Messages

1

Brutal AI / Re: Brutal-OXCE 9.2.7

« on: March 31, 2025, 10:27:22 pm »

Okay, fulfilling these requirements sounds like too much work for me. Especially considering that it still would not be a given and would have to pass reviews that would result in even more work.

The main reason for asking was because I get asked all the time for Android builds of BOXCE.

Maybe there's another way to get there that doesn't involve that whole process.

Something like having BOXCE be on your buildserver (or how it is called) too.

I have indeed ran into issues merging contributor's code. Mostly because it caused merge-conflicts on later OXCE-updates but also functionally. So I understand not wanting to take the burden of potentially having to maintain it.
On the other hand I feel like it's a bit of a waste of people's ideas and time spent working on new features like RA, not to backport them. So if I got pull-requests, I usually tried to make it work somehow. RA is probably the most positive example because it's not like with other feature's who's devs have disappeared and I had to figure out myself why they ceased working. The guy who made it is still active and I can easily get in touch with him.

2

Brutal AI / Re: Brutal-OXCE 9.2.6

« on: March 30, 2025, 06:48:40 pm »

I'm seeing 6 files with merge-conflict if I have a look at what merging the test-branch would lead to.
Not the worst I've had so far, so I'll probably be able to deal with it, once it goes into your main-branch.

I have also, in the past added separate tracking for when units were last seen but with different variables:

_turnsSinceSeenByHostile(255), _turnsSinceSeenByNeutral(255), _turnsSinceSeenByPlayer(255),

Considering I'm more or less in maintenance-mode, when it comes to the AI, I'm wondering if now the conditions for merging BOXCE back into OXCE are met.

I said initially that this can't really be a feature that can be considered as "ready" due to the iterative development-process for AI-improvements. But I've reached a point where I'm quite happy with my AI and don't really feel the need to update it any further.

3

Brutal AI / Re: Realistic accuracy without brutal AI?

« on: March 14, 2025, 10:25:57 pm »

That's some really good feedback!

I'll ping jnarical on Discord to have him read it!

4

Brutal AI / Re: Turn processing hangs after sectoid wakes up

« on: February 16, 2025, 01:29:00 am »

Thanks a lot, hope it wasn't too much of a pain to fix, but if it's fixed then it's fixed I guess. 

Wasn't super-easy but also not extremely challenging either. In the end I just had to move a few lines of code a bit further up and found it after a bit of debugging.

5

Brutal AI / Re: Turn processing hangs after sectoid wakes up

« on: February 10, 2025, 08:18:10 pm »

Fixed in 9.2.6

6

Brutal AI / Re: Brutal-OXCE 9.2.5

« on: February 04, 2025, 05:42:52 pm »

I don't think you need to include yaml-cpp.dll in the releases anymore.

Can I remove both yaml-cpp and yaml-cppd or do I need to keep the latter?

7

Brutal AI / Re: Realistic accuracy without brutal AI?

« on: February 02, 2025, 03:45:27 pm »

Okay, I see, it's mostly because it's poorly communicated how it works.

First you go to "Mods" and disable the Mod called "Brutal AI".
This allows you to also disable "Brutal AI" in the Adcanced options for BOXCE. (turns it from purple and locked to yellow and togglable)

Once "Brutal AI" is disabled none of the other options there have any impact on the vanilla AI's behavior. They all only apply for "Brutal AI" when it is enabled!

8

Brutal AI / Re: Realistic accuracy without brutal AI?

« on: January 31, 2025, 09:29:24 pm »

Hi, I've just discovered realistic accuracy thing and it seems it's everything I want, but sadly it seems to be a part of brutal ai fork. The problem is, I play xcom files and I want nothing beyond "vanilla" xcom files and realistic accuracy. I know brutal ai is configurable and stuff, but nevertheless it's a different fork and I found some discussions about subtle yet impactful changes etc, so my question is: Is there a simple way to achieve what I want? If not, could realistic accuracy be extracted into a separate mod that can be installed alongside "regular" oxce?

I'd like to know about the sutle yet impactful changes you saw discussions about.

I can try to list all of the ones I remember that do not have a separate option and then ask which ones you think are problematic.

1. Aggressive Retaliation => Changed how aliens search for X-Com Bases to prevent exploit of hiding bases in unreachable positions, retaliations also triggered by successful ground-missions.
2. Equipment-logic => When you don't manually equip your gear soldiers will try to autoequip a little smarter: Heavier weapons are more likely to be matched with stronger soldiers, it tries to fill up soldiers in a round-robin way so everyone has something of a kind of item before someone gets two, if enough items are there soldiers are filled to capacity.
3. Production queue => You can queue items for production and as long as you don't actually assign engineers it doesn't take up space. I think this was also included in regular OXCE since.

Other than that I'm not really aware of anything that needs to be specifically enabled in order to have any impact.

