Messages

1

XPiratez / Re: MLG 180 reaction fire

« on: March 06, 2017, 01:29:28 am »

I haven't played X-Piratez but I know this is very possible in vanilla, in the original as well (there are very few differences between OpenXCOM and X-COM). I know it sounds a bit like cheating, but it is a game after all and not all mods are professionally balanced. It's very easy to just go in and edit vision distance (though I'm not sure whether vision distance plays into reactions?).

For the knife, what I would do if you're willing to put the time into it is add another firemode to the knife called "backstab" that does massive damage and only use it based on the honor system. Up to you though. It would only take a couple minutes if you look at the gun melee packaged with OpenXcom (though if it's a knife, since it already has melee, you may have to actually add a fire mode with range 2 so diagonals work).

Technically speaking though your troops are capable of turning around and firing in a very similar way to how the aliens do, it's just that players very rarely leave their troops with a lot of time units and remaining time units factor largely into reactions (which is why it's such a big deal to throw a smoke grenade down the ramp on your first turn, because aliens have a basically 100% chance of reacting to your troops walking down it).

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XPiratez / Re: Hello there, new to game and I have some questions

« on: November 20, 2016, 03:13:08 pm »

Should be as easy as holding CTRL down when you click to fire.

3

Open Feedback / Re: Any word on openTFTD's progress?

« on: September 20, 2015, 11:40:39 am »

My PC has no clue what to use to open the file correctly. Will something as simple as Notepad suffice?

Yes, though if you pick up something like Notepad++ and hit Languages->YAML at the top, it'll highlight code bits and give you collapsible sections and things. The majority of ruleset stuff is human-readable and lots of fun to play with, so don't hesitate to mess around with other stuff as well. Reverting anything you cause is as simple as reinstalling. 

Good luck,
Red

4

XPiratez / Re: X-Piratez RPG: an actual downloadable rulebook

« on: August 25, 2015, 06:22:50 am »

I've actually been working for quite some time on a rather extensive X-COM TTRPG. I've been tinkering with way too many things at once to handle some more complicated mechanics in my spare time and have been perpetually in pre-release for over three years as a result (to the dismay of my RPG group, of course). 

Now that this is here, though, I finally have the drive to type up and polish ~8 notebooks worth of my shitty handwriting in the next couple weeks, so thanks for getting me to finally do something with all those notes. If nothing else I'd like to see the community shred a massive content injection into millions of basic mods. 

Thanks for the inspiration; I'm off now to digitize years of hellishly written work.
Red

5

Offtopic / Re: The PSX version had cutscenes, apparently.....

« on: December 29, 2014, 01:49:42 am »

Yeah, I actually started my X-COM career on the PSX version. It had better smoke, cutscenes, neat loading screens, turned black backgrounds into this weird purple cloudy image, better sounds...

And it made the controls in the DOS version look beautifully intuitive. Imagine using a D-pad to move the mouse pointer around the screen. X is left click, O is right (you could open doors without walking in on PSX). The other option was a hot spot interface, in which each tile and button on screen was a "spot" you could select with the D-pad. This was a little better, until you realize they never coded in a way to open doors in the hot spot interface.  You also only had one save per memory card, and the loading times were atrocious. This was especially bad because the game always chose to get stuck either on a loading screen or on an alien activity screen; this didn't stop the slow pulsating animation "Loading..." and" ALIEN ACTIVITY" had, though, so you were often left wondering if it was stuck or just trying to calculate every alien's movement in a super-packed alien base.

The cutscenes were pretty great, though. I wish there were a way to swap out the PSX ones with the DOS narratives and intro, but hey. They were cheesy early 2000's CGI, anyway, so I guess it's not so important.

6

Work In Progress / Re: [Total Conversion][WIP] oXc - War of Shadows

« on: December 14, 2014, 11:29:10 pm »

Just wanted to pop in and say you have an awesome looking mod here. Don't be discouraged by the lack of posts from other users; I'm sure quite a few people are keeping their eye on this. I really like the art style, by the way. It's nice and unique while still looking like it belongs. I thought it reminded me of Supreme Commander at first, but I can't quite figure out where my brain thinks you got your inspiration from.

If you need any help, let me know. I probably can't help much with sprites, but I'd be willing to do some of the dirty work as far as rulesets go if you'd like. Either way, best of luck with development. I'm looking forward to messing around with it in the future.

