Topics

1

Offtopic / I found the Heavy Cannon

« on: November 12, 2022, 11:32:13 pm »

The STA-50 which is designed for use by special forces, with a 5 shot magazine. The large barrel shroud is a combination suppressor and muzzle brake. I believe it weighs in the 20 pounds range.

Sure bears a strong resemblance.

2

XPiratez / some sprite reskins

« on: September 02, 2022, 10:25:30 pm »

Been really busy with things and haven't updated my X-P for a good while. Dunno if there were any changes to these, but just figured id post in case anyone thought they were cool.

The govt elite soldier is actually a replacement for standard juggernaut armor, I thivkened the legs slightly and put some glint on the armor. I always felt the power armor should look darker.

The armored car has a modified turret for machineguns which looks pretty snazzy.

3

XPiratez / Short Anims for truncated bullet strikes

« on: June 21, 2021, 10:41:08 pm »

Since this is a thing now I figured id cook up some better looking hit anims for bullet impacts. By reducing them to 1, 2, or 3 frames the standard bullet anim looks terrible (ooh its a pale white "dot").

Ive got a few colors. One of the golden ones is abit rebated for the first frame. Another is more pale yellow than gold. Have a red and a blue one too. Im sure these will look pretty good even if they're only 2 frames displayed.
(should note that guns like MAG ammo and Skorpion which cause fire effects will cause noticeable delay on impact even if the animation is truncated, which in practice seems to make the 1st frame display slightly longer with a lag onscreen)

Im sure these sprites can be played with by someone with better tool than I currently have.
I dont think the rest of the frames (for a 10 set) need to be declared, if you add the file separately from the main smoke.pck replacement. Just take care to index each 10 higher.

4

Tools / photoshop

« on: April 23, 2021, 11:14:28 pm »

Found a curious piece of software on Archive.org
Just figured id share that without posting any exact links to it.
(Its a 396mb download. Grabbed me a backup copy of it since I own it but ive lost my computer and dunno if my hard drives still work.)

5

XPiratez / request: Broken Windows (tileset)

« on: March 30, 2021, 09:22:29 pm »

This concerns vehicles like Aircars, Airspeeders, Snake, and so on which have big windshields and other porthole windows. Presumably even though you can see through them it would be Very Difficult to actually shoot through them because they'd have to be made of some pretty tough stuff (like ALON, etc).

Im suggesting a Broken state be added as the destroy-tile to default to, for at least the windshields. And maybe set the toughness on it somewhere around 60 damage so an explosion will blast them out but most small arms wont.

As for the hit cross section is there some way to make it an extremely small hole so you can see through but shooting through is unlikely?

Currently its just plain obnoxious, its like living in a glass house, to the point id rather not even be able to see out of the windows.

6

XPiratez / Yay My First Hero

« on: March 01, 2021, 07:07:23 pm »

Got my first Hero the other day, somehow it hasn't rolled at all until now.
What a badass.
I only gave him a bandaid kit because "yeahh, healing people and making them feel better really isnt his job, just look at that face, he's not supposed to make you feel better"

7

XPiratez / Small Plasma Hit (Mod/Test)

« on: February 16, 2021, 09:58:40 pm »

I really like the big green bfg-style flash used for the stargod plasma weapons, back when I made it I figured itd be used for the fusion torch or somesuch. Its entirely fitting for the heavy duty plasmas but I find it sorta obtrusive and overzealous for the lower end plasma guns that are far more numerous. So I made this smaller version with sparks and modded it to work on top of X-P.
(affects green plasma guns that do less damage than the Heavy Plasma).

tools used:  GrafX2 for android, QuickEdit for android

8

XPiratez / Car Bombing

« on: January 01, 2021, 11:43:39 pm »

Just wanted to share a technique I learned using Armored Cars since you can pilot them now. The gal has a full 4x3 size backpack to use, presumably to carry extra ammo for the gun. But she can pick things up off the northwest tile of the car and can DROP things off from the backpack too. It costs 20 TUs but the armored car gives a massive amount of them, my gals usually are sitting at 260-280 or such.

I caught onto this idea because I figured itd be groovy to have her carry the X-Grog for rapid deployment. But, being that I often use this technique normally in battle (prime grenade, drop on the ground, run away) I figured it could be done even more effectively with bigger Bombs because she can get quite clear of the blast. In fact with pre-priming I can set them to go off in stages, 2 turns, 3 turns, 4 turns into the battle, and I know which one is which because of where I put it. Im even planning on using it with a timed baby nuke, set several turns out so I can get far enough away, which sounds like an infinitely better option than actually trying to launch the thing.

It can be hazardous, but its easy enough to manage, ive only been bitten with it a couple times. Im able to sweep in and barrel bomb the lokk'narr Barn on the first turn, and using cheap Firebombs I can raise hell even worse than a mortar crew. With such high TU and Reactions NOBODY is going to reaction fire until ive already dropped the bombs off, at least not until im near the end and ive already done my damage. The limitation is having real estate to run around in, being able to get around, sometimes its an issue but the Gun on the car can help with it and sometimes I can have other gals shoot and detonate a clean path through the obstacles.

