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[Spoiler]

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Offtopic / Re: XCOM Inspired Fantasy Game

« on: March 25, 2021, 12:41:10 pm »

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Astonishingly good looking project! As for implementing the hex tiling, check Age of Wonders games. Especially the first AoW, which had walls for castles and dungeons.

I myself currently got dragged away with all the refugee life issues and the camp management now threatening me for filming a fight (they believe that all happening in the camp must stay in the camp). Although I have finished my own C-like language (called NewC), featuring an extended macro processor, which fixes all the issues impeding me from using the old CPP. Had to do that, since I really dislike C++, but still for the voxel editor I need custom types, like vec3 and bounded checked arrays with O(1) push. I can't do the voxel editor in Symta, since performance is really so critical. The NewC is not so much a compiler, than a very tricky rewriter (I'm not that crazy to implement my own optimizing compiler), replacing `vector.x` with `vec3_get_x(vector)` and `auto` with proper types. Obviously it is totally incompatible with C++, doing the right thing in the wrong way, breaking every single C++ textbook good practice, and encouraging the use of macroprocessor instead of templates. In fact, that is one of the reasons I had to re-implement the macroprocessor, because the C's one, while turing complete, is just too clunky to use for anything beyond basic `#define PI`

Anyway, I have rewrote the core voxel format several times, implemented the OBJ importer/exporter, developed a few voxel editing techniques, and got some insight into deforming the voxel models without SDF. Which I could use maybe for Spell of Mastery 2, since it really requires GPU.

TLDR: parsing C using C is much easier than writing a voxel editor, which is much easier than implementing a video game. Like an order of magnitude easier.

Thanks! I did play all the AoW (except 3) a lot actually. I am sorry about your refugee camp issues. It is a real disgrace that we in the West created so many, then handled the problem in such an inhuman way. I hope your situation will get sorted soon enough. In which country are you now? The Netherlands?
Regarding selling your code, you can just call it an engine, and you should be able to do so, but with everyone using Gamemaker, Unity or Unreal Engine, it is harde to compete (the one I use, Moai, got completely destroyed by the competition of Unity, because it lacked tutorials, documentation, and things like the asset store, which come with a large user base).

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Offtopic / Monsters in the Dark: the making of X-COM: UFO Defense, on Kickstarter

« on: March 12, 2021, 03:43:32 am »

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/davidlcraddock/monsters-in-the-dark-the-making-of-x-com-ufo-defense
That could be of interest to some of you.
It has already reached its funding goal.
It is a shame that some of the new material is gated behind a 75$ paperback special edition.

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Offtopic / Re: Zodiac Legion, another fantasy Game inspired by X-COM

« on: February 21, 2021, 11:39:48 pm »

TheEdmon made a pre-alpha preview here:

Beware the loud music at the beginning.
I could comment on the issues of the game build, but they will be self apparent. I hope you still enjoy it!

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Offtopic / Re: Zodiac Legion, another fantasy Game inspired by X-COM

« on: February 15, 2021, 10:57:52 pm »

Thank you!
Regarding trying the game, it should be featured for the next Steam demo festival (so before summer). I just need to cobble a "prologue" with some geoscape elements around the tactical levels.

[Spoiler]

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Offtopic / Zodiac Legion, another fantasy Game inspired by X-COM

« on: February 15, 2021, 08:59:30 pm »

Hey there!
I didn't know about @Nikita_sakov's game until a very recent date, so I started writing my own fantasy X-COM game a long time ago, around 2014.
In Zodiac Legion, you lead an order of arcane knights, dedicated to protect the heirs of the ancient Empire from the wizards of the league.
As magic depends on astral configuration, and the last emperor went a bit overboard with its use, it had been depleted for centuries, but there is a new conjunction, and it starts flowing again.
Given that magic had became a fairy tale, and the Empire had split into several small kingdoms, the Zodiac Legion has been terribly underfunded.
You are tasked with recovering and studying ancient tomes to harness the power of the zodiac constellations, and find the way to craft new artifacts of power.

