Messages

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IDT Modding Hub / Re: Reaver's Harmony Megamod - A Massive X-Com Expansion

« on: June 25, 2021, 06:12:20 pm »

Well, I've watched https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gu1rPS4fYX4&t=4558s

Just for reference that video is not, in my opinion, a very good showcase of the mod. The author goes into it with a lot of "knowledge" of the old XCom which is just completely wrong, and makes decisions based on uninformed and outdated information. Overall it doesn't show much from the mod even though it's a really long video.

It'd be much nicer if there was a 10-30 minute showcase with long gameplay segments, but still with some cuts to show the stuff that's different in the mod.

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IDT Modding Hub / Re: Reaver's Harmony Megamod - A Massive X-Com Expansion

« on: June 24, 2021, 01:42:40 am »

I love what you've done with the game with this overhaul. As an old-timer who spent countless hours with the original X-Com, yours feels like a definitive edition / remaster of the game. With just enough old stuff to still be recognizable as the original X-COM, but new enough so that even for a seasoned player it's interesting and unpredictable again. Bravo.

I also love what you've done with the geoscape (craft and UFO) icons. I've also just had a genius idea on a (possibly?) fun way to change these. Not even sure if it actually fits your mod, but I have to share it somewhere.

How about making regular (non-hyperwave) radars so that they don't directly show UFO icons, but rather just a "heat map" of probabilities where the UFO is? The heat map's size and intensity would be dependent on the UFO's speed, size and time  it has been visible by the radar. Essentially making it so that the radar can "see" that there is some activity (and occasionally you could just fake it without an actual UFO being present), but you wouldn't know the exact location and you would have to send in a craft for visual confirmation. This is where the "radar upgrades" for crafts which I have personally found not to be very useful would come in real handy. With the time aspect you could also just wait (perhaps risking losing the UFO), but eventually the location should get small enough so that typically you just detect the UFO without extra effort. But you'd have less time to react.

Basically you'd get a map like this on your geoscape, the perhaps generated pseudo-randomly:



Now I get that this would be a lot of work (provided it'd be at all possible) and it's probably a lot of work for a minor and possibly contentious feature... But I just came up with the idea seeing that radar shot, loved it and had to share. So, uh, yeah.

Thanks again for the mod!

Edit: oh and congrats to me for 100 messages (and logging in after 8 years) ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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Builds & Ports / Re: Android Port

« on: December 17, 2013, 12:16:50 am »

It may look like an afterthought, but it's still there, and to me I think it's a lot less intrusive than taking up space in the top left corner, covering a bit of the map area. It could always use the Back button instead, though.

This.

Also, if you were to remove one of the "hands", you could easily put both buttons there.

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Builds & Ports / Re: Android Port

« on: December 12, 2013, 10:17:45 pm »

As for newer Android devices, with the navigation bar being part of the screen instead of separate buttons, I thought apps could call for a menu button to be shown on the right side? I don't have a phone like that so I can't quite confirm.

EDIT: Yes, but this is done by setting the app's targetSdkVersion to <11. I'm not sure what else that might affect though...

Yes, you can do that. But it doesn't look nice - the button is on the side, it really looks like "I don't want to be there" and it shouldn't really be present in modern apps. I think that using a button like in the original is the best solution, even if it takes some space.

As for merging hands, how will you throw grenades then without putting your gun away first?

I assume that all these popup menus would take up all the screen space (unlike just a part, like in the original). There should still be enough space to add something like "left hand: throw; left hand: auto fire; left hand: manual fire; ... And if not, you can add just one item/button/switch, that'd say "use the other hand". If you tapped that, you'd get the menu for the other weapon.

Or you could just make it accessible through the inventory screen only (maybe have there buttons like "make primary" (which would select that hand as primary and show it in the bottom of the screen), and "access this hand now" for one-time use. I guess the former idea is better, though.

