Muton Devastator FX Preview

Well, i kept you waiting but i think you'll be pleased to see that all the particle effects for the Muton Devastator are finished, and man, i gotta say now that i made this video and put them all together i didn't quite realize until now how much work was going on this big dude compared to the normal Muton Harriers. Remember when this Mod was just an excuse to use the helmet/mask that i had made for Axiom in Chimera Squad? And remember how the Devastator didn't even exist back then? Funny how all my mods end up spiraling out of control.

Anyway, first the good news, i fixed the grenade particle effect, unfortunately i never figured out what the problem was, i just took the dumb caveman approach of making the square peg fit in the round shape, by smashing it in. So the "solution" was to simply rotate the particle effect the wrong way in the editor, so now if you saw it in the editor it would be all messed up, but it plays correctly in-game. Hopefully it wont have any problems, but at least in all the testing i've done it seems to work correctly every time.

So while i was inspired to work on particle effects i decided to also tackle the effects for the lightning claw weapon, and i must say i'm more than happy with how they turned out, they actually didn't take that much work to make, i was afraid that i would have to make a lot of this stuff basically from scratch but as it turns out, it's been so long since i've actually played Xcom2 that i had forgotten about all the fancy schmancy lightning effects Templars have, so i managed to reuse a lot of stuff, although in the case of the "lightning vengeance" attack it pulls when it strikes back at melee opponents, that one took a bit more work to make.

As for the rifle's particle effects, like i mentioned in my previous post those were already done before i started tackling the grenade catastrophe, thankfully i already had a pretty decent idea on how i wanted those effects to look before i started working on them, so it was just a matter of getting it right, and i'm again pretty happy with how it turned out.

And finally, the "Lancing Gun" FX, this actually took a bit of work to get right, mostly i had to play a lot with the timings for the effect and to be honest it didn't turn out quite as good as i hoped it would, but unfortunately the reason it doesn't look as good is because of the size of the effect and the weapon. You see, the idea was to make it look like the beams fired in order, 2 from the top barrels, and 2 from the bottom, then 2 from the middle up barrels, and 2 from the middle bottom, and finally the 4 barrels next to the weapon's "core", and this does work like that, but due to the size of the particle effects, it's not really noticeable. Either way, it looks decent enough i think.

So with all that done what's next? I guess next up is the particle effect for the Xcom version of that grenade, to be honest i'm not sure how i want it to look though, i also need to do some adjustment to some of the Devastator's animations, in particular i think the pistol fire animation and the melee attack need some "cleaning up". But other than that all that's left to do i believe is sound effects, code, and the usual UI elements so we're not that far from release(i hope), but there's still plenty of work to do, one of the problems right now is that i'm not sure how i want some of these abilities to sound like, in particular the rifle and the grenade.

But that's a problem for future me, for now i'm pretty pleased and i hope you too are happy with how these effects turned out, so with that said stay tuned for more my dudes and i'll be seeing you again hopefully very soon.