Messages

1

XPiratez / Re: HOW-TO: Install OpenXcom X-Piratez on Arch Linux

« on: July 15, 2018, 03:12:13 pm »

No, I meant what's the version of the lib with the .so.16 suffix. But whatever, symlinking should work no problem.

Ah, guess was confused by your quote pick that only mentioned .15.

2

XPiratez / Re: Bugs & Crash Reports

« on: July 15, 2018, 03:06:50 pm »

Given how spacey roof area is (pretty much whole map) and smoke everywhere (hard to see even if they walk near the edge), pretty sure it'd take quite a bit of explosions to destroy all the roofs indiscriminately without flying spotters.
And it's not just 1 random ghoul spawning there either (bug-hunt), was like 4 on that specific map iirc.

3

XPiratez / Re: HOW-TO: Install OpenXcom X-Piratez on Arch Linux

« on: July 15, 2018, 02:50:52 pm »

I wonder what's the version of libSDL_gfx is this. 2.0.26?

Seem to be 2.0.25, as that ldd was for Ubuntu Bionic binary, and that's what it seem to have currently. Have 2.0.26 here and its soname is .16, so definitely not that.
EDIT: guess we both looked it up at the same time

4

XPiratez / Re: Bugs & Crash Reports

« on: July 15, 2018, 12:24:45 pm »

I've played two "Organ Traffickers" ghoul chop-shop maps in a new 0.99J2/J3 game so far, and found that in both cases, there was a problem with ghouls spawning on the roof with no way for them to get down from there, and naturally no way for non-flying soldiers to get up either.
Not entirely sure if it's unintentional (i.e. a bug), but sure looks like it.

Example image for last of the two maps attached.

I did crudely highlight two things there:

A. Maybe issue can be easily solved by adding vertical ladders to these crosswalks (or in the corners there)?
They seem to be above otherwise empty areas anyway, and seem to be ubiquitous enough to always provide reliable access.

B. Roof itself is separated into twothree areas by fences, which probably means that adding sparse entry points (like 1-2 per map) might not be sufficient to access all of it.

5

XPiratez / Re: Any way to make your gals emit light on night missions?

« on: July 15, 2018, 12:08:01 pm »

So, almost two years after the fact I decided to give the mod another whirl. The first battlescape that greets me:
...
Why oh why? 

Edit: Ahhhhhh, scroll lock. This should be default, but still, now I can play the mod after all. Thanks once again to Meridian. 

Note that if you prefer classic "soldiers emit light" option system (and foregoing any NV advantage you get otherwise) you can grab Magna-Lite lamps (can be purchased very early-game) and walk around with these too

6

XPiratez / Re: Web-based resulting per-unit weapon power and accuracy calculator tool

« on: July 15, 2018, 12:02:49 pm »

Praise Meridian.
Bit of a shame that classic XCOM UI leaves no room for seamless tooltips like all the ones with Alt key he added, as maybe otherwise all that contentious analysis info would've fit there, without needing several extra clicks.

7

XPiratez / Re: HOW-TO: Install OpenXcom X-Piratez on Arch Linux

« on: July 15, 2018, 11:56:44 am »

However, those executables are for Ubuntu and may or may not work on Debian or Linux Mint as well, but what about all the other Linux distributions, like Arch? The solution: build from source.

Arch indeed provides a rather painless build option (with all headers pre-installed, great tools and aur), but alternative can be to use these pre-built binaries anyway, which would probably work fine on any distro - Arch included - with one quirk wrt SDL (usually) or other .so versions, which can usually be worked around like this:

Code: [Select]

% ldd OpenXcomEx
...
        libSDL-1.2.so.0 => /usr/lib/libSDL-1.2.so.0 (0x00007f61a2b9b000)
        libSDL_gfx.so.15 => not found
        libSDL_mixer-1.2.so.0 => /usr/lib/libSDL_mixer-1.2.so.0 (0x00007f61a294c000)
...
% ls -ld /usr/lib/libSDL_gfx*
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root    20 Mar 31  2017 /usr/lib/libSDL_gfx.so -> libSDL_gfx.so.16.9.1
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root    20 Mar 31  2017 /usr/lib/libSDL_gfx.so.16 -> libSDL_gfx.so.16.9.1
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 90928 Mar 31  2017 /usr/lib/libSDL_gfx.so.16.9.1
% sudo ln -s libSDL_gfx.so /usr/lib/libSDL_gfx.so.15

It's a hack, but works fine in almost all (if not all) practical cases, as .so changes in such libs tend to leave old ABIs unchanged anyway.