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Builds & Ports / Re: Android Port

« on: December 10, 2013, 03:50:56 am »

Just some notes from my experience with lots of games and apps on my android phone:

• You can move your fingers fast, but not precise (unlike mouse which is relatively slow, but precise) - therefore you need bigger buttons, but it's also less problematic to navigate menus (if the game is fast and doesn't have some stupid transition animations) and generally move the finger over the whole screen in no time
• just touching  some exact place, especially on a map/terrain it's sometimes extremly difficult to work out where exactly you need to tuch. Therefore it's better to use some kind swipe movement (as for moving the unit/shooting cursor it'd be still nice if there were options - like swipe and click, or "doubleclick" - I'd prefer highlight and click; or doubleclick and press confirm
• Too many hidden functions, especially long taps, can be extremly misleading. It must be somewhat easy to recognise what happens on touch and long press. If you hide a feature somewhere and not in other place, it'll be very confusing and there would be need for some kind of on-screen help overlay
• it's a bad idea to try to port on all mobile devices at once. Better focus first on android, and let someone else make different port for iPhone/iOS.
• it might be necessary to have a slightly different interface for mobiles and tablets. But if you make it clever you can probably avoid this.
• All newer Android devices lack the "menu" button. In fact I believe that you would hardly run OpenXCOM on any of the older devices that have that button.
• You can (and should) use the back button - the worst is when you (accidentally) press it and it just closews the game returning you to the previous screen (that happens when it has no function I believe). There should at least be confirmation
• Please be kind to people who use the "switch active app" feature - sometimes games don't save their state properly, other times they unpause when they wake up (on battlescape you should always go to the slowest time mode on wakeup), and sometimes "sleeping" the game even for a second or two it forces you to load it all again for several seconds after waking it up
• Make it highly configurable - I would, with my small screen, prefer little buttons - just some minimalistic, "everything-you-need" layout. But others, especially on tablets, may disagree

Also... You might consider merging the two hands together. Or display just one main, and make the other accessible through its menu or inventory. I bet most people 80% of the time use only one hand, one weapon.

What do you plan for controling the geoscape? I'd suggest make it drag-hold move, and with placing bases/intercept I think it'd be best to have the crosshair just centered, and you'd place it by rotating the globe. You could also make the globe zoom in an out by two-finger touch  and move, like in Google Maps.

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Work In Progress / Re: Consequences for selling items?

« on: November 21, 2013, 11:12:55 pm »

...thus the best method of disposal is to keep them in your own stores :-)

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Programming / Re: Features: Show chance to hitting and the throw trajectory

« on: November 20, 2013, 05:57:22 pm »

Shouldn't the blast radius be more like a circle with square edges?

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Translations / Re: French "close to original" translation

« on: August 28, 2013, 02:50:14 am »

You could always take the current french translation as "base" and then just edit it. That way it'd be in this order: your french (original) > the "openxcom" french > english (for untranslated, perhaps new strings)

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Programming / Re: New optionnal feature: storage in hangars

« on: August 27, 2013, 10:50:18 pm »

This would be also a good idea, but way more complex to implement. And if you go this way you could tell any unused building could be used for storage, and implementing that would be really painful.

Well...But hangar is, just as you said, an empty space. Labs, prison, workshop, soldier's quarters... Those aren't really empty. Also there are often times when you build a hangar and then don't have enough money for a craft (or you lose one). All other places are usually occupied, and even if they aren't that's just for few days.

Anyway, a hangar is a sort of big square, right, and none of the ships can occupy the whole place, so even an occupied hangar should be able to store some boxes with various supplies, such as missiles for interceptors or laser weapons in case a skyranger has to take off in an emergency.

That's very true. Maybe by the same logic there could be like 5 storage unit in every other building (you know workshops, labs, ... contain their items near) and like 10 for living quarters. I think it'd unbalance the game too much, it'd be just some extra realism.

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Programming / Re: New optionnal feature: storage in hangars

« on: August 27, 2013, 08:23:49 pm »

Oh, and I thought that you want to be able to have hangar as a huge storage when there's no aircraft assigned. That'd be a good idea too I think.

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Work In Progress / Re: Consequences for selling items?

« on: August 21, 2013, 11:32:48 am »

I think that even just the random events, which don't need to have too big impact, are a really nice idea. It'd nicely spice up the game, add another story element into it.

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Suggestions / Re: Free version of vanilla-like assets?

