OpenXcom Forum
Modding => OpenXcom Extended => OXCE Suggestions DONE => Topic started by: karadoc on January 03, 2023, 01:53:11 am
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The new system is working pretty well. It requires some changes of playing habits, but it is an improvement overall.
I think the only significant inconvenience is this business of disembarking all the crew so that you can equip them in the base, then putting them back on the craft again. It's a lot of easy messing around, and remembering / finding the crew you want. For me personally, I think the ideal case would be if the 'inventory' button from the craft equipment screen did a bit of magic to make it easier... I'd like it to show only the soldiers on the craft, but with all base equipment - including equipment that might be held by other crew who aren't on the craft. And when this inventory screen is closed, changes to soldier equipment are reflected in the craft equipment. I think most of this would be achieved by what you (Meridian) talked about in another thread. i.e. if you automatically take the crew off the ship for the inventory screen, then put them back on the ship when the screen is closed. I think that would achieve almost exactly what I'm asking for - except that I always want the inventory screen to not show any soldiers who aren't on the ship.
By the way, on a semi-related note, on my own personal OXCE version I've implemented a way to load craft equipment without removing current equipment. Here (https://github.com/karadoc/OpenXcom/commit/e51e9a78bb23305e96584abe3fbc599482fb2222). I'm not sure if this is interesting to anyone else. The main use-case is when you have a template saved for general additional craft gear that you want to add after you've already put your soldier on-board. (I went for the easiest implementation I could think of. Holding ctrl when clicking the template makes it add rather than replace the equipment; but maybe a 'nicer' implementation would have a toggle button on the load window.)
Maybe later I'll try implementing the stuff about soldiers in craft that I described above. But that's a lot harder, and my vision might not agree with everyone else's needs anyway, so I'm a bit worried that would be wasted effort.
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I think most of this would be achieved by what you (Meridian) talked about in another thread. i.e. if you automatically take the crew off the ship for the inventory screen, then put them back on the ship when the screen is closed. I think that would achieve almost exactly what I'm asking for - except that I always want the inventory screen to not show any soldiers who aren't on the ship.
Well, this functionality was originally added to allow equipping soldiers, which are not on any craft.
For example on an outpost, without a craft or even a hangar, facing potential base defense.
Removing its primary function seems... inadequate.
But I get what you're saying.
By the way, on a semi-related note, on my own personal OXCE version I've implemented a way to load craft equipment without removing current equipment. Here (https://github.com/karadoc/OpenXcom/commit/e51e9a78bb23305e96584abe3fbc599482fb2222). I'm not sure if this is interesting to anyone else. The main use-case is when you have a template saved for general additional craft gear that you want to add after you've already put your soldier on-board. (I went for the easiest implementation I could think of. Holding ctrl when clicking the template makes it add rather than replace the equipment; but maybe a 'nicer' implementation would have a toggle button on the load window.)
Adding equipment instead of replacing it, is on my todolist as well (someone requested it), I'll look at your commit and try to reuse what I can.
But I'd like to add a new button instead of holding CTRL. Or something else that also Android folks can use.
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I'm not suggesting that you remove the equip from base functionality. I think that's good. My suggestion refers only to when you enter the inventory screen from the craft equipment screen.
To clarify, suppose you are on the main base screen. If you click soldiers, then select 'inventory' from the drop-down menu, then you get the full base equipment screen - exactly as it is now in the current version. But if you if you click the craft screen->select a craft->equipment->inventory, then it should bring up an inventory screen only for the soldiers currently on that particular craft. Which is also what it currently does, but I'm suggesting that it should show the equipment from the base's storage on the ground rather than the spare equipment from the craft on the ground - probably implemented by silently automatically taking the soldiers off the craft before the inventory screen, then putting them back on again when it is closed.
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I'm not suggesting that you remove the equip from base functionality. I think that's good. My suggestion refers only to when you enter the inventory screen from the craft equipment screen.
A misunderstanding, I didn't talk about the Craft Equipment screen at all.
I should have quoted the part I was responding to.
Edited my post now.
To clarify, suppose you are on the main base screen. If you click soldiers, then select 'inventory' from the drop-down menu, then you get the full base equipment screen - exactly as it is now in the current version. But if you if you click the craft screen->select a craft->equipment->inventory, then it should bring up an inventory screen only for the soldiers currently on that particular craft. Which is also what it currently does, but I'm suggesting that it should show the equipment from the base's storage on the ground rather than the spare equipment from the craft on the ground - probably implemented by silently automatically taking the soldiers off the craft before the inventory screen, then putting them back on again when it is closed.
I don't think it's this easy, it will likely require more, maybe even a lot more.
I guess this is why I assumed you're talking about Base Equipment instead of Craft Equipment.
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I don't think it's this easy, it will likely require more, maybe even a lot more.
You're right. I just started browsing the code to see what would be required. It's a mess. To achieve what I was asking for would either require a lot of untangling to separate the inventory stuff from the normal battle creation stuff; or alternatively, an increasingly high tower of kludges - where we do some weird crap to get the desired result. Earlier I was suggesting moving the crew out of the craft; but now I'm thinking maybe temporarily moving all of the base equipment into the craft might work better. I'm not quite ready to launch into it, but if I was in a big hurry to get this done today, I'd try this:
* Get the list of all items currently on the craft.
