiers in a position to shoot unless you can approach from different directions (hence breaching!).

So while it would be cool to have different layouts, I can't help thinking that it would result in half your UFOs being significantly easier than the other half because the breaches will allow you to easily suppress and kill the aliens with minimal risk.

(Also, designing new UFO interiors would take more time than I will have available in the near future. It might happen - TD asked me about it due to the AI changes his mod makes - but there's other things I need to be doing soon and other Xenonauts stuff I want to look at, too!)

EDIT: All this said, you're more than welcome to play around with the mod yourself. Once you get the hang of it, the submap editor's reasonably simple.

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Update: New version released. Updated to v22.9 files, and I've added Cruisers in too. Crashed Cruisers don't have any fire or smoke effects on them yet, as I haven't quite done that, but since I was updating to 22.9 I figured I might as well put them in anyway since they're mostly done.

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Ugh, have just realised I didn't actually package the cruiser maps in with the last version (all the tiles are there, I just didn't add the maps!). No matter, I'm intending to have the full mod out by the end of tomorrow at the very latest, so it's not a big deal.

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Pressure, yes! How do you guys get that level modding? Damn, I suffer to just tweak some numbers! Years, right? I am a crawling baby...

I think it's more a matter of hardwork and study than time. I mod games with text codes since Jagged Alliance 2, Civilization 3 and Rome Total War and sometimes I can do more than rebalancing stuff like adding new content or so... But I never go further 'cause of the amount of work and patience you had to put in it. Rebalancing guns, changing some numbers and things like that is easy, adding new content or even fully new mechanichs... that's some serious coding hardwork! And I also needs a tutorial to get started or pick a modded file and compare with the vanilla one... bringing something out of the nothing seems like magic to me! Hahahaha!

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What Victor_Tadeu said, basically.

The map editors are actually fairly simple one you know what you're doing. And there's a good tutorial stickied on the mapping forum if you're interested in picking it up. It's not fully comprehensive, but excellent as a starting place and more than sufficient for most things you'd want to do.

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...and one version just with toggleable ufo roofs and smoke and fire. :)

Togglable roofs is a bust, I'm afraid.

Tried it out, but the UFO hull continued to disappear after I placed the UFO spectre on the level above. I thought this might be due to the roof tile designations, but I tried two and three levels above ground as well and it had no effect.

I can only assume that the game is programmed to remove any image overlapping a UFO wall tile on the same level or lower than the spectre is places, or something like that. In any case, doesn't look like it will be possible. Sorry.

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Could be down to the isUFOHull=1 and isUFODoor=1 flags?

I assume the game uses those flags to know which tiles to automatically remove while other tiles can be displayed using the toggle.

Have you tried changing them during your tests?

I notice they can be set on individual damage states as well so their visibility could be linked to whether or not the player has breached that section.

At least on walls.

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Doesn't help, sadly. Hull visibility is definitely tied to UFO wall designators.

That said, I did try twitching off the UFO hull variable before just in case, but it didn't work (I'm honestly not sure what that variable even does). UFO door seems to control when the prop designated as such is visible (it makes it break LoS rules somewhat) so it wouldn't affect this.

I did actually work out a way you could do it, though: you'd just have to replace all of the UFO wall and roof tiles with regular spectres instead. I tried this before and it worked quite well: while outside the UFO, the UFO hull can be toggled with the show roof button, while when inside it automatically removes it. However, it creates a rough edge around the UFO as you can't see the UFO ground underneath the prop. Furthermore, I know from playing around with roofs that it would cause some walking-on-air issues with flying armour around bits of the hull.

Given that, and the work it would take to redo the UFOs, it's not something I'm especially interested in doing. But probably worth indicating here in case anyone else fancied doing it.

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