« on: August 17, 2013, 10:53:42 pm »

However, I don't agree to the point you can just "abstract everything away" to make the game more moddable. While programming might be seen as more complicated and scary than editing some YAML, abstracting and generalizing features to support everyone's whims is a lot more complicated than just specifically implementing what you want yourself. as xracer has seen. There is only so much you can externalize to support everyone's crazy ideas until you reach a point of "diminishing returns" and the engine becomes so complex and barebones (like real game engines are) that implementing a feature outside code takes as much work as inside code.

I don't think it's necessary to abstract everything. Just make it so we can get rid of the obligatory loading of original xcom files, give us maybe even some in-game option to switch rulesets (maybe you could just start the game, then choose a ruleset, and only then the game would load whatever it'd need), and please, please give us some real mod support. Some system which could handle multiple "overlapping" mods is, I feel, necessary. I'd suggest using some sort scripting language (so mods don't have to be compiled) and event system. Or can the game be abstracted enough to make this kind of modding unnecessary? I don't know. Would it be hard? Well... I'm afraid it would. But you probably already know that, since things like this already were suggested.

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Suggestions / Re: Free version of vanilla-like assets?

« on: August 17, 2013, 01:41:37 pm »

xracer: true, but there's a huge difference between forking the code, changing it and compiling yourself, and just editing few rulesets/resources and sharing them around. I'd also love to see all the today-artificial limits (like map size, tile (type) amount, color palette) lifted. It's a great achievement that you can now play openxcom with the original assets without the original bugs and with great improvements. But It'd be really nice to have openxcom just as a framework where all those crazy ideas, remakes and maybe completly different games can be implemented. I still think that this style of engine (battlescape/geoscape/basescape) is really unique and could be abused to make different awesome games. Like this one.

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Suggestions / Re: Free version of vanilla-like assets?

« on: August 16, 2013, 11:29:49 pm »

so you're thinking about something that can be used to show people how it works, but without all the detail? full GUI, but maybe only one type of soldier, one species of aliens, only a few different UFOs? that might actually be a nice idea.

Yes, exactly. and if it was outsourced/simple enough to edit all those assets, it could be later expanded. And maybe at some point we'd have something legally fine, and as good as x-com. Do you want the original graphics? You'll have to buy the original then. Or you can play our high-res, better polished, more detailed game.

although, come to think of it: there was a demo for the original game, which is still available on strategycore. maybe somebody could hack up a ruleset that simply uses those assets (I think it features a snakemen/chryssalid terror mission, the files appear to contain basic soldiers, urban map tileset, skyranger, snakemen, chryssalids and zombies)? the demo file should basically be public domain, it's only 1.44 MB (ah, the old times...), so no big deal

This looks amazing. It'd be a really good starting point. Now how to cut out the necessity of all the files the game requires?

I think tha this brings us to a slightly bigger problem - there's like no proper resource management in openxcom, is it. It just loads and parses the original files. Ideally you should be able to define everything in rulesets. With units/races/whatever you should be able to just define where are their resources or how they are named. The separate files can then just be named using some descriptive convention.

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Suggestions / Re: Free version of vanilla-like assets?

« on: August 15, 2013, 05:00:46 pm »

I wasn't necessarily thinking of remaking all the assets and/or making them in higher resolution. Though it would be really nice if the option finally was there. What I thought was making a free version of openxcom that runs without the original files. You don't have to have it superior to the original. There's no need to replicate all variation of soldier skins (heads), making all the map-sets and tiles perfect, and making dozens of them. Just implement it so it works. If there is desire, it can be improved later. But it would be a great starting point for modders. And it would also mean that people could try openxcom for free and buy the original for the assets later.
It'd also mean that openxcom is actually ready to use modified assets. And by that I mean easy-to-use assets, not those terrible, hardly editable original joint asset files.

I also do understand the uncanny-valley problem. I believe that it was Project Xenocide that also suffered from this (among other) problems. But if you look at something like FTL, you can see that high-fidelity graphics can be made in a way that it is not creepy, it looks nice, has this retro style and is also comfortable to use. Current (original) x-com graphics has all of this except for the comfort of use. We play in this little window in the center of the screen, we have pointlessly gigantic buttons, but we can see only a tiny bit of the battlescape.

The Questions is what else has to go to make the Community version "SAFE" from copyright, Is the Xcom mechanics enough to still capture that same feeling of Fear and Hoplesness, even if there is no Reapers& Etherals in the game?  ( I think it is )

Exactly.