* Subtract items that are equipped by the soldiers on board the craft.
* Temporarily save that list for later.
* Move all items from the base into the craft.
* Create and run the inventory fake-battlescape thing in the usual way.
* Merge the temporarily saved item list with whatever items the soldiers have equipped at the end of the inventory screen.
* Remove everything from the craft except the things on that newly merged item list.
That's it.
That's my current plan, but I don't intend to try it right now. I'll read a bit more of the code and think about it a bit more first. Maybe there is a better way.
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Ok. I've made the changes I was talking about. I've only barely tested that it is working correctly, but I'm expecting this to be a major improvement to the new system.
Here is the patch: https://github.com/karadoc/OpenXcom/commit/b64c4fd23ef1eb59a57acfd3aa4441a06c79effd
The behaviour is what I described earlier (also described in the commit message on github).
The gist of it is that if go into the inventory screen from a particular craft, you'll see *all* of your base items. And if you change any soldier's equipment from that screen, those changes will be reflected in the items that are loaded onto the craft.
The way this is implemented is by temporarily moving all base equipment on the craft, and then moving it off again after the changes have been made.
There are a couple of things that still need to be improved:
- The code currently assumes no items limit on the craft. If there is an item limit, then it may not be able to fit all of the base's items - and so... that will be kind of annoying. I thought about temporarily repressing the item limit; but I'm not sure how best to re-impose the limit afterwards. So I'm just leaving it on the 'todo' list for now.
- Changing soldiers' equipment from the craft inventory screen changes the items on that craft. Which is good... but unfortunately there is now an inconsistency. Because if the soldiers' items are changed from the base inventory screen instead, then it *doesn't* change the items on the craft that those soldiers are assigned to. Ultimately I think it should... but I haven't looked at that part of the code, so I haven't implemented it. (and also, I don't care that much - other than it being potentially confusing for other people.)
One last thing: while making these changes, I noticed and fixed a minor bug in the existing code: When loading an equipment list for a craft, if a warning box was triggered due to missing items then the item list would not be correctly updated to show which items are equipped by the crew. (The bug was that the warning box caused the list update to be suppressed.)
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I've been playing with the craft screen inventory changes (https://github.com/karadoc/OpenXcom/commit/b64c4fd23ef1eb59a57acfd3aa4441a06c79effd) that I made, and I'm pretty happy with how it works. For me, this is the change that pushes the new equipment system from being an ok alternative, to being a superior system. For how I use the equipment screens, this is a necessary upgrade. However, there is still one minor annoyance that I'd like to fix up. Unfortunately, it might take a bit of rewriting to resolve. It's about what happens when there is not enough equipment for the 'extra' craft gear (i.e. items that are on the craft, but not assigned to any soldier on the craft).
When there is plenty of equipment, moving a soldier onto the craft will move their equipment with them, and moving them off the craft moves their equipment off too - leaving exactly the same 'extra' equipment on the craft as when you first started. That's good. But if there is not enough items in the base for both the soldier's equipment and the extra equipment, it's different. The soldier claims ownership of the equipment so that they can complete their loadout; and so when they leave the craft they take the equipment with them.
For example, suppose you have 2 laser rifles available in your base and you want to bring them on every mission, so you assign them as 'extra' equipment on the craft. If you then equip the laser rifles in your soldiers' loadouts, those laser rifles will be taken off the craft when the soldiers are swapped out. This probably isn't what you want.
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What I'd like is for the craft to remember the extra equipment assigned, so that when soldiers leave the craft, that amount of extra equipment remains unchanged - even if it was used in some soldiers loadout. As for how to implement it... my immediate idea involves heaps of changes - which I'd probably just go ahead and do if it was my project; but I suspect you'd be relucted to accept the changes. You might prefer it to be done in a different way.
Here's an outline of what I have in mind: the craft's `_tempSoldierItems` list that is currently used for soldier equipment should be replaced with `_extraCraftItems` to store the extras list instead of the in-use list. I figure that the total soldiers' equipment can be calculated at any time, and so we don't really need to store it. Whereas the extra items is not always inferrable; it must be recorded if we want to remember it. `calculateTotalSoldierEquipment` would remain, because it is useful - but instead of storing the results in a member variable, it would simply return the entire vector. The calling function can store that vector for however long it needs it. (Returning a vector in C++ was once a bad thing to do, for efficiency reasons. But that's no longer an issue, thanks to the magic of `std::move`.)
Anyway, that would be a significant amount of stuffing around with the API of the new code, but the logic is pretty much unchanged. Currently (without these API changes) we have total equipment on the craft, and a calculated list of what the soldiers are using; and we use `extras = total - used` to work out the leftovers. The problem is that the leftovers may only be a subset of what we want to reserve to stay on the craft. By storing the actual list of items that we want to keep on the craft we avoid that problem. Incidentally, I think it's a bit weird that `_items` and `_tempSoldierItems` are dynamically allocated rather than just being on the stack. I guess maybe there is some legacy reason for `_items`, and the new one is done that way for consistency? I guess it isn't important enough to change that now.
