(Proof of Concept) Destructible UFO Hulls!

[Skitso]

Great! Damn, it would be sweet to have smoke and fire around crashed ufo. Especially now that we have holes in the hull, debris and all.

[kabill]

Success!..

I can now make UFOs seamless when spotted, even before they're fully revealed:

Targeting the hull now highlights a vaguely reasonable shape:

Breaching the hull produces debris which displays both on the outside and the inside of the UFO:

And the floor of the UFO displays properly through the breach when the interior is not directly being viewed:

I've also solved all the layering issues, so there's no clipping with units around the outside of the UFO.

So basically all the problems are solved. There's just the implementation to do.

Great! Damn, it would be sweet to have smoke and fire around crashed ufo. Especially now that we have holes in the hull, debris and all.

Not sure smoke and fire could be done. I could make some props which look like fire and smoke, but they wouldn't mechanically be either fire or smoke.

I could possibly borrow the power core explosion mechanic, since this can be applied to any prop and when it happens it creates both fire and smoke. But it would only happen if the power core exploded (although actually that might make more sense than anything else). I'll maybe have a look and see what I can do. (Also, damn you for your constant raising of the bar, Skitso! )

[Skitso]

Thank you, kabill! Your work is astonishing! I can hardly wait to see the finished mod. Amazing!

I need to constantly think of new goals for you to strive as you seem to hit them pretty darn fast and accurately.

Edited May 4, 2014 by Skitso

[kabill]

As requested:

All I did here was set one of the hull pieces as a power core, such that it explodes when the power cores do. Because it's on the outside, you end up with a load of smoke and fire on the outside (possibly exaggerated in that picture due to being on a farm map with lots of flammable grass, mind).

I think this will actually make a better mechanism for having pre-made hull breaches. One of the things that was bothering me about doing that is that it's not especially clear what's happened (since as soon as you see inside the breach the UFO hull gets stripped away). This way, its really obvious as you approach, and looks pretty cool to boot. I can still do a variety of submaps with different elements that will explode on each one, though, to keep it random.

[dpelectric]

Dude, this is really impressive

It could change the whole approach to storming UFOs. Several questions: have you playtested it to see if the aliens recognize and react to the breach, and they can/will shoot through the new opening? Will the breaching blast affect any of the items in the ship, such as hurting aliens or destroying cover in close proximity? And, just to play Skitso and raise the bar, will breaching upper floors on a UFO be possible with, say, rockets or singularity weapons, thus allowing you to fly sentinel storm troopers inside (ala the OG?)

[kabill]

It could change the whole approach to storming UFOs. Several questions: have you playtested it to see if the aliens recognize and react to the breach, and they can/will shoot through the new opening?

They will definitely shoot through the openings, yes. They're relatively narrow (2 squares wide) so there's not a massive field of fire, especially where the aliens tend to be.

In terms of reacting to the breach, I honestly don't know. They have no conception that breaches are possible, I would guess, so making your own breach will always give you an advantage (but then, that's the point!). I've seen aliens moving in and out of the UFO recently, and that includes around the breach, so they seem as likely to attack out of a hull breach as the main UFO door.

It's also possible that the aliens will reposition themselves in accord with an open breach. I don't know this for certain, but I think aliens inside the UFO use the same AI for positioning as those outside (the reason why they always end up in the same places I think is due to there just being a limited number of 'good' places to wait according to their AI). As such, if there's already a breach, the additional visibility should affect their AI and where they position themselves. But I don't know any of that with any certainty.

Will the breaching blast affect any of the items in the ship, such as hurting aliens or destroying cover in close proximity?

I'm not sure. I just did a test, and I *think* it does damage nearby props. But it's hard to tell with all the smoke. (When I tested just now, some of the floor tiles had been destroyed which is a problem because it was showing desert underneath and I'd rather it didn't. I think a nearby command chair had become damaged too, but as I say it was hard to tell). Don't know if it can damage aliens, but there's already a higher chance of aliens dying on impact when the power core explodes (set in gameconfig.xml) so it's probably done through that rather than damage aliens directly in-game with it.

