Muton Harrier, Beleaguer, and Captain's animations and fX preview

Would you believe that i completely forgot that i needed to make the fire animations for the Harrier and Beleaguer? Well, i did. But alas here we are, the animations and particle effects for the Harriers, Beleaguer, and their respective captains, took a bit longer because while working on the particle effects for the Harrier and Beleaguer, it occurred to me that the captains really needed something fancy to make them stand out.

The first ideas were pretty lame, i thought about making it so the harrier captain would fire his grenades pretty much straight up, and they would rain down on the target area, kinda like a mortar, but really the only difference would be the animation. And in the case of the beleaguer captain, i thought about giving him a grenade that marks all targets in an AoE, i've had the idea of making that grenade for one enemy or another for a long time, but thankfully, i always end up coming with what i would consider to be cooler ideas.

So, the Harrier was fairly straightforward, his weapon is just an alien grenade launcher, i just made the grenade explosions a bit less impactful since they're meant to be the alien version of airburst grenades, they ignore cover, but they're not guaranteed to hit. 

For the Beleaguer, originally they were just going to fire plasma projectiles, but for some reason i just got this idea of making it so they also fired a beam at the end, mind you it doesn't do anything mechanically, i just think it looks fancy, also while you can't experience that in this video, it sounds pretty nifty so i might not even have to make a new sound effect for their rifle.

For the Harrier Captains, i ended up completely replacing their standard grenades, now they have a fancy alien incendiary rocket, at the moment it still "just" ignores cover, and it's not guaranteed to deal damage, but it looks so violent that i might end up making it guaranteed damage, some adjusting will be necessary there on the stats to not make it completely bullshit, but that comes later.

Finally, the Beleaguer captain, this type of ability is something i've wanted to make for a long time, i'm sure we've all seen a laser like this in some game, or movie, or something before, the beam cuts through terrain, or enemies, or whatever, and then after a short delay, the area where the beam passed through blows up. I planned to make this the main weapon for a "Muton Warmaster" who would be the biggest baddest Muton around, but let's be honest, at the pace my mods are going Xcom 3 is going to come out before i get there, so the idea just came to me that this guy would be a good place to put that ability. 

So unsurprisingly, this ability is the one that took the longest time to make, the particle effect was pretty tricky to make, i think there might be a more sophisticated way of doing this, basically i believe that the flamethrower particle effect has a way to "detect" where the flamethrowers "projectile" passes through, and then it adds cosmetic flames to those locations, these flames are different from the ones that deal damage and set characters on fire, but they look nifty. 

Unfortunately i was not able to figure how that works, so there's some trickery at work here, for starters, the beam and explosions are all part of a single particle effect system, the biggest trick is that you cannot make use of the simple delay function particle emitters have, because all that would do is make it so the explosions, and burning particles, etc, appear with the beam, but after a delay. In order to make the illusion work, the effects all play at the same time, but the impact effects such as the tiny explosions, and the "plasma fire" are spawned incredibly tiny so you cannot see them, and after a very short delay(fractions of a second) they grow in size.

Basically what this means is that the effects for the explosions are there instantly where the beam touches, but, because they "detach" from the beam, by making them smaller, and then increasing their size after a short delay, it makes it look like they only spawned after the beam has passed through.

All that said, as usual, mechanically the beam doesn't do anything super fancy, at the moment it's just a cone AoE ability that deals damage, but might make it so that it shreds too.

So, that is the progress report, at this point the Harrier and Beleaguers are pretty much finished, all they need is to have their stats adjusted, right now they all have the same stats, and there are some small issues like the beam sweep ability double dipping damage thus making it deal way way more damage than it should, and so on, oh and of course they need sound effects here and there.

But all that comes later, next up i'll be working on the particle effects for the Muton Devastator, i'm not sure how long it'll take because not only does he need a lot(2 for the claw attacks, 2 for the pistol, 3 for the rifle, 1 for the grenade), but out of all those the pistol is the only one that i know exactly how i want it to look, since it's just an alien beam weapon, where as the rest of his attacks are "new" alien tech, i have a pretty good idea about the rifle's muzzle flash, and i know i want the lightning for his claw attacks to be white, but other than that i'll have to experiment.

So with all that said, i hope you like how the animations and fxs for the Harriers and Beleaguers turned out, and i'll be seeing you again hopefully soon with a devastating progress report.