Messages

16

Work In Progress / Re: [SUGGESTION] Terminator series

« on: August 06, 2017, 07:37:50 pm »

It would raise the issue of receiving more personal than you have personal quarters for.
IMO, the neatest way to handle it would be to have the game handle a limited pool of volunteers, that you draw from whenever you recruit. Monthly results and specific missions would increase this amount.

About vehicles, the XCOM engine and screens really needs an empty hangar to attach them, so it works better if hangars are naturally more frequent than finding / receiving a ship.  I can imagine two different methods :
- The hangar buildings would be item storage and/or manufacturing as well, so that the player naturally builds more.
- The game mod would use ready-made bases that naturally have many hangars (this simulates how the resistance doesn't build from scratch : they take control of areas, or convince other groups to join them)

17

OXCE Suggestions Archive / Re: Smart (safe) explosive ammo

« on: August 06, 2017, 04:39:15 pm »

Meridian makes it *look easy* by putting much time, effort and skill into coding, for many months in a row. Please, don't be insulting by insisting that something "has to be easy" when he specifically answers that it's not.

18

OXCE Suggestions DONE / Re: trainingStatCaps - auto remove from training

« on: August 04, 2017, 03:36:23 pm »

The status YES / NO / DONE is very elegant.

19

OXCE Suggestions DONE / Re: Mindless charging AI (Leeroy Jenkins mode)

« on: August 03, 2017, 03:10:56 am »

Hmm what about a leeroychance instead of a boolean ? (percent chance 0 - 100, or floating point number 0.0 - 1.0) Applied every turn it would let modders use the features also for more subtle situations, like a Black Lotus agent going berserk 5% times, or a Spider normally rushing, but sometimes staying evasive and employing a ranged attack.

20

Work In Progress / Re: Modding soldier experience, specifically firing accuracy

« on: August 03, 2017, 02:37:03 am »

I'm sure mrgarrettscott didn't intend to reward the case where you force-fire a schrubbery (or a teammate)... At least this shows that it's not easy to plan for all the game situations.
Despite my own critics on XCOM's normal XP system, I also think there's nothing to do outside of a specific source-based mod which would perform all the changes that its designer wants, and fixes all the consequences.

21

Work In Progress / Re: Give me advice on grenades and smoke

« on: August 02, 2017, 03:02:13 pm »

In OpenXCom I usually spend the first turn by deploying a smoke grenade outside

It's often advised, but when I've tried to establish a standard practice of it, I got shot in the face several time through the smoke, by aliens in high levels (sectoid sniping from barn window, floater walking on a roof)
I suspect the default smoke pattern is less dense above ground zero, and/or the line of sight algorithm happens to more easily find a path that avoids 3 full smoke tiles.

22

OXCE Suggestions DONE / Re: Grenades, mines, etc. on minimap

« on: August 01, 2017, 08:31:46 pm »

The geoscape itself will start having performance issues before the minimap does.

23

OXCE Suggestions DONE / Re: Grenades, mines, etc. on minimap

« on: August 01, 2017, 05:40:46 pm »

A typical scenario where this optimization is harmful is when a soldier gets killed/stunned by reaction fire, an entire inventory (+a fresh body) will be dropped in place, and the player will never be lucky enough to have the pre-primed explosive end up as the "first" item.

24

Work In Progress / Re: Give me advice on grenades and smoke

« on: August 01, 2017, 01:16:05 pm »

The vanilla game doesn't need more powerful throwable explosives/proxy/smokes, however a better in-game explanation of smoke would really help new players get on even ground with players who already know the internals.

I think fire is very interesting, tactically, because as you can guess, the AI's self-preservation will make them avoid standing (ending turn) in flaming tiles. While smoke restricts the enemy shooting, this restricts their movement.
If your team is too small to cover all areas, put a large puddle of fire in places that you turn your back to.
Torch a window or this nasty rooftop which overlooks your deployment, and the enemy won't pop their head out to shoot you. Even if you never actually damage a single enemy with it, it can really reduce enemy dangers.

When not playing vanilla game, I use a mod with fire grenades, it's much more handy than the incendiary ammo of heavy weapons. Piratez-style molotof would be a nice variant, as it adds a bit of variety (grenade relay not possible, TU usage can be different from hard-coded prime+throw)

25

OXCE Suggestions DONE / Re: trainingStatCaps - auto remove from training

« on: July 08, 2017, 06:12:25 pm »

Or a notification screen ? Like when research or production end ?
This may be the most generic answer : if a game/mod is balanced to let training reach the unit caps, it's probably important for the player to swap units, or transfer them away from the training base.

Units have completed training at {BASE}
     [OK]   [View Base]

26

Resources / Re: Drages Weapon Sprite Collection

« on: July 08, 2017, 12:55:57 am »

I disagree with most everything you just posted I'm reluctant to derail this thread further, so I'll just advise you to read this entire thread to see what has been proposed, tested, and abandoned (and why!).
https://openxcom.org/forum/index.php/topic,896.60.html
If you test your idea and still think that you found the holy grail, please show it and we'll be very happy.

27

Resources / Re: Drages Weapon Sprite Collection

« on: July 07, 2017, 10:20:42 pm »

Here's one of the unsolvable cases :
Color 248,248,248 is a pure grey, but with vanilla behavior, it shades to a slighty pink tone as it gets darker.
Colors 252,252,252 and 232,232,232 are pure greys, and part of the colorless range.

Now, when somebody paints in photoshop with soft brushes and and pure greyscale, it WILL produce 248,248,248 sometime, and I'll wager the artist does not want these specific pixels to become pinkish when shaded, while the rest of the picture follows the greyscale range and stays grey.
 

28

Resources / Re: Drages Weapon Sprite Collection

« on: July 07, 2017, 07:25:17 pm »

There is much better tricks pixel artists know. But they hate limited palettes.

It's a misunderstanding. People who learn and master 24bit painting (typically in Photoshop) feel they are completely crippled because it's a completely different way of drawing a picture. And it's a way which can't be replicated in Photoshop, which is why a lot of professional game artists do most of their work in a different program (ex: Cosmigo Promotion for all the pixel-level graphics in Shantae DS games)

Now, it would still be nice to have OpenXCOM allow expanding the palette beyond the 256 original battle colors. Currently, this idea is completely stalled by the way the lighting work : The original game's lighting is so special, that nobody has been able to produce a mathematical formula which would extrapolate the same behavior for the entire RGB color space.

IMO, the issue could be nicely resolved by allowing multiple battlescape palettes. You'd only need a handful of knowledgeable people to produce some well-working palettes, and then many more people can draw modded graphics with these palettes, or convert to them.

29

Offtopic / Re: Invasion of the Body Watchers

« on: July 04, 2017, 01:11:36 pm »

I can't predict if you'll find many players and fame, but this is clearly the product of dedication and lots of work, something which you can be proud of.

30

Resources / Re: Neoworm Sprites dump

« on: June 06, 2017, 06:27:22 pm »

The lead vocalist of Massacration doesn't see anything wrong here.