-Red

7

Playthroughs / Re: How to Film X-com for Free?

« on: December 02, 2014, 11:54:06 pm »

...if you use Windows, for editing you can windows movie maker i think is called...

On the editing side...

I used movie maker back on XP and the stock transitions and everything (if used properly) could make an annotated video of pretty passable quality. Vista and 7 replaced it with Windows Live Movie Maker and it uses some form of relative timeline for adding things to the video that is absolutely unusable for anything precise. If anyone's figured out how to get the original back on Win7, I'd love to know.

It's not officially out yet, but I'm keeping an eye on this one. It looks like VLC combined Audacity and the original Movie Maker and I cannot wait for it to be more properly available.

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Fan-Stuff / Re: A haiku

« on: October 21, 2014, 08:11:28 pm »

Debates through haiku?
About OpenXcom, too...
What an awesome day.

[Spoiler]

9

Offtopic / Re: Do you belive?

« on: June 24, 2014, 05:22:18 am »

It's almost silly to think that there isn't ANYTHING out there, even if it's just basic life. Consider the Hubble Deep Field.

SpoilerHubble Deep Field:

(Full resolution here, at ~14 MB)

"[The image covers an area of] about one 24-millionth of the whole sky, which is equivalent in angular size to a 65 mm tennis ball at a distance of 100 metres... [A]lmost all of the 3,000 objects in the image are galaxies, some of which are among the youngest and most distant known."^(Source) It's nearly equivalent to looking at the sky through (an oddly shaped ) straw (which is an area much smaller than the size of the moon) and remembering that the sky you can step outside and see right now isn't even a quarter of Earth's entire sky. Also note that some of those galaxies are over 13 billion light years away, meaning that Earth didn't even exist for over half the time the light was on its way here.

Don't forget that these are galaxies we're talking about. While the Milky Way is larger than most other galaxies, it alone contains between 200 and 400 billion stars.

There's also the HDF South (which helps to establish that the HDF isn't anomalous in the amount of galaxies it contains) and the Hubble eXtreme Deep Field (or HXDF, which adds another ~5,500 galaxies to the HDF even though it only looked more closely at a portion of the image). And that's just the observable universe. According to Alan Guth's cosmic inflation theory, the entire universe's size is at least 300,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (3x10²³) times larger than the observable universe. Unless we travel FTL, we'll never see most of that because the universe itself expands FTL.

The human mind can't truly grasp the vastness of these numbers, but even from the little bit we can comprehend we should be able to realize how little of a chance there is that we're completely alone.

Isolation, however, is an entirely different issue...

10

Suggestions / Re: Some suggestions and ideas

« on: June 22, 2014, 01:02:51 am »

Posted this two days ago but it didn't show up...? Probably my own fault, but it lets me reply to all the new stuff so whatever.

I really like a lot of these; the biggest issue I see is how small that scroll bar in the advanced options menu is going to be if we add them (because some of these really need to be options, whether I'd be okay with them going straight in or not).

1. Like it a lot, but I'm feeling some immersion issues here. Gray would be better, I think, at least for the actual Battlescape.
3. Please make this happen. Please. It would probably shorten a campaign's time by like two hours cumulatively.
4. Great up until the alien ID point. They're just motion scanners; they aren't supposed to know anything else. I think the other features could make it a bit OP, but I'd definitely start using it for once if these were available.
5. Write it as 15/2 and you have my vote. The slash provides necessary clarity, I think.
6. A good portion of the names are too long to fit them and the "(injured unit)," especially in some of the other languages. The unit being healed could get a blank rank slot (like a tank would) or some similar indicator during the healing process.
7. That could run clear up the side of the screen pretty quickly. A hotkey for toggling it on and off would be necessary for this, similar to the "Toggle Personal Lighting" button (it's under controls in the options menu if you don't know).
8/9. Please. It could be integrated directly into the list that's already there. It's the only reason I still have to keep scrap paper nearby.
12. The weight and TU stuff would be great, even though I have most of it memorized at this point.
15. Yeah, I like this. I've always felt a bit cheated by the huge wounded times when there are kits on board.  I think the conclusion that was arrived at on most of the old X-COM forums was that it was the craft travel time that made the fatal wounds become more wait time. But if the kits are right there, and missions take practically no time as far as the Geoscape is concerned, patch everyone up on the way out!
16. Don't know if they'll use it, but you could certainly give it to them with a very simple deployment ruleset.
17. I know there's a hotkey for it, but I would love this so much. I actually tried when I first started playing OXC, hoping it was one of those unlisted features.
23. Day/night indicator would be nice.
24. The unloading and switching ammunition things would be great. Primed indicators would also be nice. Instead of text for ammunition type, you could also have dots for the weapons (red for HE, orange for IN, blue for AP, gray for smoke, purple for stun...).
25. I like where your head's at, but I think this one is a bit too much (even though I just proposed a dot system for ammunition. :P).
28/29. These would be great. I think unresearched list items should be a gray or something to fit the color scheme.
32. I was going to leave the mod stuff alone, but this one could be really fun (especially if percentages for firing were taken from original TU value and accuracy was lowered).