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The Zodiac Legion

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The opposing forces:

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The geoscape prototype:

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What I wanted to convey from X-COM was the progression, from a low magic force to a high magic one, and the sheer brutality, where you can go home with 8 dead out of 12 characters, and feel like the mission was a success.
However, it is also an age of heroes, so once a character gets strong enough, he can become one of the Zodiac Champions, and get access to one of the recovered zodiac artifacts.
Ascending and moon signs will grant access to some powers from other classes.
We will have small "commando" missions where 6 characters can be teleported, and larger ones that can be done with a group of 12.
Unlike X-COM, there will be a single fortress to design, while the secondary outposts will have very stripped down options (because we imagined it as Castle Grayskull, ie, the seat of power of the Zodiac Order, and the lose condition of the game).

Currently, the tactical battles need some polishing (LoS clean-up, more victory conditions, different AI for different opponents and missions), but it is almost "done".
The geoscape, however is in a state of constant flux.

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40k / Re: 40k

« on: February 15, 2021, 08:23:40 pm »

If you're getting a lot of cultist alerts, that means there are cultist bases in the area. You can find them by patrolling with your craft (there should be an article about this in the Assistance category of the Codex).

Is there a place to go to "get started" with the mod? I feel like an orc techie pressing random buttons when I play, and the results are not very convincing. In my latest attempt, I tried engaging a chimera and lost all of my crafts. Did I miss something, like equipping the crafts with air to ground ordnance?

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Help / Re: map arrangement

« on: February 08, 2021, 09:08:18 pm »

Thanks!
The script file is simpler than I thought.
So roads can be placed between blocks on some maps?

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Help / map arrangement

« on: February 07, 2021, 10:41:53 pm »

How are map "blocks" arranged for a given mission?
Are there higher level maps that indicates which blocks are available at each position? Are there connectors between blocks, or connection rules?
I looked in the map editor, but I could only see the block themselves, no higher level logic to arrange them.

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Offtopic / Re: Introduce yourself

« on: February 02, 2021, 11:29:30 pm »

Hey, I am Alexandre. I was first obsessed with Laser Squad after I failed to "acquire" it. I played it at my cousins' home, and I wanted it badly but I could not find the Atari ST version for sale, and they traded their copy for something else when I asked them to copy it.
My obsession with the game and 40K made me write a mediocre (unfinished and unpolished) clone a few years later for Atari.

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Given that I didn't get a PC before 1998, I also missed X-COM, and I ended up playing X-COM apocalypse first.
I could only play X-COM: UFO Defense around 2005 on abandonware sites, but I really loved the game.

So a few years later, when I left my job to follow my wife to China, I started working on my own  fantasy X-COM (Zodiac Legion), and I am really glad to see X-COM still being modded (and into 40K!) with an updated UI.

[Spoiler]

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Offtopic / Re: XCOM Inspired Fantasy Game

« on: February 01, 2021, 06:20:21 pm »

Hey!
That's a pretty impressive game project! I really like the Amiga/Atari aesthetics, and the flooding is impressive!

TLDR: my biggest mistake was picking squares over hexes. I would recommended hexagonal lattice even for real-time strategies. Unfortunately Blizzard doesn't feel enough competition to fix their competitive games and make the next Stracraft into a perfect game.

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I am working on another pretty different XCOM inspired fantasy game, and I decided to go with hexes for the same reasons you recommended them, more or less.
What triggered me the most with squares was that formations don't work if both sides are not facing each other from the main directions, which should happen a lot in a game with large maps and fog of war (because you cannot have proper Zones of controls with squares).

However, it has been a huge pain to make walls and buildings, so I am still really torn about the issue. It really makes the wall tiles hard to read in term of blocking movement and LoS.

Spoiler:

The NW->SE walls don't follow the hexagonal lines which causes all sort of issues.
I should have gone with natural caves instead of constructed walls.

So I am not sure you really were wrong about picking squares.