aliens

Show Posts

This section allows you to view all posts made by this member. Note that you can only see posts made in areas you currently have access to.


Messages - psyHoTik

Pages: [1] 2 3
1
Suggestions / Inspiration for new aliens
« on: March 25, 2016, 09:56:24 pm »
There is an interesting documentary on youtube about development of UFO:EU:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LP7VjbuNEzg

Now, if you stop it at 13:50, you'll see some aliens projects that were considered for the game. Maybe some of them will inspire you for making new species :)
(I see a Holodrone there, so probably someone already found this. In that case please delete this thread)

2
Work In Progress / Re: psyHoTik's experiments
« on: March 25, 2016, 09:43:40 pm »
I couldn't really use this, can't see what was changed. And I also needed to consider OXCE changes as this was for vanilla only. So I made my own version:
So you don't need my code anymore? That's a shame  ;D
But seriously, if you could provide me with some tutorial on how to make those Git patches or how to use Github properly, I would be very grateful. I have Github installed but I used it only to clone the repository. I don't know what else should I do with it to make everything lege artis.

If we are talking about light, I have some idea for next experiment, but I need to earn some EXP and advance a level i coding first :) The idea is:
1. Soldiers do not emit any light or this light is very weak.
2. Items have "flashlight" parameter, defined in ruleset . Such items, when hold in hand, emit a cone of light in front of soldier, not around him.
3. By setting flashlight value we can set the strength of light. This way we can have weapons with build in light (weak light), handheld flashlights (decent light source but blocking a hand slot) and some hi-tech, elerium powered super-light sources (maybe mounted on shoulders, if this is codeable)
4. Turning light off allows to hide from some species of aliens, that don't see good during the night. Turning it on makes soldier visible and exposed.
5. Shooting at target in darkness gives big penalty to accuracy (don't know if this is codeable, as I haven't looked at accuracy routines yet). So you should either illuminate the target or use weapon with night scope (another flag in ruleset) that would ignore this penalty)
6. Ultimate achievement would be learning the AI to use such light sources too.

That's the idea. Anyone tried that? :)

3
Translations / Re: Soft hyphens
« on: March 24, 2016, 04:52:23 pm »
Or then they just had to develop the game so fast that they didn't have time to realize how cheesy their writing was for them to edit it. :-\
That's the point. First of all, it wasn't made by the authors of original UFO/X-COM (they only licensed the code) There are some articles on the Net about development history of TFTD. In general, first X-COM turned to be an unexpected success, so the studio demanded a sequel in six months. As the original authors said it's impossible the studio licensed the code from them and did TFTD on their own in about a year and with much bigger team than original UFO had .
https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2010-11-28-the-story-of-x-com-interview?page=2
https://scientificgamer.com/in-praise-of-terror-from-the-deep/

4
Work In Progress / Re: psyHoTik's experiments
« on: March 22, 2016, 10:25:26 pm »
Awesome! Thanks. Now I need to ask Meridian to include your code.
Better test it first :)

5
Work In Progress / Re: psyHoTik's experiments
« on: March 22, 2016, 10:15:52 pm »
Ladies and Gentlemen , by special request from SolariusScorch...

Experiment 3 - variable sight range for armors. I've add 2 parameters for rulesets, that define sight range at day and night. It was done in most simple way and may not be exactly what you've expected, but here are the details:
1. In ruleset "sightRangeDay" and "sightRangeNight" will define the sight radius. If you don't define it, the default values will be 20/9
2. sightRangeNight should be lower or equal than sightRangeDay, otherwise it may not work as planned (but feel free to test it)
3. For aliens sightRangeDay will be used for both day and night. It is not possible to make alien sight different at night without radical changes in gameplay, because your soldiers glow, so for game logic there's always a "day" around them.
4. The light radius around your soldiers is not changed so if you set the values high you will detect units out of light radius.
5. LOS blocking by smoke and fire is unaffected by those parameters.

I've included a simple mod to show how it works. It adds night vision for human armors and also make Floaters even more pathetic by halving their sight range (just for show). Sniping aliens and PSI rework included.

Also a bug was fixed - hitting an alien on their turn via reaction fire should no longer bring counter-barrage on shooting soldier if he remained unseen.

6
Open Feedback / Re: Why so Hard?
« on: March 21, 2016, 05:17:03 pm »
Unless the discs fly. (default explosion height 0)
Large rockets are you friends :) And since item limit no longer apply (unless you turn it on but it's you decision then) you can use them with no restrictions. Just have one soldier standing in Skyranger at the Pile o'Guns and throwing rockets to launcher operators below. Remember that reloading a weapon always costs 15 TUs, so it doesn't matter if you load rocket from the ground or from backpack. Launchers have high accuracy so making aimed shots from afar, out of 'disc sight range, typically do the trick. Don't forget about smoke screen.