8

XPiratez / Re: Web-based resulting per-unit weapon power and accuracy calculator tool

« on: July 05, 2018, 05:36:02 am »

(yet, what about take in account, (and calculations, various "conditions of gals - for example, stunned, wounded, - light w., mortal w. ,  panicked, paralysed, (choked), etc..
+ everloaded, ( "overweighted,  "pretažená)

Should be rare enough to not worth bothering with I'd think, if you mean weapon accuracy and such changes from these.

You people are completely insane. What do you even need this info for.

Yeah, guess maybe given such variety, using rules of thumb like "looks good for high str" instead of precise math would be a better idea in the first place.
Though then guess one should also trust that mod doesn't have like 10x variance in weapon effectiveness, to not blindly equip something rather useless.

9

XPiratez / Re: Web-based resulting per-unit weapon power and accuracy calculator tool

« on: July 04, 2018, 05:02:22 pm »

Alt hotkey in Inventory is already implemented... it will be available with the next release in few days.

That's an awesome news!
Thanks for all your work on OXCE, and looking forward to such out-of-game hacks made redundant.

10

XPiratez / Web-based resulting per-unit weapon power and accuracy calculator tool

« on: July 04, 2018, 12:28:39 pm »

Hey,

Mod has plenty of items, stats of which depend heavily on unit using these, and often in a complicated and non-obvious way.
Wrote a python console script on my last playthrough to print/compare final power/accuracy/etc values from unit stats, but recently been watching person streaming latest version, and struggling with the same thing, who doesn't have easy access to linux console.
Analysis screen provides all the formulas in a very nice way, but not per-unit values, which were most interesting and hard to calculate manually in the first place.
Alt-target and Ctrl+M damage displays don't help much either, as weapons are usually pre-selected on inventory screens, where these hotkeys aren't available.

So did translate that console calculator into a simple html/js calculator tool here:
https://mk-fg.github.io/games/openxcom/piratez-melee-calc.html

It can be used to get resulting weapon/ammo stats based on specified unit attributes and compare these for multiple items via sortable table (WARNING - Mild Spoilers):
https://mk-fg.github.io/games/openxcom/piratez-melee-calc.html?i=longbow.aux_power_fisto.sniper_rifle.blood_ax.slugga.ppsh_4.chainsaw_heavy.barbarian_ax

Intended use is to search and pick any number of currently-available weapons for comparison table, then plug unit stats at the top and pick whatever is best based on rough "dpu" value (power * accuracy / tu cost).
Note that such "dpu" estimate is indeed quite rough, due to how probabilities/spreads work over multiple attempts and not taking target stats (armor, dodge, etc) into account, but other columns provide additional info to manually correct for anything else as necessary (e.g. pick by top single-hit power or accuracy).
It's not intended to provide neither exhaustive item description or stats (like in-game research/analysis do), nor make any lists of items, just a gist on few known/picked ones and a quick comparison.

Implementation is an html served from github.com directly, pulling js lib from d3js.org (or next to it, if saved locally) and JSON ruleset data cache from the same repository.
Latter is generated by the aforementioned predecessor python calculator script, but hopefully should stay roughly up-to-date for while (though feel free to drop msg if not, trivial to update), and otherwise can be generated as suggested in the repo description and used locally.
Script stores all input in the URL, which can persist between browser reloads and be easily shared to e.g. point out some interesting stats/picks.

There are probably similar tools elsewhere, but thought I'd share this one in case it might be useful to someone else too, as such html version should be quite accessible, requiring neither spreadsheet software nor linux console.
Feel free to point out any issues with it here or on github, should probably be easy to fix.

11

OpenXcom Extended (OXCE) / Re: Meridian's resources and mods for X-PirateZ

« on: April 16, 2016, 01:46:47 pm »

I meant auto-selling as a way to get rid of the invisible things, the main point being clearing up buy/sell/manufacture lists, of course.
Guess one way to do that with categories would be to simply edit the yaml and have all this stuff neatly split from the rest there, so indeed, maybe easy enough already... just gotta look into how categories work more closely.

12

OpenXcom Extended (OXCE) / Re: Meridian's resources and mods for X-PirateZ

« on: April 15, 2016, 01:53:31 pm »

I wonder, are there any plans/ideas wrt phasing-out items that are no longer relevant as the game progresses?

E.g. have some "don't ever show me this in any of the lists" key that would, when pressed on item (e.g. in "vaults" tab):

- Sell all current stockpiles of an item.
- Remove item from all equipment and buy/sell lists.
- Will keep item listed in "loot" tab, but will auto-sell all new instances of it.
- Maybe keep item in the "vaults" list, so that same key can be used there to un-blacklist item.

Maybe my quirk, but I've found that going through most equipment lists becomes rather tedious chore fast, listing every tiny revolver and dagger there.
Such thing seem to be somewhat orthogonal to existing "categories" concept, unfortunately, as it'd affect all of them.

