Warhammer 40k – Tyranids and Cover – How does this work…

There has been much confusion, in the games that I’ve personally played, and in the discussion I’ve seen on the internet, on how the new cover rules work with Tyranids, or more specifically, with regular infantry and Monstrous Creatures (MC). The new rule that causes this confusion is found on p21 of the Warhammer 40k Rulebook (also called the Big Red Book, or BRB):

Intervening models
If a target is partially hidden from the firer’s view by
other models, it receives a 4+ cover save in the same
way as if it was behind terrain.

This does not mean that intervening models literally
stop the shots, but rather that they obscure the sight of
the firers or otherwise spoil their aim. A successful
cover save in this case might mean that the firer has
not shot at all, missing the fleeting moment when the
target was in its sights. This is because, in the case of
intervening friends, the firer would be afraid of hitting
his comrades; while in the case of intervening enemies,
the firer is distracted by the more immediate threat.

Scenic rocks and other decorative elements that players
might have placed on the base of their models are
always ignored from the point of view of determining
cover (you cannot take your cover with you!).

As you can see, a cover save of 4+ is very easy to obtain simply by placing a unit of troops in front of the units you want to get the cover save. This also means that your own units will give a cover save to your enemy from the shots you fire from units behind the “wall” of troops you use to give cover. Every Tyranid play, and most non-Tyranid players, know that lesser Tyranid units have HORRIBLE armour saves (6+ usually, but sometimes 5+). Your typical bolter shot will be AP5, so not even the 5+ saves will be of any use against even plain old bolter shots. A 4+ cover save for these units is the difference between losing 12 models that you’ll never get a chance to save, and making 12 4+ saving rolls and on average saving half of them.

The progression of thought of the Tyranid player, myself guilty of this, is thinking that this new cover rule will also apply to MCs. Anyone who has played MCs well know that most of them have a 3+ save, with very few having a 2+ or a 4+, but the majority will be 3+. These MCs usually have T6 too, with the only exception being the Harpy at T5. Try using a S4 AP5 bolter or even a S5 AP4 heavy bolter to cause a wound on that and it will be tough. However, weapons with S8 and AP3 of better are ideal. Make the roll to hit, the 2+ to wound and you’ve knocked that MC down a wound. A Tyranid MC will have between 4 and 6 wounds, so a focus firing from those big guns will take down a MC in the open with no chance of making any saving rolls. These MCs are usually 200-250 points and upwards of 400 points (in the case of a fully spec’d Hive Tyrant).

Because of the relative ease that SOME weapons have for killing MCs, cover would be amazing for them. The enemy is firing an AP2 weapon? No problem! I have a wall of guys in front of my MC so I get a 4+ cover save, right? Wrong.

MCs are treated differently than normal troops for the purposes of cover. Page 51 of the BRB states that MCs are treated like vehicles for the purposes of cover.

…for a monstrous creature to
be in cover, at least 50% of its body (as defined on
page 16) has to be in cover from the point of view of
the majority of the firing models. Also, standing in area
terrain does not automatically confer a cover save to
monstrous creatures – the 50% rule takes precedence.
Cover for them works exactly as for vehicles (see page
62). As usual, if you cannot clearly tell if 50% of the
model’s body is covered, modify its cover save by –1.

Darn. Looks like your MC will need to find a bigger wall. So is that it? Is there no way for a MC to find cover shy of just hiding behind a big rock or a tall hill? For Tyranid players, the 5th edition codex also remedies this, with Venomthropes.

The Venomthrope is like a Zoanthrope, but instead of being a ranged expert with a 3+ invulnerable save, the Venomthrope is a close combat and cover expert. The Venonthrope has no ranged weapons, but that doesn’t mean you should be charging him into combat either. The Venomthrope has one particular ability that makes him worth his 55 pts even without ever attacking with him: Spore Cloud. Spore Cloud gives the Venomthrope and any unit within 6″ of the Venomthrope a 5+ cover save against shooting attacks. Besides the 5+ cover save that will make your opponent hate shooting at you, the Sport Cloud also makes the Venomthrope and all units within 6″ of the Venomthrope count as having defensive grenades. But that’s not all. Any enemies wishing to assault a unit under the Spore Cloud have to make a dangerous terrain test.