I'd like to propose one of my own, now (attached). Having to go multiple screens over to reorder a bunch of rookies that are going to die anyway can get a bit annoying. As such, an inventory button added to the Select Squad page would be really nice.

Thanks,
Red

11

Released Mods / Re: [WEAPON] Minigun

« on: June 16, 2014, 06:05:14 am »

I tried the version off the mod site and the last one posted in the thread. The tank requires that you buy 200 clips ($1.5 million!) for it to be able to be loaded onto the Skyranger/function. I've just been buying them and editing my save's clip stores to a factor of 200 in the meantime, but I thought I'd let you know.

Unless that price is intentional...?

I was going to try to fix the ruleset but I can't seem to find the issue; everything looks in line with the other tanks as well as the craft cannon.

12

Builds & Ports / Re: Android Port

« on: November 28, 2013, 08:50:04 pm »

Beat me to it. Here's a link I know works.
https://www.xcomufo.com/x1dl.html

Any ideas for more precise movement? The magnifying glass wasn't a bad idea IMO, but some people didn't like it. Also, how does turning/strafing work?

13

Builds & Ports / Re: Android Port

« on: November 28, 2013, 01:41:04 am »

...What do you think? Is it fine the way it is or would that be better...
...Also, for the TU reservations, I was thinking tapping any of those buttons would just bring up a big list to pick from instead, kinda like the firemode list...

This looks really nice. I think the next unit buttons are fine how they are, but maybe switching the abort and end turn buttons would be better because there's no confirmation for ending a turn and fat fingering the end turn button when you meant to fire could be disastrous.

Also, instead of a list, making the reserve cluster a single button that cycles through the options could be better, as well as easier to implement. It would start on green by default, and you would have to touch it three times to get it to autoshot.

Thanks,
Red

14

Troubleshooting / Re: Without any equipment, weight is 6?

« on: October 19, 2013, 11:40:27 pm »

Not to be rude, but I think most obsession stems from the about page: "OpenXcom is an open-source clone of the original..." I'm not a stickler for an exact copy of the original, but I love tossing auto-cannons on my rookies, and 6 makes the difference between old strategy and revising how I distribute weapons. I'd rather have it behave, by default, like the original and be able to do the other stuff by choice (advanced options, rulesets, config, etc.)

That said, I don't mind changing it in the rulesets to fit my belief (I'm in there all the time anyway), and I think the new armor handling is, again, AWESOME. Having played a multitude of RPGs and TTRPGs, though, I think the reason they would have made it 0 by default is for the same reason every other game does: lack of choice. You have to have the armor. I mean, that flattop hairstyle MUST weigh at least as much as a grenade, and we don't account for that.

But again, I'm fine with how it is now.

Thanks,
Red

15

Troubleshooting / Re: Without any equipment, weight is 6?

« on: October 19, 2013, 09:14:38 pm »

Hey, whoa, wasn't trying to offend anyone here. I frequent much rougher forums than this, so if I did, I apologize. I was agreeing with the data presented, not its presentation.

I'm not sure what source code you're talking about, but if you have numbers that I don't I'd love to see them. I was under the impression that removing ammunition entirely from the experiment (bringing only grenades) removed all confounding variables and created a clear-cut situation (one that I replicated). If I'm missing something obvious here, please let me know.

Thanks,
Red