Enhancing UFO Crashsites

[kabill]

Coming off of the hull breach project, I've been looking at trying to enhance crashsites such that they look a bit more crash-sitey.

Part of the intent with this is to expropriate the power core explosion function to facilitate placing smoke and fire around the crash site. But I wanted to try and enhance the UFO submaps as well to try and make them more crash like.

To that end, I've been playing around with adding a damage 'shadow' around the outside of the UFO. It's difficult to see what this looks like in situ as a result of the UFO hull bug in the latest build. But here's some images anyway:

Image from submap editor showing the shadow with the UFO hull:

In situ screenshot without smoke and fire:

In situ screenshot with smoke and fire:

If I'm truthful, I'm undecided about it. But I wanted to post some pictures to see what others think.

[Lt_Parsons]

You know, long time ago, in the original kickstarter alpha demo and some time after it, there was really good-looking ground crash-trails as part of downed ufo submap. But they were discarded in the process of bugfixing/upgrading of ground combat, i don't actually remember why.

Maybe it will be possible to check those old builds and extract / cut them out somehow.

UPD: yes i had it stored luckily, this is how it used to look like:

Edited May 7, 2014 by Lt_Parsons

[Skitso]

Good idea, but the brown stuff doesn't look that good, to be honest. Not on the snow at least.

The pictures you've posted are a bit small and compressed, so I can't be sure, but have you used the damaged terrain tiles already in the game there? If so, good. Just put a lot less of them there so original terrain shows through and use high damage tiles closer to ufo and low damage ones further away.

[kabill]

@Lt_Parsons: Yeah, I've seen that before. I think (so I've gleaned from the forum anyway) that they were scrapped because of issues fitting them into maps (in terms of both space and continuity with the ground). I think it might be possible to do something like that, although you'd either need a generic damage effect that can be applied to any terrain (which is kind of what I've been trying) or you'd need to design one for different ground types and add it directly into the game maps (although that produces problems with randomized spawn points and UFO types; you'd have to multiply the maps so they only have one spawn point/UFO type per copy).

The main issue, though, is the skill required. I'm really no artist and it's utterly beyond my ability to pull off (and the images are packaged with the game any more). I'm really stretching my ability playing around with any of this (the hull breaches are passable, but they could be a lot better if done by someone with a shred of artistic aptitude).

@Skitso: Yeah, I think that's my problem with it too.

You're right about the damaged ground tiles, although it ended up being more complex than simply placing them on the map. I started by just adding a few splashes around the edge of the crash site, which was ok but it looked odd that there wasn't anything literally underneath the UFO. I then tried removing the UFO floor and placing damaged tiles first so I could overlay them, but for whatever reason they always drew on top of the UFO floor tiles, even though they were on the same layer and I placed the floor tiles second.

In the end, then, I just made my own composite image and cut out a hole in the middle for the UFO floor to show through (i.e. the entire 'shadow' is a single image). There was a lot of copy-pasting which has made it quite thick; I could probably thin it out a little with some transparency in accord with your suggestion and see how it looks?

[Skitso]

Yeah, I'm sure you can get it to work. Just don't do make it so uniform and think/dense. For example the area between the "wings" could let the ground show through. Put more damage in front impact area and less in the back. Also use heavy damage tiles closer to ufo hull and in frontal parts and light damage tiles on outer ridges and behind the ufo.

ummm.. I didn't want to sound like a.. uh, taskmaster.

Edited May 7, 2014 by Skitso

[llunak]

Yeah, I'm sure you can get it to work. Just don't do make it so uniform and think/dense. For example the area between the "wings" could let the ground show through. Put more damage in front impact area and less in the back. Also use heavy damage tiles closer to ufo hull and in frontal parts and light damage tiles on outer ridges and behind the ufo.

FWIW, I second this. I've always found it weird that a crash-landed UFO looks like it's peacefully carefully landed where it is, while it in fact most likely has rammed into the ground. I'd most probably use even the version you have now, but if you could improve it the way Skitso has described, this would be definitely in my list of mods to install.

[Lt_Parsons]

@kabill: Yeah, you are right on all points. They were separate crashsite submaps per tileset per ufo and were ever done only for several smaller saucers.

Chris said here, that before release all tilesets will need to be compressed without external tile dependencies. I wonder now if it'll applies to the ufos/dropships as well or not.

[Skitso]

The tileset compression is done already and tileatlases can be easily expanded with custom tiles, so no worries there.

[kabill]

This isn't the best image in the world, but is this any better:

All I've done here is use the same image as before, but going over with an eraser to thin bits out and produce transparency (I think the selector I used selected a lot of the dark/black areas, which is possibly a good thing). I'm not necessarily planning on using this image as is, I just wanted to try it out to see if it's a good move forwards.

Personally, I think it's a lot better than the previous version. There's still some dense bits, but I think that is mostly from where I've got splodges of damaged ground on the submap already (I was using that as a placeholder and did't delete them beforehand). I maybe should have removed those to see how it looked, but I should probably go sleep now.

[Lt_Parsons]

@Skitso: Didn't knew that. All good then

@kabill: Much better. More like smudged dirt and soot/grime from smoke and overheat now, less like lava pit.

Can you add screens from other sets too, not just arctic?

