Topics

1

The X-Com Files / Supernatural dossiers

« on: January 21, 2017, 04:30:15 am »

I spent a while thinking of supernatural/horrific events which could be linked to the various factions' wrongdoings, and found more than I thought.
This can be helpful to get ideas for dossiers of specific, fictive people linked to these phenomenons :
* as perpetrators
* as subjects
* as investigators, as an isolate case (wrong place, wrong time) or sworn enemy
So far I've found:

Medical/Scientific:
- experiments on human mind power
- mind control (by subliminal messages, hypnosis...)
- surgical implants
- eugenics (ex: Crimson Rivers)
- (strange creatures already have their own missions)
- research on teleportation (and its critical failures: The fly, Doom)
- horror surgery (don't overdo it...)
Mystical:
- factions showing interest in ancient books, alchemy, magical objects, places (Stonehenge, Easter island)
- photographed souls, ghosts
- portents, predictions (Weirdos getting ready to survive an alien invasion, lol)
- curses, people suffering from unknown diseases, spontaneous combustion
- reports of witchcraft or satanism
- possession and mystical trances
- nature acting unnaturally (bees mass movements, Hitchcock's The birds)
- creepy people (ex: children of Village of the Damned, It)
Ufology:
- unidentified objects in the sky
- alien abduction
- archeological evidences, ancient aliens
- suspiciously high-tech stuff that we can't use or understand, it's always unnerving (ex: Demolition man's "three shells" )
- alien infiltrators, dopplegängers

2

Work In Progress / a different shotgun behavior

« on: July 12, 2016, 12:01:04 pm »

Just wanted to share some thought on pellet behavior.
With the existing system, target armor is applied on each pellet which hits. As a consequence, shotgun weapons are typically murderous on unarmored targets at short range, and harmless otherwise. For the modder it's extremely difficult to balance, because for example on a 8-pellet shell, one extra point of "power" does 8 more damage if the target is vulnerable.

I'm thinking of an alternative damage model which would make it less specialized.
Let's say the POWER indicates the strengh of the full blast. Already, this is closer to what the game shows for firearms and explosives.
Then the game would compute how many pellets hits the same target, and apply damage (POWER-ARMOR) * (hits/pellets).
-> A target hurt by all pellets would take damage identical as a non-pellet weapon (power - armor)
-> Half hits means half damage, 1/4 hits means 1/4 damage. This is intuitive
-> Weapons with many pellets become possible. Many pellets equalize the damage distribution - you can count less on doing maximum damage, but "something" should hit.

I know this change would "break" all exisiting mods which rely on the existing pellet model, so I don't expect it to replace it ever, but I've been thinking about it for a long time, I thought the idea was worth sharing.

3

Work In Progress / Farming

« on: April 20, 2016, 03:43:54 am »

Sharing my tests for additional tiles, in order to not invade this thread.
I really want to focus on tiles that provide additional tactical choices, not just flavor.

These bales of hay make sense, and typicall provide small cover. Can be refined more, pixel-wise, but I first want to check that they "work" ingame.
The standard LOFTemps provide the right shapes to draw these cylinders.
Can somebody tell me if it's possible to add more loftemps ? Is it then complicated to coexist with other terrains which do the same ? I'm currently using Volutar's MCDEdit.

4

XPiratez / [MOD] Torch

« on: April 09, 2016, 11:40:39 pm »

Based on an idea I had some time ago, here's a torch. It's a light source like the electro-flare, and you can use it in melee to set enemies on fire.

The balance is very experimental, I chose 75% fixed chance of success and a time cost similar to the handle. It relies on OXCE's ability to set a damage type to "gun melee", otherwise the item would only be able to do melee damage, and it would miss the point
I made all graphics from scratch. Everyone is free to use and re-use for anything.

