Exploding barrels in Dune2000!!!

Klofkac · October 16, 2020

Hi all!

I have some fun news for you! During development of Templates.bin editor and researching various byte values, I made a pretty nice discovery: There is a support for explosive barrels in Dune 2000 (similar to those barrels that are present in Red alert or Emperor: Battle for Dune, IIRC). This functionality is UNUSED in the original game and it is probably a leftover from development stage. I discovered how to activate it and had loads of fun playing with this around!

I changed the silos to explosive barrels that can pretty nicely destroy whole base!

I'm attaching modified Templates.bin and a testing map (modified version of A9V2). I added lot of silos into your and enemy bases so just try to attack some and see the MADNESS happen!

BARRELS.zip

Feda · October 16, 2020

Yo man, impressive! We discussed on the discord server about workarounds to achieve this a while back, and now you discovered that it was actually in the game. Pretty neat

Btw, how's the progress on the new tibed, so to say?

firefly101 · October 17, 2020

This is neat, I hope you find other things!

Cm_blast · October 17, 2020

I never expected to see that kind of stuff on dune 2000 at all.

Heh, even on the new campaign I am working on I gave to the player saboteurs just to destroy some iddle turrets because it would be too boring to kill with only infantry and troppers are not part of the map. Not like I need it right now as having sabos fits my story, but I can think on several commando missions already created that could benefict by having this.

Fey · October 17, 2020

lmao, and here I was thinking of just exploiting the newly discovered Saboteur behavior to create a stationary explosive barrel kind of unit
related gif here: https://i.imgur.com/gbl9PUr.mp4

beautiful to see that there is legit explosive barrel behavior I'll see if I can convert, say, some of those Heighliner crate graphics over for use as an 'explosive boxes' structure. munitions crates!

edit: by the way, how did you activate it, exactly?

edit 2: also I'm getting this error: "Invalid blit, height + toY > IpTITo->height [ gGameTicks = 0 ]" every time I try to start the barrels map. did you forget to send a file or something? and yes, of course I added the files to a fresh installation to be sure

Edited October 17, 2020 by Fey

Klofkac · October 17, 2020

16 hours ago, Feda said:

Btw, how's the progress on the new tibed, so to say?

It's progressing pretty well and I hope to release another preview version soon. There's still plenty of work and more stuff to do on D2kEditor, but the structures editor is getting into shape already.

1 hour ago, Fey said:

newly discovered Saboteur behavior to create a stationary explosive barrel kind of unit

Humm, how is that made?

1 hour ago, Fey said:

I'll see if I can convert, say, some of those Heighliner crate graphics over for use as an 'explosive boxes' structure. munitions crates!

Great idea! Looking forward to see this in action.

1 hour ago, Fey said:

by the way, how did you activate it, exactly?

In Templates.bin there is one section that was marked as unknown by Lovalmidas when he was doing his big research of Templates.bin. I was examining purpose of those bytes, and for example some bytes tell which building type is responsible of a specific build queue (my previous post about making separate build queue for Sietch). I was doing further research and there is one byte which tells that "This building type behaves as explosive barrel". If this byte is changed (originally it's -1 meaning no building), that building will "fire from a weapon" when destroyed OR sold. There's another byte that tells which weapon such building uses when destroyed/sold, and for better effect I changed it to devastator self-destruct weapon. There are more interesting bytes in that section, here you can specify for example which unit is brought by carryall when you build a refinery, which unit is used for carryall itself, which unit is used as frigate and more and more.

1 hour ago, Fey said:

also I'm getting this error: "Invalid blit, height + toY > IpTITo->height [ gGameTicks = 0 ]" every time I try to start the barrels map. did you forget to send a file or something? and yes, of course I added the files to a fresh installation to be sure

I checked this and used these files on a clean Gruntmods installation, and everything worked for me without problem. Aren't you, by chance, trying this on 1.2 version of game instead of 1.6? What happens when you start a new game i.e. mission 1? Are you able to build a silo and destroy it to see the effect?