In any case, that's my current thinking of how it should work. I'm just not sure whether or not everyone is on the same page about the desired behaviour, or the implementation.
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When there is plenty of equipment, moving a soldier onto the craft will move their equipment with them, and moving them off the craft moves their equipment off too - leaving exactly the same 'extra' equipment on the craft as when you first started. That's good. But if there is not enough items in the base for both the soldier's equipment and the extra equipment, it's different. The soldier claims ownership of the equipment so that they can complete their loadout; and so when they leave the craft they take the equipment with them.
Yes, if there is not enough items, somebody has to claim it, either the soldier or the craft. There is no third option.
For example, suppose you have 2 laser rifles available in your base and you want to bring them on every mission, so you assign them as 'extra' equipment on the craft. If you then equip the laser rifles in your soldiers' loadouts, those laser rifles will be taken off the craft when the soldiers are swapped out. This probably isn't what you want.
For me, the clear winner in this case must be the soldier, not the craft.
That was the defining requirement of this whole feature.
So yes, it is exactly what I want.
Otherwise I cannot trust this feature to keep my equipment on my soldiers, they will randomly start losing it... which I definitely don't want.
What I'd like is for the craft to remember the extra equipment assigned, so that when soldiers leave the craft, that amount of extra equipment remains unchanged - even if it was used in some soldiers loadout. As for how to implement it... my immediate idea involves heaps of changes - which I'd probably just go ahead and do if it was my project; but I suspect you'd be relucted to accept the changes. You might prefer it to be done in a different way.
Before we go into how much rewrite I'm willing to accept... how would this even be done GUI-wise?
Do you add a new GUI or a new set of left/right arrows to allow player to define this "extra" equipment? (the current left/right arrows need to stay to define the total equipment on the craft)
And how would it look like when I have 6 rifles on the soldiers, 2 extra rifles and 20 rifles together on the craft? 6/2/20? Or 6/8/20? Or 6/+2/+14?
How will it look like when I have 6 rifles on soldiers, 2 extra but only 7 together on the craft?
What about if I have only 3 rifles in total in the craft?
Isn't having up to 3 numbers next to each item just too much? (not to mention not enough space on the GUI)
And how would this work together with the loading/saving of craft equipment via F5/F9?
(And of course my feedback to previous statement also applies here. I'd definitely want the game to take away from the "extra", not from the soldier's loadout.)
Here's an outline of what I have in mind: the craft's `_tempSoldierItems` list that is currently used for soldier equipment should be replaced with `_extraCraftItems` to store the extras list instead of the in-use list. I figure that the total soldiers' equipment can be calculated at any time, and so we don't really need to store it. Whereas the extra items is not always inferrable; it must be recorded if we want to remember it. `calculateTotalSoldierEquipment` would remain, because it is useful - but instead of storing the results in a member variable, it would simply return the entire vector. The calling function can store that vector for however long it needs it. (Returning a vector in C++ was once a bad thing to do, for efficiency reasons. But that's no longer an issue, thanks to the magic of `std::move`.)
We can just use both, temp soldier items and extra items.
Btw. `_tempSoldierItems` is not persisted even today. It's just a helper variable.
Anyway, that would be a significant amount of stuffing around with the API of the new code, but the logic is pretty much unchanged. Currently (without these API changes) we have total equipment on the craft, and a calculated list of what the soldiers are using; and we use `extras = total - used` to work out the leftovers. The problem is that the leftovers may only be a subset of what we want to reserve to stay on the craft.
Here we would need input from the players and people who requested this feature originally.
You will always have one of the 2 problems:
1. if there is not enough items in total, there won't be enough "extra"
2. if there is not enough items in total, there won't be enough for the soldiers
For me (as a player), #2 is not acceptable.
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In the current system as it is, I can accidentally mess up my craft equipment simply by adding a soldier and then immediately removing it. I think this is an unnecessary pitfall. Adding a soldier and then removing it should result in the same equipment setup as if you'd clicked nothing at all; and that's one of the things my suggested change aims for.
In terms of the GUI, I imagined is that would look identical to how it does currently. It's slightly tricky, because there are effectively *three* important numbers: held items, extra items, and actual total items; and we're effectively trying to represent those three with just two numbers; but I think the cases where total ≠ held + extra aren't important enough to put in a third number. The left arrows and right arrows would do just what they do now: i.e. attempt to take an item off the craft, or attempt to add an item to the craft. This is effectively done by increasing the 'extra' items. In cases where we attempt to add an item when there is not enough available, the extras does not increase; but in cases where we attempt to take away an item that is reserved by a soldier, the extras *does* (silently) decrease. When the craft has no soldiers, whatever items are in the craft should match the 'extras' list exactly. (I hope this would be clear and intuitive enough without the need for any extra buttons or numbers on the screen.)
I'll say a bit more about why I'd want this. I agree with you that when a soldier is removed from the craft, items have to either go to the craft or the soldier. You've said that they should go with the soldier. That's interesting to me, and obviously I disagree (otherwise I wouldn't be suggesting all this). From my point of view, whenever a craft leaves the base to go a mission, we're splitting our soldiers and equipment into two disjoint sets: those who are staying in the base, and those who are going to the mission. And I think the ones going on the missions need to be given priority. I want those ones to have exactly the right soldiers and exactly the right equipment. The ones staying behind can have whatever is left over.