So there you have it. 5+ cover saves for everyone, and if you keep those MCs in front of the V-thropes then your opponent can’t even shoot the V-thrope. If you do leave the V-thrope open to fire, make sure you put a Gant wall in front of him for the 4+ cover save.

Planetside map textures…

For those of you who didn’t know it, I can code too. *gasp*

Over this last weekend, I got distracted from my CS300 assignment, and found out a cool trick with some of the Planetside files. The end result was something that looks like this:

The process to get to this wasn’t terribly difficult, but there are still some areas I want to refine to increase my own involvement with the pipeline. Here’s the overview of my process (assuming you have Planetside installed on your computer) followed by a more in-depth look:

• Convert map .fat files into 1024 .dds files
• Extract mipmapped textures from 1024 .dds files (will create 6 .tga files for each .dds file for each level of detail)
• Trim out all but the 1024 highest detail textures (they will be 128 x 128)
• Splice the 1024 .tga files into a single .tga file
• Vertically flip the combined file and save as a .bmp
• Create a displacement file to serve as a height map
• Load the diffuse texture and height map into graphics engine
• Generate normal map from height map
• Set up scene with a directional light, using the diffuse texture and normal map for a quasi-3D look

Step 1: Go to your Planetside install directory. In that directory you will find a “maps” folder. In that folder there will be a lot of files with .fat extensions. These are the files you will want. You will need to grab one of these .fat files to start with (any one will work). I copy (do NOT cut) the .fat file I want to work with to a separate working directory. With some prodding on the interwebs, I was able to come across some code that would extract the .dds files out of a .fat file (I plan on writing my own extractor in the near future). This creates 1024 .dds files, so it’s best to put the .fat file into a folder all on it’s own because you will generate a lot of images from each of these .dds files shortly.

Step 2: Using an image conversion software, I convert the 1024 .dds files into 6 levels of .tga texture files (they will be uncompressed, which is good for our purposes). The smallest are 1×1, with the largest being 128×128.

Step 3: We just want to keep the 128×128 ones so that we have the highest resolution image to import. Just sort your files by size and erase all the small ones.

Step 4: Using a program written by my roommate, Andrew Nollan, the 1024 uncompressed .tga files are spliced together into a single 4096 x 4096 .tga file, which is to say that it is 32 tiles wide by 32 tiles high.

Step 5: The spliced file will be upside-down. Load it into your favorite image editor (even regular Paint will do) and perform a vertical flip on it.

Step 6: I save off the .tga as a .bmp file which saves a bit of space (65MB .tga to 20MB .bmp). Using CrazyBump, I load in the big .bmp file and tweak the file until it looks best in the previewer with the diffuse texture and normal mapping turned on. Save off a copy of the displacement map.

Step 7: I move both the regular map image and the displacement map image into my texture folder that I load from into my engine.

Step 8: Generate a normal map by creating a normal for each pixel by taking the height values stored in the 4 pixels above and below and to the left and to the right and taking the cross product of those 2 vectors (in very basic terms, but it’s actually not much more complicated than that).

Step 9: Create a plane in the xz plane and use the regular image as the diffuse texture and use the normal map as the values for the normals that are used in the lighting calculations. Using a single directional light with a big far fog threshold, you get the resulting picture.

That is my general order of operations for these maps. I have 3 continents extracted so far: Solsar, Hossin and Cyssor. My eventual plan is to create images of all of these maps together in one huge texture in the layout of the old Auraxis. Then I’m going to get a weather mask and overlay it on top of the “world”. I’m then going to wrap that onto a sphere and have a nice 3D model of old Auraxis in my own graphics engine. It should be pretty sweet.

Always have a plan (Part 2)…

A little while ago I wrote about a thing called a “plan”. I wrote how sometimes plans can break down. Well, so can cars… in the middle of San Francisco, CA… the night before you need to make an 850 mile drive up to Bellevue, WA. So in a case like this, the “plan” is actually knowing someone (or being someone) with a variety of skills.

We didn’t need a Ford mechanic. We just needed someone who knew more than how to change the oil in their car.