Fey · October 17, 2020

On 10/17/2020 at 7:52 AM, Klofkac said:

It's progressing pretty well and I hope to release another preview version soon.

Hell yeah, brother!

On 10/17/2020 at 7:52 AM, Klofkac said:

Humm, how is that made?

The explodey Saboteur? It's the combination of a few different changes.

First, the Saboteur is based in the [GRENADIER] unit. This allows us to keep the special case for the Saboteur, preserving its special AI behavior, temporary stealth suit, infiltration ability, and training behavior. The game will automatically use GRENDEATH on despawn of any sort - if the Saboteur is killed, if it uses its suicide attack, if it infiltrates a building, anything that removes the unit from play will trigger the "on-death" damage. That's why, despite entering a single structure, nearby units or structures to the tile where the Saboteur entered would start smoking or blow up.

The Grenadier goes under [SABOTEUR]. This works fine and Grenadiers remain near the top of the unit sidebar icon layout.

Secondly, the GRENDEATH damage is bumped up! Given powerful explosive damage like what an airstrike or Death Hand could do. It only triggers once per Saboteur, so it needs to be a high value, single 'shot' kind of weapon.

Third, the Saboteur is given a new 'weapon' with a range that forces it to use it only on targets in adjacent tiles. This new 'weapon' is less powerful than the normal on-death damage, but notably deals extremely high damage to the Saboteur's armor type. This allows it to trigger its "on death" damage on command by using this "weapon" on nearby enemy units, where its new "weapon" will kill the "firing" Saboteur every time, and only adds a little damage overall as the on-death damage is the most important part. Their "weapon" only exists so they can trigger that on-death damage on enemy units.

Finally, to sell the game mechanic and imagery, we give the Saboteur an on-death explosion that's purely visual. Without it, the unit simply dies, but deals heavy on-death damage anyway, which just looks silly.

This new mechanic makes Saboteurs much less micro-intensive as, thanks to their stealth suits and on-death damage which is guaranteed to go out whether they are killed by enemy units or manage to successfully execute their suicide attack, you can just stealth them and send them at something and they'll definitely be close to enemies before they die. They're much more similar to the other 'one-clicks' - airstrikes and Death Hands.

Anyway, hope that answers your question.

On 10/17/2020 at 7:52 AM, Klofkac said:

In Templates.bin there is one section that was marked as unknown by Lovalmidas when he was doing his big research of Templates.bin.

Oh yeah, I'm referring to the other thread and the bytes list constantly! Thanks again for that research, it's proven remarkably useful. But, uhh, I don't think you specified which byte number should be changed, and to what, for the 'explosive barrel' behavior.

On 10/17/2020 at 7:52 AM, Klofkac said:

I checked this and used these files on a clean Gruntmods installation, and everything worked for me without problem. Aren't you, by chance, trying this on 1.2 version of game instead of 1.6? What happens when you start a new game i.e. mission 1? Are you able to build a silo and destroy it to see the effect?

Ahh, I'm using the Dunemaster version. I guess I can see if that makes a difference! Once you specify which byte I should change, and to what, of course.

EDIT: I went and copied the hex from your templates.bin to one of my already-modded .bins, and it seems the behavior works. Fascinating! Exciting! This will be tons of fun to play around with. I still don't know exactly what byte was changed or how, but it seems that worked. If you could get reeeally specific (because I'm an idiot) about which byte was changed to get this behavior in the first place, AND which byte one should change to change the sort of "on-death" weapon used by this "structure," that'd be great!

Anyway, thanks again so much for this awesome find!

EDIT: Wait, now it's not working again. 😂 Pls halp, need specific byte info

Edited October 19, 2020 by Fey

Fey · October 23, 2020

ayy lmao I fixed up the rest of the graphical assets for this

for posterity, here's that little demonstration video of this meme in action: https://i.imgur.com/t7q6txL.mp4

and for the modders who want the new assets to play with, here they are:

frame numbers those are meant to replace are in the file names. here's builexp and offset data:

Spoiler

Klof's awesome new editor allows us to use new structure types, and the graphics these overwrite are duplicates of other assets, so it replaces nothing!

Spoiler