Topics

1

Suggestions / Numbers on Sliders in Options Menu

« on: May 10, 2014, 06:54:44 pm »

This is a very minor suggestion I'd like to make, although I'm surprised it wasn't done already with the UI overhaul. It's incredibly annoying to fine-tune the sliders in the Options menu, and this could easily be fixed by simply putting a number on the slider button, which was actually the case BEFORE the UI update... still really confused why it was decided to remove them.

2

Suggestions / Make Dual Wielding Useful

« on: February 15, 2014, 09:41:51 pm »

Right now, there is pretty much no good reason to dual wield weapons. Dual wielding could be made far more useful by having an option to fire both weapons at once. When this is done, the rate of fire is doubled, so taking an auto shot while dual wielding plasma pistols will take 6 shots. There will still be an option to use only one weapon at once.

 If weapons with different rates of fire are used, the highest time unit cost of the two for the given shot type will be used.

If you think dual wielding heavy plasma guns and using auto fire will turn any unit into a walking tank, you are probably right, but I propose a solution to this.

 Normally the penalty for firing two handed weapons with the other hand occupied is a 20 percent accuracy loss. However, when firing two 2 handed weapons at once, this penalty should be a whopping 60 percent, which will leave you with a very poor accuracy value.

3

Suggestions / Alien Bleeding

« on: February 11, 2014, 03:47:48 am »

There is a particular feature in TFTDExtender, alien bleeding, that allows aliens to take Fatal Wounds as well. This not only evens out the playing field significantly, it introduces a few new tactics that would otherwise not be practical to employ.

 A shot landing but not killing is no longer as big a deal, because either the alien will die soon or be rendered much less combat effective due to health loss or damage to a significant part of the body.

 If you want the best idea of how this affects gameplay, play TFTDExtender with the alien bleeding option turned on and you will notice the difference.

4

Suggestions / Soldier Customization

« on: February 10, 2014, 05:23:05 am »

I'm 100 percent certain that this has been suggested before, but I figured I'd give it a go regardless.

When I say soldier customization, I mean something akin to the XCOM 2012 system, where you mix and match things like hair and hair color, face, skin color, armor color, helmets, etc.

The majority of the work required to implement this would consist of drawing tons and  tons of new sprites, something that I'm not entirely sure is feasible (and it's also modifying a lot of original game art assets). But I think all of us at one point have wanted to give our soldiers jungle camo on jungle terrain missions or to give face masks to soldiers on terror missions to conceal their identities.

I realize that this feature and purely cosmetic and that currently there are other priorities in mind for the OpenXcom team, but at some point or another after 1.0 I wound like to see this happen.

5

Open Feedback / Questions About OXC Firing Accuracy

« on: February 09, 2014, 03:41:34 am »

I've noticed a few oddities in OpenXcom regarding firing accuracy or firing in itself, and I want to know why these things are the way they are and/or if they can be changed to more closely reflect the original game's behavior.

First up, when taking Auto Shots and the target dies before the burst finishes-
Original: the remainder of the burst will hit the spot where the target once stood
OXC: the remainder of the burst will hit the ground underneath the target (its corpse)
 
Secondly, is accuracy in OpenXcom based on probability?
I heard somewhere in these forums that Firing Accuracy in OXC basically states the probability for a 'hit' trajectory to be calculated, and if the RNG roll fails, a 'miss' trajectory is calculated. However, afaIk, the original game's Firing Accuracy did not reflect your chance to hit, but instead just calculated the possible spread in degrees of any given shot you take. This made it possible, for example, to take a 56% Accuracy Snap Shot at a target right in front of you and have the shot literally fly directly to your left or some other really bad angle (although the odds of these extreme misses are miniscule, I have witnessed them a few times in Let's Plays of the original and have also experienced them).

And thirdly, when you save before you take a shot, and then continue to reload the save game and take that same shot, it will always take the same trajectory (so if the shot misses it will continue to miss and will never hit no matter how many times you reload). Is this to prevent save scumming? If so, I disapprove of it, not because I save scum myself (I noticed this while testing a few mods) but because I think if people want to save scum you should allow them the opportunity. If it isn't for preventing save scumming, I still think this should be corrected.

Whew, that was a mouthful! So, in conclusion, if these mechanics work in OXC the way I suspect they do, I'd like to see them changed to more closely model the original game's behavior.

6

Offtopic / UFO2000 Needs Players

« on: December 27, 2013, 08:41:24 pm »

I really have no idea how much the UFO2k community overlaps with the OXC community, so I'm going to assume that at least some of you know what UFO2000 is. If not, https://www.ufopaedia.org/index.php?title=UFO2000.
TL;DR, it's multiplayer X-COM (battlescape only).

Download link can be found here: https://sourceforge.net/projects/ufo2000/files/UFO2000%20beta/0.9.1176/ufo2000-0.9.1176-beta.exe/download?use_mirror=garr&download=

The game is not quite dead, but the server is empty at almost all times. You can occasionally find someone to play against with a few hours' time and some patience. I'm looking at the server stats page right now, and there have been a total of 99 games over the course of two months. That's an average of about 1.65 matches played per day, but that figure is unreliable because there are periods of several consecutive days when no matches were played at all.

Basically, I think this game deserves a 'revival' (although it's not quite dead), and the people of this forum are great candidates for that.

The wiki link above tells you everything you need to know about the game to start playing. You should devote some time to reading it, because there are many subtle differences between UFO2k and X-COM, and it's better to know about them beforehand than to learn about them in combat the hard way.

So, is anyone up for it?

7

Offtopic / If X-COM was real, would you enlist?

« on: November 24, 2013, 06:37:52 am »

If X-COM was real, would you enlist?

Even considering the... steep... casualty rates, I personally would volunteer for it as soon as possible, since it's the kind of war that has no political agenda and is pretty much for the greatest cause in human history (ensuring we're not all in alien shackles).

This question assumes that the videogame series never existed in any form, so you'd have no real idea what you're getting into.