I'd say that it is totally normal to not have enough equipment for every soldier to have their desired gear at all times. For example I might have 5 soldiers who are longbow specialists, but I only have 2 longbows. If I don't put more than two of those soldiers on a mission at the same time, they get their loadout. But if all three are on at once, then someone misses out and has to equip something else. That kind of thing happens a lot. I assume it happens to everyone for different types of equipment at different times. It's most obvious when there is a base defence mission. When every soldier is on the mission all at the same time, the player often finds that there are some gaps in what they'd like to equip.
In any case, like I said, I think it's normal for there to not be enough equipment to fully outfit every soldier in the base all at once. And I think the soldiers on the craft on their way to a mission should be the ones gives priority. If I'm putting gear explicitly on the craft, then it's because I think I might want it on a mission. I want that equipment to stay on the craft rather than stay with some soldier who is just resting in the base. The soldier can have the equipment when the craft gets back.
Note: in this suggested system, although the soldier may not bring the reserved extra items with them off the craft, the items are still on the soldier's loadout. They certainly aren't forgetting that they want that those items, and they will still equip them automatically at the start of any mission when the items are available.
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Look, I'm not saying the system that was requested in the first post is perfect, or even good.
If you look a couple of posts above, I even say that I'm not going to use it, because I find it (it = the Xcom:Apoc system) inferior compared to the Xcom:EU/TFTD system.
Especially with mods.
But the changes you propose simply negate the original requirements: https://openxcom.org/forum/index.php/topic,10452.msg144972.html#msg144972
You consider "extra" equipment "more important" than the soldier equipment. Whereas Xcom:Apoc didn't even have the concept of "extra" equipment. Everything was carried by soldiers.
Honestly, to get close(r) to Xcom:Apoc I should even completely disallow any "extra" equipment... btw. that would also "solve" our dilemma here... unfortunately to our mutual dissatisfaction.
What I want to say is, original requirement and your requirement are not compatible.
What you are proposing is not an improvement of an existing system, it is a different system.
If I am supposed to implement this new system, you'd need to either convince the original requestors (Solarius, Dioxine, etc.) that your system is better than theirs/Xcom:Apoc's, and have them change their requirements.
Or organize a poll (with a minimum of 20 people) where your system would be a clear winner.
And in either case, you'd need to describe the disadvantages and corner cases of your system, so that the people can make an "informed decision" and we don't have to implement a 4th or 5th system in the future.
(I know this is not an easy thing to do, you might even have to implement the system in your fork first before you know all its disadvantages... but it's better than me experimenting on the main branch and have different behavior in every version).
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After a discussion with Karadoc, and checking out his commit: https://github.com/karadoc/OpenXcom/commit/b64c4fd23ef1eb59a57acfd3aa4441a06c79effd
I came to a conclusion it would be nothing but improvement of apoc-styled (not literal 'Apoc clone' as you pointed out) equipping system. No disadvantages I could come up with, and a definite advantage of Apoc-style being accessible to mouse GUI (without the need to know/use 'I' hotkey). Minor advantages include it seeming more 'natural' to use that way, through Crafts menu.
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If that patch (or something equivalent) is implemented, I'll be pretty content. For me that's the big improvement that the system needs; and this current argument about what should happen when there isn't enough equipment is, although contentious, less important.
I disagree about it being inconsistent with the original requirements about soldiers bringing their equipment with them. (I started typing some explanation for why not, but decided it was just going to be a long boring rant that is tangential to what people actually care about. So I'll skip that.)
If the existing equip-from-craft patch is implemented, then more people will use that and get a feel for what is good about it and what is not. At that point, I think the conversation about follow-up details will be more meaningful. At the moment I'm literally the only person in the world who has used the version of the system that I'm asking to change!
So yeah, I'm pleased that Dioxine approves of the equip-from-craft changes. Hopefully Solarius and Meridian will also approve of that. Then that's good enough for me - even though it isn't yet my ideal end-point.
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If Dioxine is okay with it, then I am too.
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ok, with that out of the way, how do we want to continue?
@karadoc: do you want to continue developing and testing the system on your fork and merge when ready, or would you prefer incremental steps on my fork?
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In terms of the craft inventory screen, the only additional change I'd want to make is that the pre-existing (extra) craft equipment should stay on the craft when soldiers are added or removed - but I don't think we've reached an agreement on that yet. So I guess I'll leave that part alone for now. For what we've agreed on, I think the feature is probably ready to go as is. I've been playing with it over the last few days and I haven't noticed any bugs. And I think it is high value enough that I'd like to get it out to other people sooner rather than later.
