Messages

286

Programming / Re: Paletted 8bit -> 24bit shading.

« on: June 23, 2015, 06:21:43 pm »

Doom's palette and colormap are really bad, and it does look better in OpenGL with a certain lighting hack to imitate the software depth fog - the thing that causes things close to the camera to be lightened up.
It would definitely look better paletted with a 24-bit colormap though.

I can imagine rendering the entire scene in fullbright to capture the palette colors into one texture, rendering all the lighting into a separate texture - and then modifying the fullbright texture's colors by matching colors onto the appropriate index of the colormap for the X position and then setting the pixel's Y position on the colormap texture to the brightness on the lighting texture might work.

But that's wishful thinking. :-)

287

Work In Progress / Re: [CODE SUBMISSION] Grenade chaining

« on: June 23, 2015, 06:07:58 pm »

Just teasing you
Friday's episode will be... unlike others.

Even worse than a super secret mission Meridian™ cliffhanger?

288

Released Mods / Re: [COMPILATION] Final Mod Pack (FMP)

« on: June 21, 2015, 07:10:31 pm »

I dunno, ask Julian. I haven't really change Heavy Laser stats. In X-Com, lasers in general have poor accuracy, and I didn't do anything with this concept.

Actually, I'm more worried about the usefulness of Laser Sniper Rifle.

If I was to take an educated guess then lasers have bad accuracy in vanilla X-Com because they have infinite ammo, since there's only two ways to balance out infinite ammo in xcom - either low damage or low accuracy, since missing means a little bit less with no ammo to waste.

I'm not really seeing the advantage to using the heavy laser over laser rifles - which are much faster - unless we're talking about sectopods or something.
So bumping its accuracy up by a bit would help make it less of the big turd its big, brown sprite tries to convey.

289

Released Mods / Re: [COMPILATION] Final Mod Pack (FMP)

« on: June 21, 2015, 04:55:37 am »

Is it just me or are heavy lasers really atrocious weapons?
Based off Meridian's little LP they come off as having absolutely terrible accuracy combined with a huge TU cost on each shot.

Or is this done intentionally so that having strong laser weapons is a huge pain in the butt specifically to indirectly buff sectopods?

290

Resources / Re: Grand Sir Thebus' sprite contributions

« on: May 22, 2015, 05:36:09 pm »

Have some easily downloadable images (the photobucket ones require viewing the image and clicking the "download media" button for every single one):








I can heartily recommend using dropbox and dumping stuff into the public folder so that you can grab nice, clean direct links to your files.

Other than that this looks quite sweet.






And here they are with a bit of shoe polish.

291

OpenXcom Extended / Re: [EXE] OpenXcom Extended 2.0

« on: May 15, 2015, 10:09:53 pm »

It would seem like you have broken the ability to use the blaster launcher, all it does is play the sound and eat up the time units - but not fire the actual missile.

292

Hardmode Expansion / Re: [Beta][EXPANSION]Hardmode Expansion - Version 0.74 More Ufo Maps / Adjustments

« on: May 14, 2015, 03:30:12 am »

Chryssalids in January aren't really a fair move, since rifles can't even pierce their 34 armor.

Although on the other hand it teaches you the valuable lesson of ABORT THE FUCKING MISSION SON, which is pretty hardmode.

293

OpenXcom Extended / Re: [EXE] OpenXcom Extended 2.0

« on: May 13, 2015, 07:54:20 pm »

Bloax "the gym" currently work like psi lab. You need create building that have training slots.

Is this building pre-defined or do you have to mod it in yourself?
(These things would be quite easy to answer if I didn't want to run the game for the first time on camera.)

294

OpenXcom Extended / Re: [EXE] OpenXcom Extended 2.0

« on: May 13, 2015, 06:50:47 am »

Quick question: Is "the gym" just a feature in the base or do you actually have to make something to enable it?

295

OpenXcom Extended / Re: [EXE] OpenXcom Extended

« on: May 12, 2015, 06:40:11 pm »

I still say resurrection should be a thing, even if it's only passable for a Sword & Sorcery setting where necromancy is a thing.
because having the possibilities there is always good

296

OpenXcom Extended / Re: [EXE] OpenXcom Extended

« on: May 12, 2015, 04:54:40 am »

I would say that all of these things are good features. Not necessarily for vanilla XCOM, but they are good features to have available for not-entirely-XCOM things.

In fact, add a weapon flag that lets soldiers apply medikit-like items to themselves onto that.

no this has no relation to "how can you be a pirate if you can't even hold your own rum" what are you talking about

297

XPiratez / Re: [TOTAL CONVERSION] Piratez Extended

« on: May 11, 2015, 06:24:35 pm »

I think the most important thing here would be implementing something that was available and good even in Doom:
Pain sounds.

So that even if the enemy doesn't die - which they usually do after 1-3 shots in vanilla XCOM - you'll know that they're taking damage.
Which would serve to not demotivate you from keeping up the hailstorm of firearms, since sooner or later they are bound to fall.

Especially fearsome critters could also have no pain sound just to make them scarier.

298

OpenXcom Extended / Re: [EXE] OpenXcom Extended

« on: May 11, 2015, 06:18:10 pm »

Oh.. I did not realize I phrased my comment quite that way.. What I meant to say is that both facilities should do it.
*SNIP*
On the hospital: You could have one to which you assign soldiers, with limited spots (since it would take alien tech and lots of money to supply it). Those assigned recover faster, the others recover at the vanilla rate. Really fancy hospitals with cloning tech might even allow you to bring back a soldier from the memorial!

I would say that all of these things are good features. Not necessarily for vanilla XCOM, but they are good features to have available for not-entirely-XCOM things.

299

Playthroughs / Re: Oh Shit Moments - Why i love XCom :>

« on: May 10, 2015, 05:44:09 pm »

Soooo many Elerium WTF!

The best part is where it was a lossless mission where the aliens lost an entire base worth of stuff while also providing you a ton of cashmoney due to the massive score it yielded.

300

Programming / Re: Paletted 8bit -> 24bit shading.

« on: May 09, 2015, 06:42:07 pm »

Employing something like the COLORMAP used in IDEngine1 for palette entries except with full RGB support for the different light levels of the respective palette entry*  would likely be a good solution to this problem.

* - the actual COLORMAP implementation uses palette entries that would visually look like a grayscale image with the pixel brightness indicating the palette entry number. This means we can't do anything we want since ultimately we're dictated by the palette. :^(

So as an example, here's the stock Doom colormap:

Each pixel in the topmost row represents the raw palette indexes from 0 (leftmost) to 255 (rightmost), with every pixel downwards being a drop in light level.
Do note all the duplicate colors due to the lack of colors to represent the darker shades in the palette.

Here's a very quick & dirty "fade to black" approach in 24 bits (not restricted to just the palette entries)
But here's the thing - we can do anything we want in all of those different light levels.

(also includes a different blue because the default one sucks)
Which of course also means that we can do some color tinting as we approach the darker shades;


And I'm bringing this up because it seems like a way to do what you're looking for, while also providing a funky tool for modding.