Messages

31

Open Feedback / Re: 0.5 in 2012?

« on: August 18, 2012, 09:04:53 am »

Oh no, misunderstood again. You are right of course, but my idea doesn't exclude challenges and hard gameplay. That's why I'd like to see better geoscape AI that's dependant on the difficulty more than in the original. On harder difficulties you can make aliens smarter, maybe even so that they try to avoid the player, or that they do unexpected things (like draw the player from a base to get very large UFO and when he leaves attack the base). However, on lower difficulties, you have less missions in the original. That sometimes leads to very hard gameplay because you need money from savaged ufos, and since they sometimes completly avoid your base and land on the other side of Earth, I suggest making beggining on lower difficulties easier by helping the player.

But these are just few ideas, I'm simply trying to take out the almost total randomness from the original x-com and make player feel like that the aliens know what they are doing.

32

Open Feedback / Re: 0.5 in 2012?

« on: August 17, 2012, 09:28:30 pm »

...

That's why I wrote it in quotes. Basically I just suggest to throw out the "fixed missions"  that are chosen randomly and make completly random and fitting missions instead.

33

Open Feedback / Re: 0.5 in 2012?

« on: August 17, 2012, 02:42:46 pm »

Smarter? Of course. But before making it "smarter" it should walk through "the same" area, which is I believe quite difficult to make if "moddability" is a "must".

Making it the same could also mean either throwing that code to a bin later or limiting yourself. I think that the original approach is completly wrong. Why can't we just have a "real AI" which generates ufos really smart - you can easily count how the player is doing, take into account difficulty and the stage of the game (based on game time, research done, ...) and deliver ufos and missions adequately.

eg. in the beginning (on lower difficulties) make the ufos fly near the players base, don't hardcode low mission count for lower difficulties (it might actually be harder, because you have nothing to savage, therefore resulting in no money), make the retaliation take place where the previous mission was unsuccessfull, do terror missions where xcom has low activity (so it's like a "surprise" attack), the same with alien bases (so they can't be detected so easily), etc. The aliens have so much technology, but are stupid enough to build own base near xcom base? That's how the original works

34

Suggestions / Re: additional (ocean) terrains

« on: August 16, 2012, 07:19:30 pm »

Just thinking about new crashsite tileset - if the ufo lands in a shallow water, you can have a map with a coast or maybe even a map on a beach/in a very small amount of water. It'd also solve the "bug" when sometimes the ufo seems on a land (when zoomed out) but is actually on water, and therefore the crash site doesn't appear.

35

Suggestions / Re: additional (ocean) terrains

« on: August 16, 2012, 05:51:28 pm »

It't be nice (and also completly possible by just running an algorhythm) to make at least two types of water - deep (sea) water and coast/river/lake water. In the first step you could just generate it as a short distance from land to  water and later maybe add underwater ravines, etc. Even that it is just a cosmetic change, it'd make the globe nicer and maybe later some mod can add underwater missions or something.

36

Suggestions / Re: Instant Battle Option

« on: August 13, 2012, 06:36:06 pm »

You'll be able to configure battle options directly through the game UI (not finalized yet). Nothing fancy, just stuff like mission type, alien race, light amount, etc. It's what the Battlescape already does, only with the Geoscape removed.
No configuration files yet, as typical players don't tend to realize they exist but I might add them in later if you find yourself repeating the same scenario over and over.

Maybe while programming this GUI... Add a option to enter random number seed so we can play an identical battle? It's useful for debugging (and it's fun! ). Also if there was a kind of "url" to send as a set of battle options (so that it's easier to share), that'd be nice too

37

Work In Progress / Variable/realistic prices

« on: August 08, 2012, 09:13:20 pm »

An idea just come up to my mind - what if we made the prices a little variable, increasing each month and also increasing the sell price with more sold items and decreasing the buy price with increasing amount of sold items. It would make game more interesting and feeling a little more realistic, while not much changing the gameplay. Just that if you decide to empty your warehouse and sell those 3000 alien alloys, 500 elerium and 50 mind probes, it  will be unprofitable than selling a few after each mission.

Well... it's just a thought and probably and idea for mod than for default gameplay (since it could change it too much for someone), but think of it please

38

Work In Progress / Re: Sell / Sack menu

« on: August 08, 2012, 09:07:07 pm »

Old versions of OpenXcom listed the items alphabetically and people didn't like it one bit. I forsee a million options in the future...

I think that the original DOS Xcom listed the items alphabetically, but in english. It was pain because it didn't make sense translated - it was sorted neither alphabetically nor logically. I'd probably prefer this tabbed view (with one tab showing everything) and then sorted alphabetically.

39

Programming / Re: openxcom3D

« on: August 05, 2012, 12:10:59 am »

I'm just thinking about this real 3D. Can we use 3D to make nice effects (shades, shaders, reflections) and the isometric view rotation (but no freecam!) and possibly keep pixelated graphics? I don't mean the original (where would all fancy effects pointless) but if the game resolution was twoo or three times greater, it might already look nice, but keeping the good original look and feel.