5

Offtopic / UFO and TFTD now on GOG.com

« on: March 29, 2016, 08:28:53 pm »

Good Old Games has just added UFO and Terror From the Deep to their catalogue. And Apocalypse.
Basic price is 5.39€ apiece, but there's a launching promotion of -50% for one week (-75% if you pick the 5 games UFO - TFTD - Apocalypse - Interceptor - Enforcer)
https://www.gog.com/promo/launch_promo_xcom_pack

6

XPiratez / throwing experience for weapons which rely on throwing skill

« on: January 11, 2016, 03:35:01 pm »

Piratez includes several different weapons which rely on throwing skill when you "shoot" them : black powder bombs and molotovs, bows, knives. I really like how it lets you use recruits who have a bad shooting accuracy. Even weaker ones can be bowwomen with unlimited ammo.

However, there is the issue that these weapons don't train the right stat... The standard experience system gives "shooting experience" when you hit a hostile target with any ranged weapon (either directly or with splash damage), and this increases firing accuracy, not throwing.
So my suggestion would be for Extended to modify the experience system accordingly.
1) Ranged weapons which rely more on "throwing" than "shooting" should give throwing experience when hitting a hostile, instead of shooting experience.
2) In this case it should still trigger secondary experience gains (TU, energy,..)
Such rules can be hard-coded, because it only triggers in games/mods that include such weapons.

Now, personnally I wouldn't stop there, but I know this gets far from vanilla...
3) Grenade/proxies explosions which hit a hostile would give throwing experience instead of shooting experience. And still provide secondary experience, like in 2)
4) Throwing random stuff would stop giving throwing experience once the character has reached the average stat of a hired soldier.
5) For equity, I would give "shooting experience" to soldiers who shoot at a hostile target (even if they miss) if their shooting accuracy is under-average. This should not trigger secondary experience gain, because it's too easy to abuse.

7

XPiratez / Cutlass

« on: January 10, 2016, 04:41:59 am »

Can I propose a cleaner sprite for the cutlass ? It looks really muddy and out of place when compared to the other melee weapons.
Made from scratch, anyone is free to use and modify, no credit required.

8

Work In Progress / TU% costs to avoid

« on: May 26, 2015, 12:10:36 pm »

A bit of information for modders :
Since TU% costs are rounded down, you can have cases where a soldier can shoot less often when combat experience gives him one more TU.
Ex with the vanilla pistol :
18% of 55 TU -> 9 TU per shot, 6 shots, 1 TU remaining
18% of 56 TU -> 10 TU per shot, 5 shots, 6 TU remaining

I made the math, here are the TU % that produce this oddity :
1 to 9 : avoid, very inconsistent numbers
10 to 18 : avoid, inconsistent numbers
19,20 : 5 shots /turn
21 : inconsistent 5/6
22-25 : 4 shots per turn
26 : inconsistent 3/4
27-33 : 3 shots/turn
34, 35 : inconsistent 2/3
36-50 : 2 shots/turn
51 : inconsistent 1/2
52-100 : 1 shot/turn

9

Work In Progress / [WIP] Alternative human tech armory

« on: May 21, 2015, 03:09:55 am »

Here's a rebalance of the human technology that I've been thinking for a while.
The goals are:
- Eliminate redundancy : Try to be self-complete (no need to keep any stock firearm), and each weapon should have a somewhat unique purpose.
- Balance pistol(s).

2 unusual "gimmicks" that I've employed are :
- Flat TU cost, for pistol. This means the weapon stays useful for slightly longer in the campaign, since your experienced soldiers shoot slightly "faster" as their TU rise.
- Close combat weapons can't fire beyond 20 tiles, which happens to be exactly the visual range (you get enemy number icon if you're in range, and it's also the range for reaction fire)

General notes :
- Compact rifle and shotgun are CQB weapons. The former is slightly better in attack (thanks to a good automatic fire and general speed), the latter is slightly safer for overwatch (thanks to better snap accuracy and damage)
- For soldiers who don't wield any of the above, the Handgun is very reliable personal defense weapon. Reloads become problematic if you go trigger happy.
- Machine gun has the best automatic fire. The unlimited range lets assist your troops from long distances.
- If stray bullets are too risky or your soldiers too frail, use the precision rifle instead. Unrivaled accuracy, but the weapon is too awkward to hit moving targets during enemy turn (no snap shot = no reaction fire). The weapon can also let you fire single rockets with the same accuracy.