There are two other things I think are worth mentioning though:
- There is an additional 'feature' that turns out to be a side effect of my implementation... it's actually something that I'd thought about adding deliberately - so it's pretty funny to me that I'd done it accidentally. Here's how it works: as you know, when you go into the inventory screen from a craft, my code temporarily moves all base equipment into the craft so that you can equip your soldiers from anything that's in the base. That's normal. But the accidental 'feature' is that if you have a filter applied on the craft equipment screen (such as 'underwater items') and then you click the inventory button, then it only moves items matching the filter. Items that were already on the craft will still be there; but only items matching the filter will be available from the rest of the base's items. In my view, this is something I like - because I think its sometimes helpful to show only the items that match certain conditions; and showing the items that are already on the craft is good too, so that it doesn't mess up the soldiers' saved equipment by removing what they are holding. It's an accidental feature, but I like it. It happens for the same reason why saving an equipment template while a filter is on only saves the items matching the filter. We could easily fix it by clearing the filter automatically - but I'd prefer to leave it as is!
- The other thing is only indirectly related to my changes. It's about the base inventory screen rather than the craft inventory screen. In my changes to the craft inventory screen, equipping items will add those items to the craft. So I think it would be good if the base inventory screen did the same thing. i.e. if you add items to the equipment of a soldier from the base inventory screen, then those items should be added to whichever craft the soldier is currently on (if they are on any craft at all). I have a vague sense that Meridian was going to implement this himself; but maybe I imagined that. In any case, I think it would be an improvement consistent with the changes that I already made.
So I'd suggest just merging the craft inventory patch as is; and then follow up with the base inventory change afterward if we're in agreement about that. As for my suggested craft-extras changes... we can just shelve that idea for now. Maybe when people have played a bit with the new patch they'll see why I wanted it - or maybe not. It's a minor tweak in terms of functionality, but it could be quite a bit of work to implement. So I don't really want to do that if it just going to get rejected.
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The other thing is only indirectly related to my changes. It's about the base inventory screen rather than the craft inventory screen. In my changes to the craft inventory screen, equipping items will add those items to the craft. So I think it would be good if the base inventory screen did the same thing. i.e. if you add items to the equipment of a soldier from the base inventory screen, then those items should be added to whichever craft the soldier is currently on (if they are on any craft at all). I have a vague sense that Meridian was going to implement this himself; but maybe I imagined that. In any case, I think it would be an improvement consistent with the changes that I already made.
... and then follow up with the base inventory change afterward if we're in agreement about that.
is this effectively the same as this: https://openxcom.org/forum/index.php/topic,10984.0.html
if yes, I have already implemented that, please have a look: https://github.com/MeridianOXC/OpenXcom/commit/cd932f6885fb86ae9ef4763ca75f15399472713d
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is this effectively the same as this: https://openxcom.org/forum/index.php/topic,10984.0.html
if yes, I have already implemented that, please have a look: https://github.com/MeridianOXC/OpenXcom/commit/cd932f6885fb86ae9ef4763ca75f15399472713d
Yes. That's what I was thinking about; and at a glance, the implementation looks good. (I don't like the variable name `_backup` though. I'd go with `_soldierCraftMap` or something like that.)
So I guess everyone will be very happy. :)
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After talking with karadoc about how I think equipped items should be considered "reserved" I realized there isn't really any reason this feature should be reserved to the alternate equipment management.
So, working from karadoc's commit I've added two buttons to the craft equipment screen labeled for a lack of better names "+" and "-":
- Plus button works the same as karadoc's version showing you all the items in the base
- Minus button does the same except it filters out equipped/"reserved" items i.e. no more accidentally stealing equipped items
- Inventory button keeps the old behaviour
Inventory hotkey uses old behaviour normally and Minus behaviour when alternate equipment management is enabled.
github.com/MeridianOXC/OpenXcom/compare/oxce-plus...Uchuu-Kaizoku:OpenXcom:inventorydev
(https://i.imgur.com/LSnFLUw.png)
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What I want to say is, original requirement and your requirement are not compatible.
What you are proposing is not an improvement of an existing system, it is a different system.
To be honest, when I first read this post I was a bit unsure what you thought the original requirements were. Since the original request was marked as 'complete', I thought the feature was already working as intended, and that we were just trying to refine it a bit.
But after talking to UchuuKaizoku, I realise that that you weren't just going for a system loosely inspired by apoc. It was literally meant to have soldier equipment strictly reserved so that items were effectively stored on the soldier rather than in the base or the craft. I didn't realise that was the aim, because I don't think the current implementation achieves it - and I prefer the current implementation compared to that strict goal anyway!
So Meridian, you were right. I probably was proposing a different system. A system that is very similar to what is currently implemented, but not the same as the 'apoc' idea that was originally intended. I think this whole discussion is a bit foggy, with different people having different understandings of how things currently work, and different ideas of how things should ideally work.
I've taken a bit of time to write some notes about what I think the three different systems are. Option 1 being standard xcom, option 2 being something close to what we have currently, and option 3 being the strictly reserved soldier equipment system. I'll paste those details in a moment. But let me just say I thought option 2 was more-or-less what everyone was aiming for here and I was enjoying using that system. I'm reasonably happy with what we have currently implemented. But I have no interest in using option 3 whatsoever, and I think it could be a bit of a nightmare to implement and maintain. So although the original idea might have been something closer to option 3, I'd urge people to think carefully about what they actually want. It would be a shame to spend a lot of effort 'fixing' discrepancies in the current system only to end up with something less useful.
Here's are the details that I've written down for the three options:
(`*` means implemented already. `#` means currently unimplemented. `?` means the current implementation is ok, but I have a suggested change.)