40

Suggestions / Re: Instant Battle Option

« on: August 05, 2012, 12:07:40 am »

Istrebitel, I love your idea. Theres one thing I disagree on with:

To counter the benefit of giving experience, they could cost money to play. Should be balanced so that its not possible to train your people into supermen, just train some rookies into squaddies with adequate stats so they can stand for their own when base defense comes.

Given that the base building has maintenance cost (and takes up space - that's probably the main disadvantage), there's probably no need for further payments for missions. You can easily make your men "supermen" by playing regular game too. I'd also keep wounds (you know, the unit is shocked, etc.), but the recovery time would be much faster than after common missions (let's say 1/4 of usual time). Also no soldier could die. And another "disadvantage" is obviously the fact that you take no score, no money and no materials from these missions. I think that it's enough to balance it.

If we are going to switch to a  training ground it  should have similar rules to the Psi-Training room except the benefits would be random over different stats ( TU, strength, shooting accuracey , throwing accuracy bravery and reactions) all at a Cost.

Why randomize the stats? If you actually play it, you can tell what stats the unit should increase.

41

Programming / Re: openxcom3D

« on: August 04, 2012, 02:06:20 pm »

I think thathaving 3D battlescapewould be nice, but mainly because of these reasons:
- we could view the game in all four isometrical directions (it is sometimes handy)
- we could get rid of the NE/SW wall problems
- there could be nice realistic shadows

Sadly I have to agree that pixels are nicer. Is it even possible to have nice pixels with 3D?

42

Open Feedback / Re: 0.4 This year?

« on: August 02, 2012, 06:57:26 pm »

On the other side: in a real job if you overrun a release date, it usually comes with big fines the company needs to pay the customer for each day you are late. (at least it's like that at my job)
So that's an advantage :p

Well... Look at the Valve Time phenomenon. And as far as I know, they've never had trouble with prices

Have you seen the kickstarter thread? Maybe if openxcom gets support... It could be paid  much better. Sadly theres the need to have the original game (data), so it probably won't get THAT big support.

43

Fan-Stuff / Re: Vegetation Earth map

« on: July 31, 2012, 09:45:21 pm »

(also don't think the loading is free, the delay OpenXcom has when pressing New Game is all because of YAML).

Maybe I'm wrong, but i think openxcom loads quite slow because of lot of yaml.

Well... You probably don't want to hear this, but... Maybe it'd be better to traverse to some scripting language instead of expensive YAML. I think that having most rulesets as objects in Python would be much more beneficial (though it's not really appropriate for saving polygons). Of course I'm assuming that it would be faster than parsing YAML (though if it wasn't, it's still better to be able to actually script something ). On the other hand, one does not start a new game that often, so it's probably not really a problem. Alternativly there could be a tool to convert nice YAML config to pure binary file(s) similar to what the game uses now.

That is the plan, but I only have 2 hands. (also don't think the loading is free, the delay OpenXcom has when pressing New Game is all because of YAML).

I really wish I could help. I honestly do. Maybe you can find a work for trained monkey?

44

Fan-Stuff / Re: Vegetation Earth map

« on: July 31, 2012, 06:23:49 pm »

@Amunak: those artifacts are real and the result of slightly incorrect coordinates. look at the screenshot from Volutar's viewer (its really an editor now, isn't it? we should call it that ) - you can see it even more clearly because the line width is less.

Oh I see it now. So it's just messed in the original xcom data files.

Before you were talking about file format. Why can't we just make our own YAML config with definitions? I think that now it should be even possible to make other shapes than triangles.

like this:

Code: [Select]

Polys:
  - coords:
    - lat: 1234
      lon: 6543
    - lat: 1256
      lon: 4040
    - lat: 2500
      lon: 3800
    - lat: 2725
      lon: 6866
#    ^ this would make approx. a rectangle (4 coord pairs)
    terrain: forest
    zone: Europe
    anything: if some mod can use it...
  - coords:
    - lat: 1500
      lon: 6000
    - lat: 1000
      lon: 2500
    - lat: 2500
      lon: 2500
#    ^ just a triangle
    terrain: woodland
    zone: North America
    ocean-depth: 1

Sure, the file would be longer, but it loads into memory once anyway. We could also have country boundaries/cities in the same file defined in similar fashion. It's just about implementing it and converting the old data.

45

Fan-Stuff / Re: Vegetation Earth map

« on: July 31, 2012, 11:36:24 am »

Speaking of vegetation map/earth surface in-game, I've noticed small artifacts that sometimes show (see the screenshot). They are visible mainly in the highest zoom. These two on the screenshot are quite small, but I've seen larger (though I can't find one now).

And another thing - I've noticed that the textures are not moving with the globe (ie. they are "static" relative to the window). It looks really weird (especially while zoomed in and rotating the globe by only little bits). It's the same behavior as in the original xcom, but it looks weird and I think that we could get rid of it. I hope that you know what I mean