Maybe there's something like that in place already?

13

Released Mods / Re: [TOTAL CONVERSION] The Piratez Mod

« on: April 06, 2014, 04:12:01 pm »

Shame on Jadestar for not reading installation instructions and than wondering like a stoned person why female soldiers have male names

Jade is there to LEAD, not to READ

Controversal design choices and the usual cool-to-hate mentality of stream aside, it looks like an awesome and fun game conversion.
XCom game mechanics indeed seem to fit pirate (or a bunch of alien invaders') side as well as ridiculously cut-down "ufo defence" startup.

14

Released Mods / Re: [TOTAL CONVERSION] The Piratez Mod

« on: April 06, 2014, 03:56:12 pm »

Recording's on the homepage: https://openxcom.org/index.php/2014/04/the-most-controversial-stream-ever/

Chat of both streams, for completeness (I think was referenced quite a few times in videos): https://is.gd/CML0Ii

15

Released Mods / Re: [HWP] Scout Drone

« on: February 02, 2014, 03:36:20 am »

some things to note:
Aliens can't see through 4 tiles of smoke. which is the same for xcom. Smoke does work both ways, but xcom can choose where and when to pop smoke, so thats advantage xcom.

I don't have much experience with smoke, so you are probably right here.

Come to think of it, disposable soldier with smoke grenades seem to be somewhat worse alternative due to need to prime these, but then again, it can be done in advance and throwing usually gets better accuracy (than 0% for vehicle launcher) with same TU costs.

Just because it takes the space of one unit and behaves like a unit (ie - can move/spot/die) it's still not really comparable to a unit. A tank is a tank... it's designed to take hits and provide fire support... this is not tank. think of it more as a deployable tool.

I should've probably stated clearly that all comparison points above are to using soldiers in place of a vehicle, not tank scouts, which are much worse than soldiers at that, at least until hovertanks.

that said, it is kinda flimsy... a good shot with just about anything can take it out. I suppose the problem with that is aliens are only armed with plasma weapons... so you need good-decent armour just to survive a hit anyway, so increasing the drones armor wouldn't stop it being one-shotted unless it got a good buff. However... it's not a tank, high armor doesn't really make sense. It's tricky...

One potential I see for such tool being useful is advanced sensors - always-on night vision (like aliens have, presumably through biotech and/or implants) might be nice (<insert comparison with flare-packed rookies here>).

Maybe an even better vision? Built-in motion scanner?
Other sensory equipment that don't fit on humans?

Not sure how much of that can be done from the mod though.

sacrificial rookie tactics... I don't really use 'sacrificial' cannon fodder, so for me this helps save lives. and in terms of lives saved... if you use the drone cleverly, you can avoid meat grinder situations where 3-4 rookies run blindly into danger and get killed. these lives saved add up too. Ideally I'd like the drone to be stealthy, I tried to implement that by giving it high reactions (to avoid incoming reaction fire) but a side effect of that is the drone wastes its smoke shooting at aliens as reaction fire too ._. It's also a smaller target, so aliens will have a harder time hitting it. these little things help it's survivability, atleast thats the theory.

I didn't realize there was a height difference, that should be another "+" point, though not sure if it affects the actual aim either.
After casual glance at Projectile::calculateTrajectory, I think it should, as what seem to be calculated there is not just whether shot will be hit or miss, but "target voxel" (which I assume is smaller than 3d tile, given that projectiles hit fences, window frames and such) - the point in 3d space which projectile will actually fly to.

"sacrificial" can be replaced by "first out of the door" usually - someone/thing has to go and spot aliens at the end of the day, and that one/thing has good chance to die, so no point sending best shooters there - they are much more useful at shooting spotted stuff and will become even better at it (as they get kills).

-- After the very early game stage, rookies have better armor and still cost way less.
- Saving rookies will get "trained" to better class, so saving them is useful? DONT YOU LOVE YOUR SOLDIERS!

Putting extra value on human life in this case seem to be at odds with game mechanics, where you get "TANKS DESTROYED (1): -50" vs "X-COM OPERATIVES KILLED (1): -20" - clearly lives of even most experienced and decorated humans aren't worth even half of fried silicone and gears they put in that tank, further confirmed by the actual price tag of soldiers vs tanks
Guess overpopulation, mass indoctrination and lack of raw materials for good tech in the world of x-com might explain how such thing came to be.

Another "+" for fair comparison would be that you don't pay monthly wage to the tanks, like you do for soldiers - at least cruel world of x-com doesn't have them die as slaves or battle thralls.

as for delivery times... it's standard delivery time for a tank if I recall, I could up it to standard delivery for equipment I guess.

Don't think it's that huge of a deal, but might be one more advantage over meatbags.