Option 1: standard
aka: ignore soldier equipment
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* (Standard original OXCE behaviour)
* Soldiers' remember what items they last used, but do not bring any items with them or reserve items for any reason.
? Inventory changes from the base screen, the craft screen, or pre-battle are saved - updating the soldier's remembered items list. (Although, perhaps it would be better to not save pre-battle changes - just for consistency with the other options.)
* Items can be sold, transferred, or used in any way - as normal - with no special restrictions.
* Moving soldiers does not trigger any movement of items.
* Craft item template save/load affects all items on the craft, including any items equipped by the soldiers.
* Craft inventory screen shows only the items that are currently in the craft.
Option 2: the currently implemented 'alternative system'. (This is my preference.)
aka: request soldier equipment
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* Soldiers' remember what items they last used. This is their 'preferred equipment' list.
* Inventory changes from the base screen or the craft screen are saved as the soldiers' current 'preferred' equipment. Changes made in pre-battle, or during battle, are not saved.
* Items can be sold, transferred, or used in any way - as normal - with no special restrictions.
* Moving soldiers on / off a craft will also move their preferred equipment list with them (if the items are available in the base).
* Equipment of the soldiers on the craft cannot be separately moved off the craft. (They must be either unequipped first, or the soldier must be moved off the craft.)
* Items in the base's storage can be added to the craft, regardless of whether they are equipped by other soldiers in the base.
# Craft item templates save/load affects only the unequipped items on the craft. (i.e. templates refer to the craft's extra items, not including the preferred inventory of soldiers currently on the craft.) (Edit: I've got other thoughts about this now, so it might be worth ignoring this one, or discussing further).
* Craft inventory screen shows all items available in the base - including items by soldiers not on the craft. (Items can therefore be 'shared' by multiple soldiers. i.e. Two or more soldiers can have the same unique item in their preferred equipment list.)
* Changes made to soldiers' equipment from the base screen or the craft inventory screen will result in equivalent changes to craft items.
? When a soldier is moved onto a craft, if there were not enough items in the base to add the full equipment list to the craft, the missing items should not be removed from the craft when the soldier is removed. i.e. Adding a soldier to the craft then immediately removing the soldier should not have any net effect on the craft's equipment list.
Option 3: strict apoc
aka: reserve soldier equipment
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* Soldiers' remember what items they last used; and they are treated as literally 'holding' these items at all times. The items are strictly reserved, preventing for all other uses.
* Inventory changes from the base screen or the craft screen are saved as the soldiers' current 'reserved' equipment. Changes made in pre-battle, or during battle, are not saved.
# Equipment held by soldiers cannot be sold, transferred, researched, or used in manufacturing. Items held by soldiers should not appear in the base storage screen, with the exception of the 'force sell' screen when storage is overfull.
# Transferring a soldier to another base also transfers their held items.
# When a soldier is injured, they drop all items. (This is a technical issue only. The inventory screen is unavailable for injured soldiers.)
* Moving soldiers on / off a craft will also move their equipment with them.
* Equipment of the soldiers on the craft cannot be separately moved off the craft. (They must be either unequipped first, or the soldier must be moved off the craft.)
# Equipment of the soldiers not of the craft cannot be added to the craft. (The items are reserved by the soldiers still in the base, and therefore should be unavailable for the craft. We cannot share or steal the equipment of other soldiers.)
# Craft item templates save/load affects only the unequipped items on the craft. (i.e. templates refer to the craft's extra items, not including the preferred inventory of soldiers currently on the craft.)
# Craft inventory screen shows all items available in the base - excluding any items held by soldiers not on the craft. (Items can not be shared by multiple soldiers. If a soldier has a unique item in their equipment list, then no other soldier can equip that item.)
* Changes made to soldiers' equipment from the base screen or the craft inventory screen will result in equivalent changes to craft items.
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Implementation notes:
* The current version of the game stores an inventory list for every soldier, but these items are not actually stored by the soldier. The soldier's items are always stored by the craft or base. Therefore, the 'strict apoc' setting must explicitly check the items list of each soldiers to manually reserve those items from other usages. This makes implementing the strict setting (option 3) a bit tricky, and potentially creates a code maintance issue - since every type of item usage / transfer must always check these item lists.
* Regarding the last dot-point in option 2, about moving soldier on and off craft. This is what we were discussing earlier in this thread. For me, it is important that moving a soldier onto a craft and then off the craft again should not result in any net change. And to ensure this, we might need to store the craft's "extra" items as a separate list, so that they can be remembered even when some of those items are currently being used for a soldier's inventory. We could simply ignore this, and the result would be a bit of minor inconvenience in the craft inventory changing sometimes due to not enough spare items; but I think it would be nice to fix it. The issue doesn't happen in option 1, because soldier's don't bring their equipment; and it doesn't happen in option 3 because the items on the craft would not be allowed to include missing items from the soldier's inventory in the first place.
And finally, let me just clarify that I'm not really requesting that we have a three-option system implemented in the game. We could do that and it might be good, but I don't really mind what happens. I'm just trying to clear up some confusion about what I was aiming for and what other people might be aiming for. If the goal is just to have the standard system and 'reserved soldier equipment' as an alternative system, then that's fine - but I'll just stay out of it. I'm only really interested in using option 1 or 2.