9

Brutal AI / Re: Brutal-OXCE 9.2.5

« on: January 31, 2025, 07:50:55 pm »

Suggest adding two lines to common\Language\OCXE\ru.yml:

STR_NO_CRAFT_FILTER: "В транспорте"
STR_NOT_ASSIGNED: "Не назначен"

Added in my repo but won't make a new build for this.

10

Brutal AI / Re: Brutal-OXCE 9.2.2

« on: January 28, 2025, 06:35:08 pm »

I was seeing 2 (character '2', not number 2), because I was loading the broken BOXCE 9.2.2 save, not an OXCE save. Sorry for the confusion.

Anyway your fix makes sense and works, @Xilmi: see attached.

With this fix, I can load any OXC/OXCE/BOXCE save... except for the broken/incompatible BOXCE 9.2.2 saves.

Thanks!

Works wonderfully!

I am really grateful for the support you provide to help me maintain this fork!

11

Brutal AI / Re: Brutal-OXCE 9.2.2

« on: January 28, 2025, 05:16:44 pm »

aaaa, this is new property that is not in OXCE, this mean my previous comment is not accurate. This mean OXCE save should not have it.
But this save was generated by OXCE? Should this save be from BOXCE?

Yes, the purpose of these is simply for the AI to remember at what turn it has scouted each tile on the map. This is used in AI-code for determining where to search for enemy-units.
Basically the longer ago a tile was scouted, the more likely the AI thinks enemy units are there.

12

Brutal AI / Re: Brutal-OXCE 9.2.2

« on: January 27, 2025, 05:57:28 pm »

No, I didn't push it yet. Still experimenting.

I think I had an issue with my compilation before. I changed something mid-compilation and it didn't compile it but then also thought it was already compiled. Because after some other changes the problem with the pre 9.2.2 saves was suddenly gone without any change warranting it.

So I guess situation is now:

9.2.3 will be compatible with everything except 9.2.2 and very old saves or saves made with regular OXCE.

Before the saves made with OXCE still did work though.

I attached one of these very old saves, that I always used for benchmarking.

13

Brutal AI / Re: Brutal-OXCE 9.2.2

« on: January 27, 2025, 05:10:38 pm »

I changed it now as you suggested.

I still have some weird effects.

I see 4 cases:

1. New saves created with 9.2.3:
Loading is fine. Gameplay is fine.

2. Saves from 9.2.2:
Loads very slow and AI/Autoplay-turns are slow for some reason.

3. Saves from <9.2.1 but >2.0.0 or whenever I introduced the turnLastExplored:
Loads quickly BUT AI/Autoplay-turns are slow for some reason.

4. Very old saves from when I just started and before turnLastExplored:
Loads very slow and AI/Autoplay-turns are slow for some reason.

I didn't have any of these effects before the merge. I could just load a save from whenever and it would seemingly run with no issues.

Edit: I think I understand why it slows down the AI:

int Tile::getLastExplored(UnitFaction faction)
{
   int lastExplored = 0;
   if (faction == FACTION_PLAYER)
      lastExplored = _lastExploredByPlayer;
   else if (faction == FACTION_NEUTRAL)
      lastExplored = _lastExploredByNeutral;
   else
      lastExplored = _lastExploredByHostile;
   if (lastExplored > _save->getTurn())
      lastExplored = 0;
   return lastExplored;
}

When it reads random stuff from the save as lastExplored it will return 0 as lastExplored because it is > than _save->getTurn() but not correct the members it read. So it will come to the wrong conclusion of having to recalculate potential enemy-positions every time.

14

Brutal AI / Re: Brutal-OXCE 9.2.2

« on: January 27, 2025, 04:37:22 pm »

I would still strongly recommend changing those variables to Uint8, because they are basically constants (always equal to 2) and don't need to be Uint16.

Wait what? i thought the "2" was the amount of bytes and the actual contents (turns) was inside of the "binTiles:"-line.

If that's not the case, I've probably misunderstood the whole savegame-structure.

However, I'll just change it how you say and if this fixes my old saves, I'll put out a new version.

15

Brutal AI / Re: Brutal-OXCE 9.2.2

« on: January 27, 2025, 04:31:40 pm »

Your merge doesn't seem to work.
For me it doesn't load any battlescape saves when running from Visual Studio, old or new, it immediately crashes.

There are several ways how to fix it.
I'd recommend a backwards-compatible way, see 2 attached images for the needed changes.

Your screenshots seem to be from before I fixed it myself in a slightly different way.

I now load/save it with 2 Byte-Uint16 at all places. Before it was a mix-up which didn't work.

Going down to only one byte bears the risk of becoming wrong once the battle takes more than 256 turns. I also had previously used 2 bytes to hold those turn-numbers. Or did I?
Maybe I intended it but didn't. In that case I might want to change it. Right now only saves made with current version work properly. If changing it to 1 byte allows me to load old saves again it would be better.

Edit:
Ugh, okay, I never saved it as 2 bytes. So I'll make a 9.2.3 where I go to 1 byte to restore savegame-compatibility.
Thanks for keeping an eye on it and informing me!