And, just to play Skitso and raise the bar, will breaching upper floors on a UFO be possible with, say, rockets or singularity weapons, thus allowing you to fly sentinel storm troopers inside (ala the OG?)

I was already looking at this and thought I might have to concede defeat. However...

Scouting the UFO:

Charge deployed:

Hull breached:

Soldier paths movement through the breach:

That's just a mock-up. Strictly speaking, there's no roof (game-mechanics wise) to destroy where the breach displays, so you could just path through it anyway. The key thing was to check whether or not explosives could affect the tiles on the level below, which appears to be true. There's a few issues - to make this work, I had to make the UFO hull itself vulnerable to damage and technically any damage it takes will contribute to putting that hole in the roof. I'm also not convinced that it will work well with UFOs possessing more than one level, but it might be possible to put holes in the sides of such UFOs rather than their roofs, maybe. Definitely seems possible, though in some manner, though.

EDIT: Just checked the larger UFOs to see how their designed and, actually, the upper floors have their own hull image. I should therefore be able to use the same mechanism to allow rooftop breaches.

Edited May 4, 2014 by kabill

[Jean-Luc]

Wow, just wow.

[dpelectric]

Woohoo! You could drop out of the ceiling onto the aliens!

Assuming reaction fire works as usual, though, this could be a risky proposition (as it should be). Of course, you could breach the ceiling, then drop smoke/flashbangs through the hole, then descend down through it. The one thought that gives me pause is if players could learn to "game" this. I'm specifically thinking about control rooms on carriers and battleships, where if a player dropped through a breach at the very front upper edge of the vessel, they would be almost guaranteed to more-or-less safely land behind the aliens with just about full TUs.

This could open up so many possibilities it's hard to picture them all...

[kabill]

The one thought that gives me pause is if players could learn to "game" this. I'm specifically thinking about control rooms on carriers and battleships, where if a player dropped through a breach at the very front upper edge of the vessel, they would be almost guaranteed to more-or-less safely land behind the aliens with just about full TUs.

This could open up so many possibilities it's hard to picture them all...

The breaches in the roof would have to work like I've done the others, i.e. at pre-specified points. So I'll have complete control over where to put them and should be able to avoid any abusable issues like that.

This said, I'm not sure I mind too much if rooftop UFO breaches are quite strong. Maybe this is just me, but I've never really found a great deal of use for Buzzard armour, since there's not many places on the maps to gain an advantage from flying. So if being able to fly gives the player a powerful tool when attacking UFOs, then I don't think I mind.

[Gauddlike]

It depend son how powerful.

If you can bypass a couple of floors and go straight to the bridge then it seems a bit too easy.

Being able to jump into a chamber between the teleporters and the bridge though is a risk.

It might let you wipe out the bridge crew quickly but you also risk getting hit from both sides.

Adds a bit of interest if nothing else.

Good work on this mod so far, I am not going to give you a new goal to hit though, taskmaster skitso has that well in hand

[Skitso]

Have you found out a way to prevent the ufo floor from breaking and revealing ground tiles underneath it?

*cracks a whip*

Edited May 5, 2014 by Skitso

[Caaygun]

Wow, just wow.

Exactly that!

Is this mod compatible with e22.7 ?

[kabill]

It depend son how powerful.

If you can bypass a couple of floors and go straight to the bridge then it seems a bit too easy.

Being able to jump into a chamber between the teleporters and the bridge though is a risk.

It might let you wipe out the bridge crew quickly but you also risk getting hit from both sides.

Adds a bit of interest if nothing else.

I'm not sure whether being able to skip parts of the UFO would actually be that powerful, as you'd still need to go back and clear the rest of the ship. But that said, I think I'd rather leave the command room as unbreachable anyway, so that there's always a choke-point that you can't avoid. Conceptually, this actually makes some sense as well, since it's reasonable to assume that the hull surrounding the command room would be more durable than other parts of the ship and thus invulnerable to breaching attempts.

Have you found out a way to prevent the ufo floor from breaking and revealing ground tiles underneath it?

