Messages

166

Offtopic / Re: XCOM Inspired Fantasy Game

« on: May 11, 2020, 03:22:09 am »

Done implementing mine generator for now.

167

Offtopic / Re: XCOM Inspired Fantasy Game

« on: May 10, 2020, 08:16:20 pm »

If you don't want to use an engine, SDL2 for c++, don't know about c#. If you are fine with using an engine, Unity for c# and unreal for c++

If you don't want to use an engine, there is a high chance you won't achieve anything beside wasting time, and maybe learning a few basic OpenGL things. So I suggest you to use Unity, not Unreal or Cryengine, but Unity since it targets small teams and even single devs. With Unity you just import your assets and write gameplay code, instead of wasting man-years on all unimportant stuff. Moreover, OpenGL is slowly being pushed out by Vulkan, which is even harder to use, especially for newbies, and designed to be a part of an engine, maintained by a team professional graphics programmers.

I personally use SDL2, but that is because the game is 2d and I'm developing my programming language Symta first of all, and as of now it has barebone floating point support (i.e. no unboxed floats). Yet I still plan to integrate with Unity in the future, when the language becomes stable enough. Since I still use a few 3d effects, but software triangle rendering a bit slow, even on modern hardware.

TLDR: go with Unity.

168

Offtopic / Re: XCOM Inspired Fantasy Game

« on: May 09, 2020, 02:34:30 am »

To generate a mine dungeon, I will adapt the same city generator, but instead of streets there will be railroads and instead of buildings - caves

The city generator indeed needs to be extended since as of now it properly handles only overworld.

Crystal mine dungeon is like a requirement now, since there is now the crystal resource and all mines are obviously well guarded. Otherwise there is no justification of such crystals being a rare resource. Still have no name for the crystals, so they are just blue crystals.

169

Offtopic / Re: XCOM Inspired Fantasy Game

« on: May 07, 2020, 10:47:16 pm »

Still trying to come up with the soundtrack direction (Again with ducks for watermarking):
https://soundcloud.com/nash_gold/spell-of-mastery-tambourine-loop

Unfortunately this style can appear a bit too serious for a turn-based indie pixelart game. I had thoughts about more upbeat approach with a trumpets, but it was sounding just too annoying. Also couldn't find any good tambourine sample. Those coming with sf2 fonts sound like ass.

170

Offtopic / Re: XCOM Inspired Fantasy Game

« on: May 07, 2020, 05:34:51 pm »

I guess it depends on how complex a combat system you wish to make.  I was assuming hits that did 0 damage were still considered hits instead of misses.  OpenXcom seems to have a good combat system but perhaps there are some things you would like to do differently.  Maybe a hard hitting blow should always do some damage even against strong armor.  Or maybe a percentage of the damage blocked by armor gets converted to stun.  Maybe weapons should be a combination of damage types.  For example a grenade would do both blast damage and the shrapnel would do piercing damage.  Or a rifle bullet would be 80% pierce and 20% concussive while an arrow would be 50% pierce and 50% cutting.  This system could handle sandbags that can stop bullets but allow arrows to penetrate them and grenades that demolish them.  IIRC, the bullet arrow sandbag thing has to do with arrows having more momentum even though bullets have more kinetic energy.

I think more robust idea would be simulating the underlying physics. But that wont be a game, since there would be no nice percentages and play will never know how exactly the explosion will behave. With more complex like stuff like sword fight, simulating physics would be very hard. Although one game, Exanima, tries to do that somewhat believable.

A few games, like Stracraft don't have to-hit system at all. Armor just reduces the raw damage. Although there are still different kinds of damage, so say flame throwers are very efficient against zerlings. Although Starcraft has an exception with Protoss units, which have regenerating energy shields. To damage them, you need to first remove the shield, so they are immune to several forms of opponent micromanaging, since a single hit will do nothing. But if you flank them, the shields will go down fast.

171

Offtopic / Re: XCOM Inspired Fantasy Game

« on: May 06, 2020, 12:50:26 pm »

Generally, many games treat armor as primarily reducing damage.  Better armor usually doesn't make opponents miss more but instead lessens the effects of the blows received.

That doesn't always make sense. Say two knights wear plate mails and armed with short swords. Now one knight hits his opponent with a slash. A slash will get deflected by plates or by shield, and wont do much damage (beside maybe forced the opponent to backstep), unless he hits with the handle and to the head, resulting in some concussion damage. Now if that knight manages to get the sword between the armor plates, that will do the damage, and could be fatal. Same with a warhammer - it will do concussion damage, disregarding the armor.