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Since this seems to be the place about putting up (new) ideas for the craftEquipment screen I'd figured why not show the system I currently use.
It has evolved over time but is currently in a state for which i believe could benefit others as well.
The basic premise for this design was to allow for GUI adaptions but not for any changes to the underlying logic related to item allocation to soldiers.
New query methods were allowed if needed for numbers (but thanks to then new apoc-style equipment those are no longer necessary).
The main goal was to make item allocation a bit easier.
The true power lies in those situation where a mod provides a huge number of battleItems but stock is (always) limited.
See attached image-collage to get an ideas of how those changes look and the sections below for a description.
If interested in (part of) those ideas I can put up a demo branch rebased upon latest oxce-plus (9a90fab43).
The code gates most changes behind an user option but there are some refactors.
Reason for the gating is to let impacted code stand out while minimizing changes to existing logic and UI.
Major visual changes (A-C).
===========================
(A)
Changes the info line **if** the craft has a limit on item amount and/or size.
All fields (except for "Soldiers>##") are running numbers responding to list changes.
Intention behind this change:
Make player aware of the limitations before any error pops up.
(B)
Introduces buttons that operate on the list as visible (e.g. after filter has been applied).
They accept the same input as existing list button (e.g. respond to LMB, mouse-wheel and RMB).
There are two important things to note about the usage of those buttons though:
1) Those buttons use a 2-step approach when changing numbers.
- The first click tries to balance claimed items in the direction chosen
+ Pressing ">" only operates on items that have less assigned to craft than claimed by soldiers.
+ Pressing "<" only operates on items that have more assigned to craft than claimed by soldiers.
- Only when the list is fully balanced the buttons will operate on the full list again.
2) When using these buttons any error message related to craft limits is suppressed.
- Allows to (temporarily) assign all items to craft in order to assist equipping via inventory button.
- Even though errors are suppressed they are still enforced, see [F] how that is handled.
Intention behind this change:
Make item allocation easier but have some safeguard against accidental removal of claimed items (without enforcing a minimum).
(and visual AMSR while holding down LMB. But that is pure coincidence ... or is it? :))
(C)
Adds an extra column to show if (and how much) of a soldier claim exist on a item.
This new column uses a (translatable) indicator to convey the status, more_than/exactly/not enough, followed by the claimed amount.
The extra column approach was chosen because I did not want to change the meaning of the "on-craft" column.
Intention behind this change:
Inform player there are claims on certain items.
Side-note:
Image as shown still has an old alignment for the 'on-craft' and 'claimed' columns
Since the creation of the image those are shifted to the right (closer to original location of on-craft).
There still is an offset to the left of ~1 character (6px) though, to account for "more than reasonable" numbers.
Other changes (D-F).
====================
(D) Combobox.
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This button now responds to RMB-clicks, when that happens the behavior changes into:
+ Show the inverse of the selected category (anything not belonging to ...).
+ Change combobox text to reflect this inverted list display.
The second change is that the default filter categories learned a new one.
- A filter to only show items claimed by soldiers.
(E) Visit inventory button.
---------------------------
This button changes appearance if it is detected that some claimed item is missing on the craft.
If that is the case any inventory visit would mean that some soldiers lose said item(s).
When the button is in this warning state an LMB click will show a warning.
This warning tells why it is not a good idea to visit inventory at this moment (and how to forcefully visit anyway).
A visit to inventory can always be enforced using 'CTRL+click' or 'RMB'.
(F) Return to base (ok) button
------------------------------
This button changes appearance if it is detected that some craft item limit has been exceeded.
A click on this button will replay any stored warning messages and it is not allowed to exit this screen.
To prevent players getting stuck on this screen a shortcut has been provided (CTRL+ALT+click) for forced exit.
This forced exit will restore craft inventory to the state from before entering this screen (to prevent erroneous craft state).
Relation with 'oxceAlternateCraftEquipmentManagement`
=====================================================
The original intent of this redesign was to provide extra info (and QoL operations) using existing data.
Since apoc-style predates this suggestion care has been taken as to not interfere with it's logic (only it's visuals).
This means that any protection provided by apoc-style is not overridden by this redesign (e.g. very unlikely to see "< ##").
It also means some gratitude is in order. This functionality allowed me to reuse some logic and thus made life easier.
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Did a brief test with both Meridian commit and Karadoc commit - both are welcome changes!
Thank you, Karadoc, for taking time and writing down options. I agree that option2 is the best. (I also agree that inventory code is... complicated and big changes are best left to devs :) )
//I just learnt about craft templates reading this thread.
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Thanks for checking it out, Scamps.
And R1dO,
All of that UI work looks quite good to me. I like that the < and > buttons effectively have normal vanilla functionally, but with a clear and intuitive 'interpretation' in terms of soldier equipment & craft equipment. That similar to what I had in mind earlier, but perhaps better. I also like that the inventory button had a visual indicator for when it going to screw up my soldiers' inventories. The "!!!" doesn't look super attractive - but at least it is a clear warning, and I don't have a better idea. On the combo box, I don't know how 'claimed by soldiers' is different from 'equipped' (but I don't tend to use the 'equipped' thing, so maybe I'm wrong about what it does).