*cracks a whip*

I've not tried it, but in theory it should be a matter of removing any hitpoint entries for the UFO ground tiles. (Although I'm a bit confused as to why it's an issue at all, as to my knowledge weapons don't tend to destroy ground tiles. So it might be something specific to the power core explosions and therefore more complex/impossile to fix.)

Love the picture.

Is this mod compatible with e22.7 ?

It should be. I don't actually know, though - the files I uploaded in the OP were all built using v22.6. The only issue I can think of is that Goldhawk have added some alternative UFO layouts, so you'd need to delete those as well as the normal ones to remove them from the UFO submap pools.

Bear in mind that the present mod doesn't have any of the bug fixes and stuff I've posted recently. It's pretty much a prototype, which I'm happy to take comments on but won't be great for playing at the moment.

Edited May 5, 2014 by kabill

[dpelectric]

Another issue is if you can even get on top of larger UFOs. Burzmali noted a problem with being unable to access rooftops on multi-story buildings, since, say, a 3-story structure is contained in a map that only has 3 levels of elevation.

http://www.goldhawkinteractive.com/forums/showthread.php/9831-V21-Stable-Steam-Ground-Combat-Elevation-Issues

EDIT: Just loaded a carrier mission save and I could fly up to the 5th elevation level, at least on that map, so hopefully it won't be an issue?

Edited May 5, 2014 by dpelectric

[kabill]

Another issue is if you can even get on top of larger UFOs. Burzmali noted a problem with being unable to access rooftops on multi-story buildings, since, say, a 3-story structure is contained in a map that only has 3 levels of elevation.

http://www.goldhawkinteractive.com/forums/showthread.php/9831-V21-Stable-Steam-Ground-Combat-Elevation-Issues

Thanks for this. I don't know this for certain, but I've assumed that the number of levels on a map is dynamic based on the highest actual level of any submap on the map. Theoretically, then, I could add in false levels onto the UFO submaps to ensure you can fly onto the roof. Shall see in practice, though.

For what it's worth, I'm probably going to concentrate on doing the ground level breaches for the first proper release of the mod anyway. There's some other issues with elevation that might be problematic (like the shooting through floors bug which apparently is still an issue), so it probably makes sense to hold back on roof-top breaches for the time being.

[Dranak]

You sir, are a wizard. I'm really looking forward to trying this out when it's a bit further along.

[kabill]

Update: I've updated the OP with a new link to the revised mod. At the moment, I've only done light scouts (both landed and crashed); I'm posting this in case anyone wants to have a proper look while I'm completing the rest of the UFOs. I've also only done the alternate UFO designs; I'll do the vanilla ones after I'm finished.

So far as I know, all the issues listed above have been fixed. The only problem I've spotted is a slight layering issue with smoke and fire, but I'm fairly certain this is beyond my power to fix. But if you encounter any issues, please report them.

EDIT: Forgot to add that I've made the interior UFO walls destructable as well, so you can use breaching charges to open up new approaches to rooms if you want. It's largely irrelevant on the light scout map, but I wanted to include it for larger UFOs. There's no destroyed image for that at the moment, though; it will just disappear when destroyed.

Edited May 5, 2014 by kabill

[kabill]

Thought for the morning:

I really like the idea of making crash sites look more crash-sitey. Especially with smoke and fire. However, there's only one way I can do this, which is using the power core explode function, which also ties in to the probability that aliens are killed in the crash. So if I want to use it, I need to do some rebalancing to minimise the effect on gameplay.

At the moment, the power cores explode 20% of the time. If the power cores explode, there's a 40% chance of any individual alien dying on the crash, while if they don't there's a 25% chance of an alien dying. On average, then, across all crashed UFOs in a game, you encounter:

(0.2*0.6)+(0.8*0.75) = 0.72 =

72% of the maximum possible crew size of UFOs.

I'd like to increase the chance of the power core explosion event to something like 70%, such that 70% of the time the UFO will crash with smoke and fire and all that. To rebalance this, I'm thinking of tweaking the kill chances to 15% when power cores don't explode, and 30% when they do, resulting on average in:

(0.7*0.7)+(0.3*0.85) = 0.745 =

74.5% of maximum crew size across all UFO crashes.

