Topics

1

Suggestions / "Sort by" combobox on Craft Soldiers page

« on: May 19, 2015, 03:48:41 am »

I felt so sorry for Meridian when I saw him manually organizing upwards of 70 soldiers on the Craft -> Soldiers page that I wrote this.

It adds a combo box to the bottom of the screen that allows you to sort the soldiers by any attribute.  Choose "Original order" to restore the order they were in when you entered the screen.

The order of the attributes to sort by is the same as in the soldier info page, but I think some items are more useful than others to sort by.  What do you think?  Which items should go at the top?

Code is up at: https://github.com/myk002/OpenXcom/tree/sort_soldiers   I'll wait for a bit for feedback before I submit the pull request.

2

Suggestions / In-game manufacturing profitability view

« on: March 25, 2015, 05:09:21 am »

Hi all,

One question that I find myself asking a lot is: "what's the best use of my engineer's time right now?"  There has always been this wiki page, but it is cumbersome to switch out of the game and go back and forth to consult charts, and now with mods adding items and changing properties of existing items, the wiki's charts can be incomplete and inaccurate.

I decided to try to bring the profitability calculations into the game so it can give you accurate, useful data for exactly the items you can manufacture right now.  Here's a preview for what I've done so far.  The screenshots are of the production items screen (if you don't recognize some of the items, it because they're from the FMP).  I've added a third column that shows the net profit (or loss) if you dedicate all the manufacturing resources at this base to the item for one month.  The number will differ for different bases according to their manufacturing capacity.  Of course, most "profit" numbers will be negative, but even this is useful since it informs you of the "opportunity cost" of manufacturing the items that you need.

I also added an additional "category" to the combo box to show only profitable items.  If this is selected, the list is sorted so the most profitable items you can manufacture right now are at the top.

What do you guys think?  Would this be a welcome addition to the game?  My concern is that while it can be very useful for someone who knows what it does, it can also be confusing for newcomers.  Any ideas on how to refine this to be clearer/more useful?

3

Programming / New feature discussion: inventory templates

« on: April 02, 2014, 01:08:57 am »

I love this game (and especially this implementation of it), but one thing that always bugged me was all the clicking I had to do to get my soldiers' inventories set up.  Granted, with the saved equipment layouts in OpenXcom, you only have to do this once per soldier, but the first mission is always a pain, having to click click click to prepare 10 soldiers (or so) for their first battle.

What I thought would be most convenient was to set up one soldier the way I want as a template, then tab through the other soldiers and apply the template, using free items from the ground.  That way my setup before a mission would be:

• set up a soldier the way I want (or select a soldier that's already set up the way I want)
• hit [c] (the new default hotkey for "create template") or click the button
• [tab] to another soldier that isn't set up
• hit [v] (the new default hotkey for "apply template") or click the button

then just repeat the last two steps for any other soldiers that aren't set up.  The UI might look something like this:


This is pretty simple and easy to use, but is it enough?

Another option would be to have a list of layouts that you can edit, create, individually name, and save.  This is more complex and "busier" on the screen, and may take more clicks to use, but has more functionality.  The UI might look like this:


A third option would be to keep the inventory screen fairly clean, but have a separate "Layout Manager" screen that you can get to from the inventory screen.  This would have the greatest amount of functionality, but also take the most amount of clicks to use, even for simple things.  It might look like this:



So what do you guys think?  Is this a feature that you'd like to see?  How simple/complex should it be?  What do you think your common use cases would be?

4

Programming / use of uninitialized var fixes

« on: July 03, 2013, 07:08:36 pm »

I tried building with -Wall -Wextra and gcc found a few issues, like variables being used without initialization in some code paths.  These code paths probably aren't being hit too often -- otherwise we would have heard about crashes, I'm sure, but it's probably a good idea to fix them up.  I created a pull request that fixes the issues, but it could certainly use a review to make sure I fixed them correctly : )  Maybe we could add -Wall -Wextra to the flags in the standard build?  It does catch some important issues before they become a problem.