I <3 Smoke Grenades

[Triaxx2]

Yes, I figured that might be the case.

No, what I mean is, had I thrown a flashbang instead, the alien would have been unable to move and kill her at all.

[Anarch Cassius]

If the alien is close enough to flashbang you're better off flash banging, I agree. I've seen aliens do a lot better with long range shots overall than you describe. 2.5 in general seems to do longer ranges.

So basically I'm using the smoke grenades in situations where they aren't going to be able to walk up to it but I do feel threatened, which is most of the time they can fire regardless of distance. Even a near miss with plasma can hurt.

Also I've seen what appears to be aliens using area effect weapons and firing blind at the cloud. So it's not perfect but it reduces you're odds of loosing a soldier while running for cover from long range fire from like 50% to like 20% which is pretty nice. It comes up in other situations too.

I guess really I'm just paranoid and like keeping soliders alive without retrying so every little bit helps. There aren't many defensive tactics in the game and I hit upon this after dying like 10 times horribly trying to take a Cold Industrial zone.

[Triaxx2]

What I'd like to see is the ability to walk up on top of some of the drop ships. It'd be an assured vantage point, and give you the ability to strike back against enemy targets which are either higher or otherwise hidden. Of course that would require some of the models be altered. Or the maps. Either way it's not vital.

And I thought I was far enough away. There shouldn't have been enough TU's left for an attack after the alien walked through the cloud. I'm pretty suspicious of the additional reaction shot that was available to the alien afterwards as well.

[DexCisco]

it rolled past once and bounced past the second time.

Speaking of which, can we not have impact detonation grenades optional like the launcher?   Those crazy things bounce like superballs sometimes.

[ShipIt]

...   Those crazy things bounce like superballs sometimes.

This depends on the nature of the floor. At least in theory, as we need to define the properties (like "bouncefraction") of every texture used for floors in the terrain.ufo file. Nobody took on this task yet.

[Triaxx2]

Got an example with all the necessary properties defined I could use as an example?

[H-Hour]

/base/ufos/terrain.ufo

When you edit the .ufo file, you just need to restart the game to test the changes.

[DexCisco]

What does bouncefraction default to?  It isn't set in many of the materials.  Interesting note:  apparently flowers are made of rubber.  Highest bouncefraction in the file.

Would it also be possible to define multiple footstep sounds for each terrain and have it randomly pick one to add some realism?  With an XML data file it would but I am not familiar with this format.

[Triaxx2]

I'll give it a shot. Do I need to remove the .pk3 file so it doesn't over-write the file changes?

[ShipIt]

No, you don´t. The extracted files have a higher priority than those in the .pk3 archive.

Unfortunately I have no experience with this terrain settings yet. So I cannot tell you how to find out which textures need to be defined right now. Maybe we have a script for this? Mattn?

The tex_buildings/floor017 texture (grey tiles), which is defined in terrain.ufo line 532 is used in the bungalow map.
The tex_nature/grass001 texture, defined in line 8 is the grass texture in the pipes_const map.
If you try those maps in Skirmish, change the parameters in the terrain. ufo and try again, you should be able to figure out whats going on. But remember you need to restart the game after the changes to make them work.
Any help with this would be very much appreciated, so, whatever happens, please report your findings.

[Triaxx2]

Cool. I also fixed the hot tip while I was there, and rebalanced the Dragon.

I'll give those two a shot.

[DexCisco]

In looking at the grenades I noticed that frag grenades don't have a bounce attenuation property while the rest do.  Is this a deprecated property or just an oversight?  Does it make any difference?

I added the bouncefraction to all the materials in my terrain.ufo.  Usually about 0.5 for hard surfaces like concrete and pavement, 0.4 for wood or hard dirt, 0.3 or less for grass and dirt, and 0.1 for snow and sand.  Some may prefer the top end being higher, but grenades can still bounce a fair bit.  These values seem to be OK to me, at least for now.

[H-Hour]

How do you feel about extending your work? It's been 4 years since the terrains.ufo saw significant additions. That means that a lot of our textures will not have any bouncefraction defined in terrains.ufo. If you're willing to take on this task, let me know and I can offer a few suggestions that might make it a little easier.

[DexCisco]

I'd like to help, but my computer sucks.  I tried building from the source and it would have taken days to compile the maps with my single core.

[H-Hour]

You can download compiled maps from the server, which automatically compiles maps whenever they are changed, so you get the latest. Run /contrib/map-get/update.py to download the latest compiled maps.