7
Work In Progress / Re: psyHoTik's experiments
« on: March 20, 2016, 10:07:57 pm »
Well, how about making the AI:
a) Use smoke grenades if not hiding (the aliens in Apoc are capable of using them)
b) Be able to properly launch well co-ordinate assaults on multiple fronts
c) Act more clever when X-COM is preparing for an assault or camping up the door for reaction shots. Say, one alien opens the UFO door, another throws a grenade.
d) Does the UFO AI know about doors that can be opened in UFO? Pretty sure it is totally ignorant about this possibility, unlike the TFTD AI.
e) Civilians run towards the goddamn Skyranger, or at least towards somewhere hidden, rather than herp-derping around like mind-addled morons. Maybe actually keep some of the "herp-derp" behavior because sometimes people DO act derpy in unexpected situations.
f) PSI-controlled X-COM agents can pick guns and reload them. Always hated that kind of cheesery. Take the mind-control like a man!
g) AI isn't as interested in controlling soldiers unable to harm other soldiers - so no more "give lasers/firearms to psi-wimps so our top Power Armor soldiers aren't threatened anymore by psi". Bonus if the AI is smart enough to send that controlled soldier towards weapons that can harm the soldiers.
You are expecting too much, my friend :) Remember, that human brain has been perfected by millennia of evolution, while alien AI is actually 60 KB of code ;) Your ideas are interesting and reasonable but, sadly, most of them are uncodable or require a huge amount of work for little observable effect. Let's talk them over:

a) probably doable (somehow) but consider the following:
- Apoc is more action-oriented (especially in real-time mode), while UFO and TFTD are more about hiding and seeking and are best know for that you never know where to expect the enemy. Exploding alien smoke grenades would give a hint about enemy position, spoiling some atmosphere
- smoke will hinder AI much more than the player, as aliens, by default, require a visual contact to shoot, unlike X-com agents, who could shoot through the smoke
- it would require creating new object (alien smoke grenade) and changing spawning routines so each alien will be equipped with it.
- if implemented I see two functions for alien smoke: 1. alien is carrying primed smoke grenade, which explodes when alien is killed to cover his buddies. 2. when escape evaluation fails because every available tile is in X-com visual range, the alien throws smoke grenade or just drops it to the ground and then moves. Like I said, however, it won't be easy to implement.
b) very difficult (impossible?) to code (unless you can translate it to algorithms ;) )
c) as above
d) what do you mean? In OpenXcom the same AI is used for UFO and TFTD. It can definitely move through the doors, unless you mean opening doors by "right click", without crossing them which it cannot do.
e) that was exactly my idea, as I always were sorry for this poor guys too :) Unfortunately, as Warboy told me, it is impossible to "tell" the AI where the Skyranger is so this won't work. I will ,however, experiment with civillian AI and see what are the results. You may not believe but they are not acting random - they have routines for hiding and running away, similar to those used by aliens. I think their problem are mostly low health and TUs so they are doomed anyway  no matter how smart they would be. They also quickly "forget" what they were running from, which I will try to change if I'll have some time.
f) I think this one is already implemented if you turn on Alien Pickup Weapons mod. Keep in mind that mind control lasts only for one turn, so they may have not enough time to do it.
g) this one (choosing targets based on carried weapon) may ne even doable... Picking up weapons - see above

The aliens sniping from afar is very cool, but I guess some more changes will be needed to make it work nicely. Like for example being able to define sight range during a day, too (OXCE only allows it for the night.

Actually, you can consider this a request on my part. ;)
I'll see what can be done, but I cannot promise anything :) What exactly you need? Global setting for day/night visibility for the whole mod? Or sight radius as a parameter for given alien race? If we are talking about sniping aliens - do you mean sight range as visual range or the range that alien can shoot at unseen (revealed by spotter) target?

Also, question for the Devs: Is it possible to make AI set grenade timer to more than 0? I can't see what happens next, after grenadeAction is completed (and AI decided to use grenade). Where are the routines for priming and throwing itself?

8
Work In Progress / Re: psyHoTik's experiments
« on: March 19, 2016, 09:38:24 pm »
Still, your experiments are very good and such things are where great concepts come from!
Nice to hear that. It gives motivation for further work :)

Any plans for further experiments?
Say, alien UFOs attack X-COM craftm
Sorry, but my skills are far too low for such features. I'll focus mostly on battle AI, as it is actually quite easy to understand and modify.

9
Work In Progress / Re: psyHoTik's experiments
« on: March 19, 2016, 01:59:46 pm »
Experiment 2 - reworked/balanced Alien PSI

I've implemented mechanics described above for alien PSI. Now they use it mostly like the player do so no line of sight is required to perform PSI attack but the target must have been revealed (spotted by at least one alien) in current turn. This way:
- you won't get PSIed to death on first or second alien turn
- you have some means to defend yourself - as long as you keep you soldiers out of enemy sight, they are safe
- PSI "rod" tactic will not work anymore - unless you expose the "rod" to enemy but it's more probable that he will just get shot.
- on the other hand, alien psionics is not totally impaired by line of sight requirement and still pose a big threat if you get spotted.