It was Saturday night, and Richard needed to drive Andrew to the airport. He calls me at about 10:20pm and tells me that the Ford Explorer just lost power steering, the battery light came on and the car was starting to overheat. You don’t have to be a car person to know that’s not a good thing. The top priority was getting Andrew to the airport though, and they were only about 5 minutes away. Richard calls me again from the unloading area of the San Francisco International Airport. Since he couldn’t turn the car off there, I told him to go to the nearest gas station he could get to. By the time of his call the car’s temperature gauge was already starting to peg on the H. I was worried the engine wouldn’t make it another 5 minutes. About that much time passes and I get another call from him. The car is parked at a nearby gas station.

When this mess started, I went over to the other room that our group was staying in and notified Evan, who owned the other vehicle we came down in, that we’d need to go help Richard and see if we could possibly fix the Explorer that night (after all, we wanted to leave San Fran the next morning at 7am). I convinced Chris to come along with us as well, and it turned out to be a good idea. I got the exact address from Richard and punched it into my Tom Tom GPS. We headed out to rescue Richard at about 11pm.

We got to the gas station that Richard made it to at about 11:15pm. The car had cooled down enough that it wasn’t too bad to look around under the hood. I took the air intake off so I could see the belt system easier. I was thinking that perhaps the alternator belt had broken or jumped off and that it had interfered with the power steering and water pump belts. Replacing a belt isn’t that difficult and probably wouldn’t set us back too far. With a flashlight, it only took me a handful of seconds to notice that the idler pulley didn’t look right. Not only did it not look right, but it wasn’t even attached to the engine anymore. I reached into a little nook on the engine and pulled the pulley out. I was amazed it was even still with the engine. The bolt was held on still do to a special kind of washer, so that was comforting. However, I knew that idler pulleys weren’t an easy part to find. Getting the pulley was going to be one thing, and finding on a Sunday was going to be the biggest challenge, because I expected it to be a dealer only part.

It was a good thing we brought Chris along. Having diversity on your team will always help out. Chris had AAA. It was now about midnight and he called AAA to get the car towed back to the hotel (we didn’t want to park it at a gas station in San Bruno). After about an hour, the tow truck hadn’t shown up yet, so Chris called AAA to find out what was delaying the tow truck. Turned out the tow truck driver got pulled over coming to get us. I guess we weren’t the only ones with bad luck that night. By the time the tow truck got the Explorer hooked up and towed it back to the hotel in San Fran, it was already 1:45am. Remember how we wanted to leave at about 7am? That wasn’t going to happen. Well, there was nothing we could do about it that night, so we all got some sleep.

I wake up at 8am and call the local Kragen auto parts store (my handy little Tom Tom could look up auto parts stores closest to me and give me their phone numbers, which turned out to be very useful). The particular store I called didn’t have the part, but he looked in the system and there was a different store that did have one and it was only 10 miles away. I had them hold it for me and I got Evan and headed out to go get it at about 9am. We got the idler pulley and a new belt (those Ford Explorer’s only had a single serpentine belt, to my surprise) and headed back to the hotel. Evan and I get back at about 10am and get everyone packing their stuff up. With all luck we would be on the road by noon.

I wasn’t too confident that I could totally fix the problem. After all, I didn’t even know if I had all the parts or not. The new pulley was just the pulley itself, and the old pulley wasn’t attached to the car when I found it nestled in the engine bay. I had no idea if it had all the necessary washers. With a few basic tools I got the new pulley on and it seemed to be working right. So Richard helps me get the new belt on and we work together to get it snugly fit. Nothing more to do but fire it up and see if it runs or not. Richard fires it up and amazingly nothing breaks. But I’m still not convinced that we’ll make it back without any more problems. We get the rest of our stuff together and leave San Fran at about 11:30am.

To everyone’s amazement, we drove that car 850 miles to Bellevue, WA and made decent time as well, arriving at just after 2am. I will never forget that trip to GDC, and I’m sure that no one else in that party will either.

Always have a plan.

Surprising your team…

My team members thought they knew me pretty well before heading to GDC last week. I tried my best to throw them for a loop that week. Of course, they had seen me every day wearing my nice slacks, dress shirts and ties and my fancy shoes. I gave them a taste of something… different.

