Fire in the Hole! - Destructible UFO Hulls and Dynamic UFO Assaults

This mod has been moved here

[video=youtube;gDXoZ9copgU]

Assaulting a Scout UFO:

The UFO awaiting assault:

Xenonauts deplot breaching charge against the south-west side, while Xenonauts on the north-east side approach a breach caused by the crash with caution:

The hull on the south-west side is breached and Xenonauts prepare to attack:

Xenonauts storm the alien ship, overwhelming most of its defenders swiftly:

Exceptional work there, mate, didn't think such a mod would even be possible. Very inspirational, can't wait to see your next project.

Wow! Roof entrances!! Brilliant idea, kabill! I loved it!

Maybe as a quick fix for not being able to see where is it, you may have some news Xenopedia entries showing where and how to enter each UFO? It may be unlocked together with the UFO type entry. It may look like something "we studied the UFO design and found some weak spots", them some pics showing where to blow in the sides and in the top.

Maybe as a quick fix for not being able to see where is it, you may have some news Xenopedia entries showing where and how to enter each UFO? It may be unlocked together with the UFO type entry. It may look like something "we studied the UFO design and found some weak spots", them some pics showing where to blow in the sides and in the top.

I'd actually been thinking of doing something like this in any case. I'm not 100% sold that it's the best solution, as it's unlikely the player will remember exactly where they are (and even if they did, the locations are only a tile or two in size, so they might still be hard to find!)

Trouble is, the only other solution I can think of is having a slight colour difference or marker on the relevant tiles and I'm not sure how to make it look good.

I'd actually been thinking of doing something like this in any case. I'm not 100% sold that it's the best solution, as it's unlikely the player will remember exactly where they are (and even if they did, the locations are only a tile or two in size, so they might still be hard to find!)

Trouble is, the only other solution I can think of is having a slight colour difference or marker on the relevant tiles and I'm not sure how to make it look good.

Yeah... it would be a lot of alt+tab to check the image in the forum. Well, maybe you can make that specific tile looks like a small hatch of some kind. An escape hatch for the aliens on top of the UFO, something like that. Then you blow it off and enter the alien-can.

There is no easy way to uninstall the mod sadly.

You could have a look at Time Units First, which easily installs/uninstalls cleanly, even if unrelated parts of the same files have been modified by something else (such as another mod, or even if the game updates). This is because it uses diff/patch utilities (downloads for windows: diffutils patch), which are rather smart about applying text changes. Your mod is more complicated because it adds also binary files, but if I'm looking correctly it only adds new ones, so that could be handled by e.g. by having those under the patches/ subdir as well and making the install/uninstall script copy/remove them from the game itself.

I actually rather wonder how you keep your mod up to date when the game files change, it's got to be tedious to handle it manually.

Might have a look at that, thanks. I don't know anything about file patchers, but being able to use something like that would be really useful.

On the other hand, the actual file edits themselves are quite minor (hence why I'm able to keep it up to date). It's the uninstall which is the problem, because of having to remove additional maps from the map pool.

How about this http://ge.tt/3s4GJsh1/v/0 ? It's a testing mod that patches xenopedia and adds three dummy files. The dummy files are actually text, but they in reality should be binary, text files are to be patched (a .patch file is created by having original Xenonauts dir and modified Xenonauts dir and running 'diff -u -p -d -N -r Xenonauts.original Xenonauts.modified >mod.patch').

Oh well, I couldn't stop myself from trying it for real. At http://ge.tt/91T0Psh1 is your mod done this way, it installs and uninstalls cleanly as far as I can tell.

Wow, thanks for that.

Although I've just tried to download it and Chrome is blocking it as malware. Is that common with the file sharing service you're using?

How should I know, it's just a random file sharing site I've gotten used to using when I need and nobody has complained yet. But one of two archives does contain some Windows executables and it's the first time I've shared something like that, so I guess better verify it on your side with some antivirus of whatever you use (the file size of modutils.zip is 1645891 and its md5sum is 3A5A50CCEFED05B5532D237C356B7FE3). I'm on Linux, so that's about how much Windows malware affects me.

Update: New version uploaded with redone smoke and fire.

How should I know, it's just a random file sharing site I've gotten used to using when I need and nobody has complained yet.

Just looking to check is all, in case you'd encountered it before.

Update: So, indecisive flip-flopper that I am, there's a new version out! I've added the power core explosions back in as an addition to the smoke and fire I've placed manually. These areas affected are entirely or almost entirely outside of the UFO and shouldn't block any doors (there's a slight issue with Corvettes, but I'm hoping they'll be fine).

This is pretty much the final version of this mod. I'm going to playtest and tweak (for example, I need to move the explosions on the scout a little bit as they look slightly odd where they are now. However, I'm not planning on adding any new features or overhauling anything now. Thus, aside from very minor changes, consider it complete.