I think it's more fair for the player than vanilla mechanics but also more challenging than PSI Line of Sight mod. Please try it yourself :) Sniping aliens are included in this build.

10
Suggestions / Re: Bleeding soldier indicator idea.
« on: March 18, 2016, 03:50:47 pm »
+1

I like the idea. In fact I've just realized how much I missed such feature :)

11
Work In Progress / Re: psyHoTik's experiments
« on: March 18, 2016, 09:19:16 am »
Can't you make a fork and have your changes there for everyone to see, remember it's GPL code ;)
Some day maybe :) I need to learn more how the forking works. Besides, at the moment, I don't consider myself good enough to do it in such official way ;) Of course I'll gladly share any code.

Do the alien do aimed shots if from afar?

Well, I'm not sure because I haven't touched the routines for choosing firing mode. But the distance is already included in this process so probably yes.

Does this include use of explosives - 'nades, Blaster Bombs, etc?
Actually, for grenades, blasters and (to some extent) PSI, this was already implemented, even in vanilla. The difference is, that the AI can use this weapons even after loosing visual contact, so implementing this routines for firearms would ruin the gameplay. I restricted sniping only to targets visible to AI in its current turn.

12
Work In Progress / Re: psyHoTik's experiments
« on: March 17, 2016, 11:13:57 pm »
Can't you do the adjustment in the code that loads the alien stats ? read "n" from the file, store "n*2" in memory.
That's what I meant. I'll do it but not today ;)

13
Work In Progress / psyHoTik's experiments
« on: March 17, 2016, 08:36:29 pm »
Here I will post my useless, lame, noob, unprofessional, untested, unlicensed builds. They are done mostly for fun and testing but maybe (by accident) some of them will be even playable ;)

Experiment 1 - Alien Snipers
The goal was to give the aliens the ability to shoot at revealed targets they don't personally see, just like X-com soldiers do in most cases (you fire at enemy spotted by another soldier). In theory this could make game more challenging and unarmed or weak enemies would still pose a threat as they could relay your position to their buddies. The build actually works and such game may be even considered fun...

...BUT...

...there is a huge side effect. If you meet an alien during your turn and he saw you, then your soldier will be visible to AI during subsequent alien turn, even if you run into a dense smoke, far away from any enemy eyes or kill the spotting alien. This means this soldier will be sniped even if no longer visible to any alien. The problem is that turnsSinceSpotted is updated every "full" turn (X-com+alien). This idea requires it to be updated every half of the turn, like grenade timers. I wonder if this could be done without corrupting too much... Anyway, feel free to test it yourself :)


Problem solved, now it should work as planned :) The change, however, effectively halved the alien intelligence parameter as TurnsSinceSpotted is updated twice a turn. Multiplying intelligence by 2 will be required to keep the status quo.

14
Builds & Ports / Re: [HELP] Compiling under Visual Studio 2015
« on: March 17, 2016, 08:18:47 pm »
EDIT: btw. did you add YAML_CPP_DLL also for Release mode? Maybe you added it only for Debug build.... that might be the cause...
Exactly, that was the case :) I didn't know that this is separate for debug and release. The code compiled successfully (although with 3991 warnings ;) ) and the game runs.

Try checkout this fork, it should be just building with no modifications after downloading Meridan's depencancies.
https://github.com/hartmark/OpenXcom/tree/vs2015
Thanks, I'll have that in mind in case some other issues come up.

Again big thanks for all of you, guys.

15
Builds & Ports / Re: [HELP] Compiling under Visual Studio 2015
« on: March 16, 2016, 09:15:27 pm »
Do you link all required files from yaml lib? This error expecting to have static variable `YAML::detail::node_data::empty_scalar` of type `std::string` defined somewhere.
The truth is... I don't know  :-[ I just followed the walkthrough from Ufopaedia, only difference is that I used Meridian dependencies for vs2015 and I add "YAML_CPP_DLL" preprocessor definition (also suggested by Meridian). I haven't modified the code yet. The effect is:
1. In Debug mode building is successful (no errors, no warnings) but the game crashes on start
2. In Release mode building fails - 2 errors (described above) and about 180 warnings, mostly "conversion - possible loss of data"

That's all I know for now. Like I said in different thread, I'm not a real programmer - I just wanted to experiment a little with AI code (I have some C++ knowledge) and hoped that build can be made with some tutorial, without going into too much details. It seems it's not that easy :(

How can I check if this whole YAML-thing is linked correctly? :)

Pages: [1] 2 3