In modern setting we have bullets and explosions. Bullets do piercing damage, if target has no armor, and concussion damage if target has bulletproof vest (i.e. a bullet can break you bone if shot into the vest from close proximity). Explosion is a pressure wave, which can break and send flying all kinds of objects, so there can be all kinds of damage, in addition to heat.

172

Offtopic / Re: XCOM Inspired Fantasy Game

« on: May 06, 2020, 01:27:41 am »

Added ballista turret for castle sieges.

Now the question is: should different weapon and armor types be implemented to make units a bit more different? Original XCOM games actually differentiated between explosion and piercing damage, as well as fire and laser damage. In addition units had full 3d armor directions, so units, like tanks, could be highly armored from sides, but still have a vulnerable belly. Other XCOM units had armor only in front of them, so any hit to the back or to the side were fatal. I currently have all units being vulnerable from behind and from sides.

Additional question: should armor reduce damage or just difficulty to hit?


Regarding castle sieges, they have remade Stronghold game once again, and it is even bigger mess of bugs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dg27Bvn4ElA
Firefly has beaten Blizzard to its game. Maps are even smaller. AI is non-existing. Comical Rowan Atkinson style characters are gone. And even from the graphical standpoint, shadows move separately from units, castle walls have a missing floor texture, while terrain looks like it came from some early 2000 3d RTS. Unfortunately Age of Empires now has no competition.

173

Offtopic / Re: XCOM Inspired Fantasy Game

« on: May 04, 2020, 08:26:39 pm »

Had to rethink how movement points work. Originally I had just `AP` stat associated with each unit. It got replenished with `full_AP` each turn. Then I have dropped the random to hit chance completely. That required introducing additionally `atk` state for each unit capable of attack. Atk basically mean how many AP unit can invest into defeating targets defense. Now some units are immobile, some or all the time. With simple units like destructive castle gates I can just set AP to 0, since gates are passive. But what about the stationary ballista turret, castle defender gets? It needs to have AP to invest into attack. Any any AP means the turret will be moving. That sucks, since I dont want player to move the turret.

Now I can add immobile, and some special kludge to prevent such immobile units from moving, but that wont solve the case with a turret mounted on top of a giant turtle. Giant turtle moves slowly, but the turret should still have a few shots per turn. That can be solved with mounting the turret as a separate unit from the turtle carrying it, but what about the gates with some active security system shooting intruders?

Given these shortcomings I have to introduce a hierarchical AP system. At the start of the turn units gets basic AP (based of stamina), which are then allocated in various sub-systems, like movement and attack. Alternatively one can use a disjoint system system, where all parts get their own AP meter, but living organisms usually have single energy source and single brain, while the time spent on movement or equipping some item is the time not spent to defeating opponents defense. So hierarchical dependency seems like a natural choice. In a real-time strategy you can probably incorporate it with your entity component system, but I have just hardcoded everything for now.

174

Offtopic / Re: What happened to Blizzard?

« on: May 04, 2020, 04:39:01 pm »

Blizzard slowly fixes the whole mess. Still no ladder (i.e. no way to find a skilled players, forcing you to play with noobs). Still haven't fixed the UI to fit with modern wide-screen displays (compare to C&C remaster UI which was even redesigned). Then again, Blizzard haven't called it remake, but instead used the term "reforged", which could have meant anything. So no deceptive advertisement there Imagine Square releasing Final Fantasy VII "Reforged", instead of the remake. And still I'm puzzled how Blizzard managed to produe actually good Warcraft movie, but failed to do something as simple as porting the old game to the new hardware - you still cant play it on your phone or a console, despite the Blizzard's "you guys all have phones" attitude.

175

Offtopic / Re: Footage of real XCom ufo interception.

« on: May 04, 2020, 01:45:14 pm »

No, it's a twin-engine aircraft.

Why is it so fat? Where are the wings?

176

Offtopic / Re: XCOM: Chimera Squad

« on: May 02, 2020, 11:42:40 am »

Reconnaissance? Bad idea, you'll just activate an overwhelming number of enemies. Flanking? Building a fire base? Using decoys?

To be honest original XCOM had no true recon. There were basically three options.
1. Using that huge tank, which took 4 cargo space.
2. Using cannon fodder rookies to bate aliens into exposing their positions. They took space, similar to tanks, but also got you penalized for losing operatives. In addition to their training cost.
3. Shooting the guided missiles into the fog of war, hoping they will hit something.

But yeah, it had no triggers, and the aliens were patrolling map unpredictable no matter what. That simple mechanics was actually very efficient at making AI challenging since a random pick covers very large decision space. So AI by extension can do anything not just what it was scripted to do.