Also, now all the UFO-bound aliens aren't dying in a fire, this is apparently what happens when you assault a scout ship without bringing along breaching charges:

EDIT: I'll also look at sorting out a patcher once everything's stable.

Link don't works for me.

Ta. Fudged the copy-paste, but it's fixed now.

Thanks, kabill. Question: what the mod changes at config.xml and gameconfig.xml?

kabill good pal,

If your having issues and tweaks with modding try to pass this XML validator in all modded files. Maybe some errors make weird occurrence specially deploying ground combat.

XML Validator online

Thanks, kabill. Question: what the mod changes at config.xml and gameconfig.xml?

In gameconfig, the following changes are made:

- powerCoresExplosionChange (from '20' to '100')

- killCrewOnCrashChance (from '25' to '0')

- killCrewOnPowerCoreExplosionChance (from '40' to '25')

In config, just the following:

- FireChanceOfDissipating (can't remember the vanilla value, but I've changed it to '50'. It's not actually that important, though)

kabill good pal,

If your having issues and tweaks with modding try to pass this XML validator in all modded files. Maybe some errors make weird occurrence specially deploying ground combat.

Thanks for this, though I've not encountered any issues myself thus far.

EDIT: Also, to prove the above occurrence wasn't a fluke:

Six Xenonauts charge into the UFO:

Last man standing:

Mission failed...

Next time I'll not be lazy and go and get the breaching charge off the guy who died near the drop zone.

That's Corvette, right? Looks interesting Could you post screenshots of the updated ship interiors under a spoiler tag? Might convince quite a few people the mod is worth it while also make the awesome and heavy work you've done visible.

I was avoiding doing that because I didn't want to spoil them. But I guess if they're in spoiler tags, then its optional whether you look at them.

The middle picture in my last post is a pretty good one of the corvette, actually. And it's largely representative of what the rest of the UFOs are like in terms of style. I'm glad they've turned out to be hard; I'd been worried previously that the interiors felt a little easy but this seems to be because there were 1/2 to 2/3 of the aliens missing due to walking through fire.

The middle picture in my last post is a pretty good one of the corvette, actually. And it's largely representative of what the rest of the UFOs are like in terms of style. I'm glad they've turned out to be hard; I'd been worried previously that the interiors felt a little easy but this seems to be because there were 1/2 to 2/3 of the aliens missing due to walking through fire.

I wouldn't call them easy but predictable. If you could figure a way to make the interiors vary for each UFO so that you can't know what is where inside before you even enter it, it would add even more suspense and longevity to GC.

50-66% of the aliens died in the mod specifically, or generally in the game?

I wouldn't call them easy but predictable. If you could figure a way to make the interiors vary for each UFO so that you can't know what is where inside before you even enter it, it would add even more suspense and longevity to GC.

Varying the interiors is easy: it's just different submaps for the same UFO. Doing it is time-consuming though.

In any case, there's already some level of variation in the mod already. Firstly, the approach to the UFO is somewhat varied by hull segments sometimes having been destroyed already. Secondly, aliens have a habit of moving through the UFO and leaving doors open, so you won't know in advance whether or not a particular door is going to be open or closed (although I imagine some will have a tendency to be one or the other).

Thirdly, there's some small amount of restructuring I've done as a result of interior damage, where I've replaced regular doors with damaged, already-open doors instead. So again, LoS will be different in some instances as a result of that. In a previous build, I'd experimented with doing some more drastic things than that (e.g. flattening sections of the UFO which had been wiped out by a core-explosion, and in one instance putting a big hole in the floor!) but I scrapped it in the end because I don't have any good-looking debris to throw around in place of what-were-walls.

So it's not the same as having entirely different interiors, but there's definitely some variation.

50-66% of the aliens died in the mod specifically, or generally in the game?

This mod, just because of the fire-update bug. I'm happy to say that the current placement of explosion centres seems fine - there's a very occasional scream (or hiss) of aliens running into fire but it's rare and, as indicated above, not having a noticeable impact on gameplay.

In gameconfig, the following changes are made:

- killCrewOnCrashChance (from '25' to '40')

- killCrewOnPowerCoreExplosionChance (from '40' to '25')

A question, probably dumb, if you don't mind. I like to fight full UFO crews, and change these values to "0" on my games. Can I do the same with this mod without causing issues?

Yes, absolutely. This change is only to ensure that the number of aliens on aggregate across a game is about equal to vanilla, but if you'd prefer more aliens that's fine!

(Also, there's a tiny mistake in the above: the first of those should be changed to 0, not 40. Not that it matters, since the power-core explosion is always triggered in this mod.

Hmm, now I think about it, now I have regular fire and smoke effects by default, I could change the power core explosions back down (say to 50%) so you only get the really big impacts - with consummate additional dead aliens - half the time.)