10

Troubleshooting / Alien shooting at XCOM from out-of-range

« on: January 17, 2015, 05:44:39 pm »

I've seen a weird behavior where the Alien can take reaction shots even though they are out of range of their victim.

I now have a save game (with mods, unfortunately) where the alien placed at 19 east, 7 south shot at my advancing scout. From the player's standpoint, that tile is still black, out of range.
I've tested with debug mode : The alien doesn't "see" the soldier, according to the UI (no [1] sign). Yet during its own turn, the alien AI keeps staying on this tile on shooting at my soldier.

Anybody has an idea how to troubleshoot better ?

11

Work In Progress / [EXPERIMENT] manufacturing a research project

« on: November 29, 2014, 06:01:53 pm »

I've just thought of a neat trick with the current Openxcom engine : It's possible to make a buildable thing that unlocks a new research project.
You can test with the attached ruleset :
- Your engineers can manufacture Weapon facility
- Once built, your scientists can research Weapon facility
- This research topic unlocks the items New Pistol and New Rifle for use and manufacture (in this example, just copies of the laser rifle and pistol)

Disadvantage:
1) the manufactured item will have the same name as research project, so you're limited to names that somehow make sense to first build and then spend some time using/studying : "gauss prototype", "particle accelerator", "plasma testbed", "psionic study module", "Global array sensor"
2) Player is not notified of new research project
3) Can't prevent from building more than one, though it's not useful.

Benefits:
1) Gives something for your engineers to do, for example at campaign start
2) Can incur a cost of specific items, for example 10 sectoid corpses
3) The monetary cost alone can make it unavailable at game start
4) These costs are visible, so the player can see beforehand that he has to accumulate 10 sectoid corpses for a reason.

12

Resources / [TFTD] Scout dolphin

« on: November 20, 2014, 09:57:00 pm »

Experiment for a dolphin scout, underwater equivalent of the german shepherd.
The top row has a pod, you can assume it's a camera like in "Life Aquatic" movie, or a voice activated sonic weapon

13

Troubleshooting / [1.0] GetLogicalProcessorInformation not found in KERNEL32.dll

« on: June 14, 2014, 04:59:25 pm »

The 32bit Windows version of XCOM 1.0 fails to start on a machine running Windows XP (Tablet PC edition) SP2.
The function mentioned in the textbox doesn't exist before SP3, and is actually called by the runtime msvcr120.dll, and at least SDL and yaml-cpp.dll have been built and linked to it.

For the people who have the same problem, I made a build of XCOM 1.0 with mingw-gcc, so it doesn't require microsoft's runtime.
yaml is compiled by me and linked statically (so no dll)
I built SDL long ago so I'm not sure how many optional image formats I built into SDL_image - but apparently it's enough for OpenXCOM. SDL_image still links png dynamically, which itself links zlib dynamically, as it seems the preferred method.
I don't remember ever building mikmod, so it must be from an official package.
And libgcc and libstd++ are the ones directly from Mingw.

Have fun, old PC users 

14

Open Feedback / Salaries

« on: June 13, 2014, 11:19:51 pm »

I wanted to add something in the Differences to X-COM wiki page, but I have some doubt, so if somebody can confirm it :

You should hire personal and rent ships at the beginning of a month rather than at the end, because in OpenXCOM you pay a salary for those who are in transit, and this includes the ones that you just hired.

15

Open Feedback / Plasma ammo plentiful

« on: May 06, 2014, 09:21:45 pm »

OpenXCOM uses clip optimization, similar as XcomUtil. Unless I'm mistaken, all clips of the same type get combined : those fired by XCOM + those fired by aliens. So this may be too efficient, resulting in quasi-unlimited ammo for plasma weapons :
In a typical mission, aliens will take 1-10 shots of heavy plasma. Since a heavy clip has a capacity of 35, it means the player's team can already take 25-34 shots of heavy plasma "for free", because a clip would be lost anyway. You can have 14 soldiers taking 2 heavy plasma shots each, and it costs nothing. If you tried this in vanilla, you'd use 14 clips in one mission!

IMO, the standard loadout for aliens should be reduced. Even one heavy clip per alien should be enough. Because as it is now, it's quite impossible to need to build more plasma clips.