DDR Dance Dance Revolution (DDR Extreme to be precise). In the Metreon building right next to the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco, there is a decent arcade called “Tilt”. On Friday, a few of us decided to kill some time and check out the arcade. We were all very tired from all the walking we did the first day. We hadn’t discovered how wonderful the public transportation option was yet. Due to our fatigue, the last thing on our minds was playing a game that involved rapidly moving our feet in coordination with techno/dance music. I, however, haven’t had the chance to play DDR in about a year or so, and even though time had passed, DDR is one of those things that once you learn you’ll never forget how to do it. I went to the token machine and got my 4 tokens for a few songs (on DDR arcade machines, one play is 3 songs).

In full dress attire, I tucked my silver tie into my salmon colored dress shirt and went to town on Rhythm and Police on standard mode. Wow! I sure was rusty. But my teammates that came over to watch me were pretty impressed, especially because I was doing alright even in my clunky dress shoes. I played another song on standard mode before bumping it up to heavy mode. While in heavy mode, if you miss too many steps or just are generally out of sync when you hit the right steps, your score bar will go down. If that goes down all the way, you will fail and the song (and any further songs you would have gotten to play) ends. I made it pretty far in the song, but I had forgotten about the fail rule for heavy mode. The 2 songs prior and the combination of a step up were too much for me and I failed about half-way into the song. That was it for my DDR at GDC. Or so I thought.

While about 10 of us were having lunch at the Metreon, we decided to go up to Tilt afterwards. We were casually walking to the escalator when someone said something to the effect of “Is Tim going to show us more DDR skills?”. Upon hearing this, the lead designer, Kye, from my other team got rather excited and hastened his step towards the arcade, and he mentioned that we should both play a few songs. Kye had apparently also missed DDR. We made our way to the token machines, got our tokens, and headed for the DDR machine. There was someone already at the machine, so we had to wait for him. This guy was clearly a DDR pro. Some of the hardest songs, on heavy mode too, seemed to be nothing for this guy. He maintained a combo the whole way through. Everytime. But he didn’t have the flair of a producer and a designer locked into a mortal dance-off.

And so the battle began.

And if you liked that, be aware that I’ve got nothing on this guy.

Always have a plan (Part 1)…

I put it on my business card for a reason.

Speaking of business cards and plans, never assume that since your business cards are “guaranteed” to be delivered to your house 2 days before you leave for GDC that they will in fact get to your house before you leave for GDC. They may, in fact, get to your city on that day, but there’s nothing stopping them from NOT getting delivered for no good reason, and then turning around and start heading for Salt Lake City, Utah. That’s where having a plan comes in.

There’s a handy thing called delivery intercept. I used it. It cost an extra $26. Remember that thing called a plan? The “plan” got tossed out the window and the backup plan got put in place. However, never assume that the backup plan will work either. Even though you are assured by 2 different representatives of the business card company that your $26 extra re-routing fee will “guarantee” that your business cards will arrive at your hotel before the biggest 2-day event of your career, it does not, indeed, guarantee that those business cards will actually make it to your hotel on time.

So now we see that sometimes when plans, and backup plans, fail you need to have a backup to your backup plan. This is the plan where you take the small sample image that you got as a preview for your business card (you know, the ones you paid extra to have rerouted to your hotel), resize it to the proper size and take it down to the Fedex Kinkos in the hotel lobby of the downtown Hilton hotel. But, never assume that just because you have the image, in the right size, with the proper space left at the edges for the bleed area, that your backup business cards will be able to be made properly.  You might have to edit the image to remove the red bleed mark (that shouldn’t even show up in the first place) out of the image.

That’s where having a backup to the backup-backup plan comes in. Make sure you bring your netbook EVERYWHERE. You never know when you’ll need to balance it on top of a tiny counter while in line at the Fedex Kinkos in a hotel lobby in a line of impatient people that you waited an hour to get through and use the tiny touchpad and Paint.net to edit the little red box line out of your business card image.

See, when you have a plan, a backup plan, a backup to your backup plan, a backup to your backup-backup plan, and especially a netbook, you can dodge anything that life tries to throw at you.

Always have a plan.