Edited May 7, 2014 by Lt_Parsons

[Skitso]

Looks much better, good work!

[kabill]

Can you add screens from other sets too, not just arctic?

Yeah, I'll try and do that along with some better pictures. I'd have done so already, but my test game for light scouts currently has the crash on arctic terrain and it takes a surprising amount of time to set up test saves, apparently.

[kabill]

Here's a set of similar images on a different map type:

Half uncovered:

Fully uncovered:

Hull removed:

The burn shadow has been stripped down a little more from the last one. You won't be able to tell, but I think this makes it better when it's sat over black FoW. The darker splodges are separate bits which I could move around (possibly put them more around the front rather than the back, as per Skitso's suggestion above?).

[Ragnarok]

I think the latest pics in the post above, especially #2, look very, very good.

[kabill]

Thanks. I was a bit uncertain about it last night, but looking back actually it seems reasonable. What I might do is roll it out in the next hull-breach pack so people can see it in game. If it's not well received, I can quite easily remove it again.

[Alexandre Lange]

Hey kabill: what are those blood drops near the ufo? I have noticed it at your Destructible UFO Hulls mod too...

[kabill]

They're markers for the smoke and fire props so I know where they are in the map editor. I meant to remove them before I released the last version, but totally forgot.

Depending on time tonight I might see if I can patch them out.

[Victor_Tadeu]

Awesome work, kabill! I'm liking very much the way it's evolving! I do think it's kinda dull how the UFOs just sit there in the vanilla game after being shoot down. You work remembers me XCom Apocalypse, my favorite XCom ever, where the UFO crash sites was heavily damaged and filled with fire and smoke.

I dont think it's possible but would be awesome if you can do different damage styles for different asmount of damages the UFO sustained, like intact, minor damages, heavy damages, etc.

[kabill]

Sadly, the method I used in the examples above has had to be shelved, at least for the time being.

The burn shadow around the UFO was all part of one image, which produced some issues. The main one was that it didn't look very good before you'd seen the ground around the UFO. But I also, in my hull-breach mod, needed to make some changes to how the UFO image is displayed to overcome some graphical issues. As a consequence, it was also possible to have the burn image without the the actual UFO which looked a bit rubbish.

The method by which this could be solved is actually quite simple, technically speaking. All I'd need to do is break the image down into individual tiles rather than doing it all together. However, the amount of time that this would take is more than I'm willing to spend on it given other things I currently want to do, so I've gone back to my original plan of just dotting some damaged tile overlays around instead. As it happens, I think this looks good enough as is, especially with the fire and smoke effects (and the ground damage this causes as well), so the value that would be added by making custom tiles is quite small relative to the work involved.

On the other hand, if anyone with some skill and enthusiasm wanted to come up with some stuff, I'd happy put them in the mod.

[kabill]

I dont think it's possible but would be awesome if you can do different damage styles for different asmount of damages the UFO sustained, like intact, minor damages, heavy damages, etc.

Ugh, meant to reply to this then forgot.

It's kind of possible. There's no way to tie this into the amount of damage the UFO sustained. And in order to get the smoke and fire effects, I've had to increase the chance of a UFO being 'heavily damaged' (as per the description on the mission briefing screen) very high.

On the other hand, there's no reason why I couldn't vary the submaps a bit more to reflect increasingly high levels of damage. There'd be no correlation between this and the aliens killed in the crash, sadly, but aesthetically there'd be a difference.

It's something that I'll have a look at when I go over the maps for some final polish. I was already thinking of exercising a little more direct control over what is and isn't damaged as at the moment I'm just using the power-core-explosion variable but this produces some undesirable issues (like high concentrations of smoke and fire in places) and I think I might be better off setting props to be damaged in the submaps and using using the smoke and fire prop I'm using for smoke effects. (This would also enable me to add debris in places where the hull is already breached, which doesn't work using the present system sadly.)

[Victor_Tadeu]

Plus, I was thinking... it's possible to add damaged buildings or trees very next to the UFO? Like if had crashed over some poor soul house.

[kabill]

It's something I'd love to try, but it would probably have to be done at the map level rather than on the UFO submaps (i.e. you'd design a map with a damaged building and place the UFO submap in the middle of it). Don't know if it would be easy to make it look good, though.

(I think Stinky tried this a while back, but I never looked at the result and I don't know if the map is compatible with the current build).

[Victor_Tadeu]

By the way, kabill the enhanced crash sites are looking awesome! I just ended a mission right now where the last alien burned alive inside the UFO even before I get there! And I think it's good! Gave me a feel of a really crazy crash of this UFO! If this thing was shooted down by fighters with missiles and machine gun and ended hitting the ground probably at high speed, I think it's suppose to have nasty things going on there!

On the other hand... since I didn't saw the alien itself, just the fire and heard the sounds, the AI could had make him walk in and out of the fire... but anyway... I loved it! May not be common but was a nice incident!

[Skitso]

The tilesets currently in the game don't fit that well in doing damaged buildings. It just doesn't look right.

[Gauddlike]

Plus the submap with the UFO on would need to fit within any damaged structures you made but couldn't overlap them.

You would always have the same submap sized space around the crashed UFO unless you also designed a new UFO submap to fit the map.

Possible but time consuming.