These numbers are close enough I think to minimise impact on the game. Most crash sites would have a very slight reduction in the number of aliens compared with vanilla, but a smaller number would have an increase and on average there's a very slightly larger number of aliens.

My questions are, then: 1) do people like the idea of there being a higher chance of smoke and fire around the crash sites; and 2) do people think that the adjustments to alien kill chance is reasonable to balance that out?

(Note: I've not writen about resources, because I can easily redistribute alloys and alenium to other parts of the ship to ensure that on average you're getting the same amount of resources from UFO crashes.)

Final point: the power core smoke at the moment is very dark and difficult for the player to see through. I'm contemplating changing the smoke image used to one of the lighter smoke types to mitigate this. Does anyone think that's a bad idea?

EDIT: Hid the maths in case it puts anyone off reading. The maths aren't important per se; just included them in case anyone spots a stupid mistake.

Edited May 6, 2014 by kabill

[Skitso]

You don't need a taskmaster anymore as your work is this self-imposed. All those changes sound really good and well tough out so go for it. *cracks the whip anyways* Wouldn't change the smoke though. I like it dark.

Edited May 6, 2014 by Skitso

[dpelectric]

I think all these ideas are great. Crash sites are definitely too sterile right now. If you can add smoke and fire for realism without significantly affecting LOS then it can't be anything but good.

Me personally I always set the chance of power cores exploding to zero and also add to the alien numbers, because I want all a ship's goodies and like engaging a full crew (plus some). So slightly increasing the potential enemy crew size works for me

If you keep up this kind of work (random maps, breachable hulls, more dynamic crash sites) GH is gonna need to make you a job offer

EDIT: When you have pics to post you may want to consider starting a new thread about this, just to differentiate it from people's input to breachable hulls per se

Edited May 6, 2014 by dpelectric

[Gauddlike]

My only concern would be for research progression in the early game.

How would reducing the players chance of getting the power source required for alenium research by so much influence the flow of the game?

Do most players get alenium research from landed ships or do people rely on the 80% chance of getting it from a crashed ship?

If that is the case getting a little unlucky on the 30% chance of recovering the core could cause issues, especially for the new player.

[kabill]

My only concern would be for research progression in the early game.

How would reducing the players chance of getting the power source required for alenium research by so much influence the flow of the game?

Do most players get alenium research from landed ships or do people rely on the 80% chance of getting it from a crashed ship?

If that is the case getting a little unlucky on the 30% chance of recovering the core could cause issues, especially for the new player.

This wasn't clear in the above, but I can turn off the 'power core' variable for props if I want.

The way I've set things up at the moment, there's 10 versions of the crashed UFO submap and on each one I've set different props as being destructable. So for example, some of them it's the engine, some of them its a weapons array and so on. So I can use the UFO submap randomisation to create a chance approximate with the original values.

For example, if I made the actual power core prop explodable on 3 of the 10 submaps, there would overall be a 21% chance of the power core prop itself exploding in the crash (70% chance of exploding event multiplied by 30% chance of a submap with power cores being explodable). That's almost exactly the same as the 20% chance already in the game. On other submaps, other props would explode, or else I'll put in some invisible tiles which are set to explode purely for the aesthetic.

Overall, then, I should be able to set things up to minimise the impact on game balance as with the alien numbers.

EDIT: When you have pics to post you may want to consider starting a new thread about this, just to differentiate it from people's input to breachable hulls per se

Thanks, I might do that.

[Gauddlike]

So if the power core prop setting is independent of the power core item recovered for the research then it shouldn't cause a problem.

Sounds fair to me.

A few more variations of UFOs should be fantastic.

[Max_Caine]

It would probably be more reliable to remove alien power source as the alenium trigger and replace it with alenium in researches.xml.

[kabill]

It would probably be more reliable to remove alien power source as the alenium trigger and replace it with alenium in researches.xml.

I'll be honest, I thought that was the case already. So thanks, that's definitely worth doing.