In any case, I'd pleased to see all of those challenges implemented alongside the alternative inventory system. I like it. But for the original equipment system (i.e. normal / 'option 1' / 'ignore soldier equipment'), I don't think there is a concept of soldiers claiming equipment - so I'd only want the additional visual information and warnings about claimed equipment to be activated when using the alternative system.
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Thank you for the kind words.
I do believe my concept is very close to your "option 2" proposal (without the automation or protection).
Any new text (like "!!!") is actually translatable (choose your own poison ;)).
As for the difference between "equipped" and " claimed". It also took me a while to grasp the former. For your info:
- Equipped means: items assigned to craft inventory
- Claimed means: items claimed by soldiers.
As for the concept of soldiers claiming.
It does not really exist in my concept (other than that it made sense for variable names). It just makes use of something that was already tracked by OXC (e.g. latest stored soldier equipment, in the code it is called "game managed layout").
This concept only works in the confines of the mentioned screen.
As for implementation.
Even though it sounds nice to have any idea implemented, in the end it has to be maintained by the (main) devs.
A multitude of options is detrimental in that regards, hence why I put it up as a possible idea.
If it gets traction I'm willing to discuss how it can be merged with existing ideas / change my code to make it conform. But I can understand if the proposed change is deemed to invasive for inclusion.
That is one of the reasons i did not propose it earlier, too uncertain if it did not deviate too much from vanilla.
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The behaviour is what I described earlier (also described in the commit message on github).
The gist of it is that if go into the inventory screen from a particular craft, you'll see *all* of your base items. And if you change any soldier's equipment from that screen, those changes will be reflected in the items that are loaded onto the craft.
The way this is implemented is by temporarily moving all base equipment on the craft, and then moving it off again after the changes have been made.
The moving of all base items into the craft only works when the "Everything" filter is selected (and no quick filter is used).
(otherwise not displayed items are not moved)
Is that intended?
If not, should I hide the "Inventory" button when the combobox filter or the quick filter are used?
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The moving of all base items into the craft only works when the "Everything" filter is selected (and no quick filter is used).
(otherwise not displayed items are not moved)
Is that intended?
If not, should I hide the "Inventory" button when the combobox filter or the quick filter are used?
It's a bit quirky, but it is intended.
The main use-case is when preparing for special equipment restricted missions. For example, the player might want to filter for 'underwater' so that they don't have to remember / double-check which equipment will be available underwater while they are looking at the inventory screen. The filter is not applied items that are currently equipped though, so could potentially be confusing. (I still think it's best to not filter out the currently equipped items, because otherwise the player might mess up all their equipment by accidentally opening the inventory with a search / filter active.)
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OK, thanks.
I have split the commit into 2 commits and uploaded on the `test` branch:
https://github.com/MeridianOXC/OpenXcom/commits/test
I have done some restructuring of the code, but hopefully without any unintended functional changes.
The only intended functional change was that I excluded also items with `ignoreInBaseDefense: true` (on top of you excluding the vehicles/HWPs). For example all those blue and red chips.
Please review the code, maybe you'll see something I messed up.
If you can, I would appreciate also help with testing.
A test build is available here: https://lxnt.wtf/oxem/builds//ExtendedTests/Extended-7.8.16-test-4f2fe9402-2023-04-11-win64.7z
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I've read the code, and I can't see any problems with it. I agree that the `ignoreInBaseDefense` thing is good idea; and the restructuring looks good. I left a couple of very minor comments on github.
I haven't test it yet though. I'll let you know if I notice any weirdness.
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Merged into OXCE 7.8.18
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Adding links to 2 related changes:
1. Improvement to loadout via base (not via craft): https://openxcom.org/forum/index.php/topic,10984.0.html
2. Option "add on top" when loading craft equipment: https://openxcom.org/forum/index.php/topic,10851.0.html
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After the base has a certain amount of battlescape items, the rest don't show up when you try to equip soldiers. You'll have to add them to the pile manually on the craft screen, for example. This started appearing with an X-Com Files campaign as it progressed and the number of eligible battlescape items on a base increased; currently, there are already about 10 screens worth of equipment to select and the number is only liable to increase.
I suppose there is some limit, buffer or some such that doesn't quite work if there are way too many different kinds of battlescape items on a base.
In the attached save, you can see this when equipping a craft in EU base, while Brazil base is working fine.
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according to author:
The code currently assumes no items limit on the craft. If there is an item limit, then it may not be able to fit all of the base's items - and so... that will be kind of annoying. I thought about temporarily repressing the item limit; but I'm not sure how best to re-impose the limit afterwards. So I'm just leaving it on the 'todo' list for now.
The humvee has a limit of 999 items.
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Unfortunate.
But this made me wonder: would it be easy to implement a similar "hiding" mechanism (mouse right click to toggle) in the equip screen that already exists in Buy or Manufacture screens? This would also make equipping more straightforward as you could hide the junk you almost never will want. I suppose it shouldn't be too difficult. Then the loadout could be modified so that it doesn't automatically add those items you hidden, you have to do it manually (or remove the hiding).
Maybe this should be posted or moved to as a separate suggestion.