Explosions

I was just looking at the lets play videos of Total Annihilation from Youtube and came to the conclusion that one thing that was superrior in TA over Supcom was the explosions. By this I mostly mean the unit/shell/building explosions. When the unit exploded you could almost feel it and the s*it was flying all over the place (trees blowing up by the impact of unit blowing up etc).

What would you like to see in PA in tems of explosions. Personally I like the more gritty type explosions of TA (also Company of Heroes also did a good job with explosions for example). The explosions in Supcom were too clean (often just white flashes).

Dont know if this means anything to you guys, but just thought I will throw this thought out there. Perhaps the engine of PA allows cooler explosions that also affect the environment since you are supposed to be able to blow up planets! Still can't fully believe it

from the trailer they are seeming to go cool on the explosions, which is good.

True. I also like the explosions seen on the trailer. Hopefully they are able to put something similalar to the actual game.

Yeah, that was one of my biggest quibbles with supcom, the boring white explosions.

I would say that units should have a short white bright flash followed by a more traditional explosion and flying debris.

Totally agree

In TA I did cool stuff like dynamically generating pieces based off the mesh. Bouncing stuff around was easy.

In SupCom we couldn't get things to bounce off the ground because of the way the simulation worked. I know it sounds crazy but we interpolated between 1/10th of a second intervals linearly so it wasn't possible...

Did you (or someone else from GPG) change something in the simulation, that made this possible in Forged Alliance? Because, at least in Forged Alliance, there some very small objects that bounce off the ground, when an explosion happens. I also made a mod in fa were bombs could bounce from the ground like stone skipping.

Hate to correct you about your own game, but it's definitely possible, and I used it quite extensively when modding (To replicate TA explosions, in fact).

Blueprint code:

Code:

ProjectileBlueprint {
    Physics = {
        MinBounceCount = 3,
        MaxBounceCount = 3,
    }
}

Ok. Great insight.

I also have a follow-up question. Is there any single explosion of a unit that you would have like to be different from the previous games?

I thought that the tactical missile explosion should have been a bit more noticable, because it was hard to notice when you were being sniped by tac missiles. I thought that the tac missiles should have had an explosion similar to the support commander explosion of Supcom. Something that hangs around for some time so that it would be more noticable. Or perhaps just a pilar of smoke that hangs around for some time because the tac missiles dont do aoe damage?

It would also be interesting to see gravity affect debris from planet to planet: Angry Birds Space

This was another topic though: Explosion effects

How about explosions that melt the ice if you are on an ice moon? The water below would slowly refreeze.

Nice idea but I'm afraid Uber will say that this is one of the things that probably is not worth the effort since it will not improve the gameplay (related to the big *** load of code that would probably be needed to implement this). Hopefully we'll see things like this in the future though.

It'd be cool if artillery would have long duration explosions as their internal ammo reserves catch fire and explode. Basically leaving it on the field as a dangerous part of terrain for a few seconds while it constantly explodes and throws burning and exploding shells everywhere.

Tac missiles definitely had the greatest dissonance between their simple visual appearance and their crazy huge damage. It was incredibly annoying.

Do artillery weapons even store shells? The stationary versions draw their ammo from the energy supply, and the mobile ones generate their shells on demand. The only unit that could conceivably have ammo explosions are units that store high explosive ammo. Bombers are a likely candidate as they clearly carry a huge pile of explosive bombs. Missile swarm units would be another option as their ammo needs to be readied in advance, leaving a bunch of tubes filled with explosive missiles. But after the ammo is spent, there's nothing left but an empty husk.

An artillery unit would still be more volatile than a direct assault bot, simply due to its greater emphasis on lobbing gigantic explosive shells. But it wouldn't need much beyond that.

It's mostly just that I think it'd look cool. Too many units just go "boom" and then they're a passive wreck 0.5 seconds later. It's nice to have some units that take their time in being destroyed. Maybe even some wrecks that have subtle animations (flipped over tanks with still moving tracks, robots with twitching arms)

Put some emphasis on the amount of things that was just destroyed. I picked the artillery example mostly because artillery tend to be big and primary targets, so they're a good one to have a long death animation. But I can see using others as well.

Excessive death animations also get in the way of battle. You'll see in Starcraft 2 that when a unit dies, it is very obvious that it's no longer on the field of battle. There's rapid color change, quick explosions, and obscuring elements are gone in a jiffy.

Uber mentioned that they were going to have units leave TA style wreckage that blocks pathing and projectiles. So a unit would still be playing an active role on the field, as it blows up and turns into a wreckage obstacle. That can justify some rather lengthly and interesting death animations.

It's important to keep the wreckage mechanic consistent, and not have the dying process interfere with it. Basically, wreckage serves as your overkill mechanic. If a robot was hit hard enough to mulch its wreckage, then it gets gibbed. No waiting for a peewee to hit the ground.

I think we're mostly on the same line. With the wreckage mechanic, the unit stays on the battlefield. Likewise; a unit that's in the proces of exploding and still dealing damage to nearby units is still an active part of the battle, and as such it doesn't really matter that it takes some time.

As long as the status change from "fighting unit" to "dangerous explosive object" is clear enough, it can stay in the new state for a while.

i think it would be cool if not everything that died exploded. flying debris is also cool, id rather see pieces of a t1 robot flying scattered when shot by a heavy cannon (kind of conserving the momentum) than just blowin up the same way it would if it fell on acid or were fried by a laser. and that would also make explosions cooler when they do happen.

This is actually a very important issue for me. I hated the "just a white flash explosion" in supreme commander, it felt like a wet fart. I want red and yellow in my explosions! The game is about robots at war, explosions should be an important visual aspect of the game But in all seriousness, making the explosions have a little "umpf" makes even small battles look epic and when you have a big gun having a bigger explosion also adds to the reading of the player. In TA you had pretty much the same explosion for all scenario's, but there are 3 (maybe more) sizes. See a big explosion and you know the enemy has a big gun. Colored coded lasers were also very nice, but that is something for a different topic.

I have been playing TA again to feed my hunger for PA and the explosions looked awesome, not only the debris but just big onscreen explosions.

If the final game explosions look anything near the explosions in the trailer I would be a very very satisfied man.