But I guess new xcoms were inspired more by Fire Emblem, which indeed used various deus ex machina triggers.
https://feheroes.gamepedia.com/AI

All enemies in the game will wait until they are engaged by the player, after which the enemy will begin attacking the player units. An enemy unit is engaged if it is attacked or a player unit is present in its danger zone during the enemy phase.

Obviously such AI will result in a completely different, dumbed down, gameplay. No matter the game mechanics, which may as well be a perfect real world imitation down to atoms.

177

Offtopic / Re: XCOM: Chimera Squad

« on: April 29, 2020, 11:50:23 pm »

I think most drama and butthurt generated by modern games (especially the remakes) is due to, surprisingly, the larger budgets. Imagine yourself being a video game producer. You got a nice multi-million dollar project funded (video game development costs now approach billions of USD). Now you need to waste all these money somehow. So you funnel them into creation of some overpriced assets, like hiring a some famous music stars to voice the roles, and motion capture all characters. Additionally you use some premade engine, like Cryengine or Unreal, geared towards FPS games. Because custom engine would be too much effort, and modern engines require very specific expertise and a lot of time to design (i.e. even given unlimited money it would be impossible).

Now it is all nice and dandy if you're making an FPS rail shooter game with a static movie-like experience. But what if you're making an XCOM like game? Unreal engine is not really suited for destructible environments or tile based games. So you use continuous static space with static objects and linear story-driven mission progression. That way you can indeed use all these expensive assets and cutscenes. Even hire the best sci-fi author to write the screenplay. The resulting game is very predictable, can be easily debugged and shipped on time. Corporate people in suits love that, but they usually hate video games (really not their fault modern customers demand this complex crap, instead of the good old booze). Same BTW happens with journalism today, when everyone, even your parents, have a youtube channel and some web-log (big media got very annoyed they have to be more fun, niche, dynamic and interactive, or just die).

Now original XCOM games up to Apocalypse had a very turbulent development history, and mostly depended on actual game design being composed of systems creating some dynamic, but ultimately fun holistic experience, instead of being a movie/book with static content (i.e. think Dwarf Fortress). Such product is very hard to design and debug. You need Gollop for that, not that random manager guy who can't program even a checkers.

BTW, DF devs finally decided to add some UI. And it is not pretty. Just some confusing 2d tiles. Can't believe they could not crowd fund a proper 3d UI. Still better than ASCII I guess.

178

Offtopic / Re: XCOM Inspired Fantasy Game

« on: April 29, 2020, 05:08:11 am »

Implemented castle and palisade gates. For now they work like usual units, so no special siege equipment is required.

There was once a Master of Magic clone game, called Age of Wonders, and it too had castle gates, while the only one way of damaging them was battering ram, which was really slow, especially when you move it from the other side of the map. Had you got a misfortune losing it, the battle was basically lost. It was annoying to say the least. Age of Wonders sequels completely removed that mechanics. Original Master of Magic had no city gates at all, but there was that firewall spell, which damaged enemy units entering the city. Then there was this British Stronghold game, built completely around castle sieges. Surprisingly they allowed any unit do damage walls, given enough time. There was also a fantasy version of the Stronghold game, with flying units, but they really rushed it and it ended up being garbage.

In my cases there are also engineering units, like the imp, which builds ladders and digs tunnels. Guess siege units, like cannons, do additional damage against the gates and walls.

Also, I have cleaned up the UI a bit, moving time and resource indicators into the panel right side. Now there are basically two buttons: end turn and leave map. Player can leave at any moment, without losing any unit that is not surrounded by enemy and has full movement. Obviously leaving castle a siege map leads to the loss of the city.

179

Offtopic / Re: Warhammer 40K Chapter Master

« on: April 29, 2020, 01:17:59 am »

I do not think this is Xcom engine,
- tiles have different dimensions (its look like unit is two tiles tall)
- there is not "black map" at beginning
- inventory is handled differently
- allow zoom out
- flying work different

If this engines have some in common then it was very very heavy rewriten.

Yeah. Its uses the Wages of War engine: https://www.mobygames.com/game-group/game-engine-random-games-1996-2000-strategy-engine

They made numerous XCOM clones with it.

180

Offtopic / Re: Footage of real XCom ufo interception.

« on: April 27, 2020, 11:59:32 pm »

Pentagon declassifies Navy videos that purportedly show UFOs
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/pentagon-declassifies-navy-videos-purportedly-show-ufos/story?id=70364183

"The aerial phenomena observed in the videos remain characterized as 'unidentified'", the spokesperson added.


I bet these are some lightning related phenomena or maybe camera problems. Like i.e. interference for electromagnetic activity in these fat clouds.