This gal has picked up multiple ranks of Bomber just because of this trick, without throwing a single one of them.

9

Released Mods / X-Piratez High Quality Sounds (unofficial)

« on: December 11, 2020, 10:07:02 pm »

https://openxcom.mod.io/x-piratez-high-quality-sounds-unofficial

Enjoy and dig in.
Just in time to get comfy with L6 over the holidays as you shelter in place.
Happy Christmas.

As it says, there is room for growth but I think theres so much here that its not really wanting for anything currently. Quite refreshing.

If the mod site messes up here's a filedropper link but I dont know how long those stay up.
http://www.filedropper.com/piratezhighqualitysounds

10

Help / Item Transformations

« on: November 20, 2020, 10:37:10 pm »

I know Armor Transformations are possible but can you do the same thing with Items? So that when you go in various environments the items change look or capability?
(Eg a Glock that works fine, but underwater the Glock loses firepower rapidly and only has a range of like 4-5 tiles).

Also how do you turn off Throwing? (Set Throw Cost to time to 0?)

11

Tools / Android Editing Tools

« on: November 10, 2020, 06:58:11 pm »

Granted it isnt ideal but it IS possible to do editing on Android. At the moment im using a phone because I dont have a comp, and ive gotta say OpenXcom is a great game app to have for it, it really blows away most of the modern game apps.

Grafx2 has an android version and ive been doing minor sprite work. Also QuickEdit has YAML editing capacity, no thread collapsing like Notepad++ but it does syntax.

Ill also mention again the Falco OpenXcom tools website.

Question I have is are there any Online image converters that will convert an image to a specific 8bit palette? Because Grafx2 doesn't have the ability to save/load palettes or convert them. Im not sure if Gimp has an android version but its palette stuff has never been trustworthy.

12

XPiratez / Interfaces colors

« on: February 09, 2018, 08:23:41 pm »

Okay so im modifying the battlescape palette to represent the final range of dark slate grays that the game hardcodes over it. The spare colors in the actual palette are used for text colors in the ufopaedia so they pop better, and obviously setting that final range to the battlescape grays causes those text colors to change.
(I know other people have been like, meh its something I can live with - But I be the one who is Doing something about it)

So which interfaces heading covers the text colors used in the Ufopaedia for item entries and such... the interface heading for the screen linked here, its a real jungle in that interfaces ruleset. (since im modifying the palette I will have to remap the colors for the Text in the ufopaedia so that they are still colorful and not steel-gray washed out)

13

Help / Operator call on a Scalar[]

« on: February 02, 2018, 03:47:48 am »

Just started getting this error on a mod im working on, but it will not mention the line/column where its getting it.

Im guessing this may have something to do with accuracy multiplier or damage bonus bits because thats what I was mainly adding in. Particularly using flatHundred to impose a penalty in both cases. Is that whats causing it? (im gonna be pretty pissed if it is) If it is that then will putting it in the format "flatHundred: [-0.12]" fix it?

14

Suggestions / TFTD underwater smoke

« on: January 26, 2018, 11:43:37 pm »

When I was a kid playing TFTD I distinctively remember that moving through smoke tiles underwater adds +2 TU cost to all forms of movement. Moving diagonal cost 8, moving normal cost 6, and it may have been multiplied for above-4TU cost specialty tiles. It also causes no Stun underwater.
(On Land it behaved just like it does in ufo though)

I didnt make much use of smoke in TFTD because of that, I knew it took longer to move through it (annoyingly so) and I tried to skirt the edge as much as I could so that I could get a clear line of sight/fire to hit something. Only time that underwater soot ever helped was when I accidentally shot a pipeline and it filled a massive area with cover since it took awhile to move out of it.

Just the other day I was playing TFTD on my phone (android oxce+ 3.9 distro) and I noticed moving through the soot tiles underwater wasn't affecting my movement at all (it also caused stun accumulation), so this is a bug report.

Now im not so sure its a Good Idea to impose movement restriction from the smoke in an underwater enviro so it should probably be an Extended option to turn it off (just like leaving the Dye Grenade at 10 damage wasnt a good idea). Realistically being sooted-up sure grinds scuba operation to a crawl and can even cancel a dive early... but most of the time xcom agents have their feet planted on the seabed and remember the layout of what they saw before it went to gunk. And everybody underwater would be moving so slow that the timescale for every turn is absurdly longer than it would be on land.

I think this is a rule that could be implemented with whatever is designating a mission as being "underwater" (xcom agents wear helmets, they emit water bubbles, gunfire emits vapor trails, and explosion graphics default to bubble blasts) just to simplify things. I know Meridian updated his Enviros recently but I dont think thats the way to do it.

15

Help / Making Xcom2 in Xcom1

« on: January 17, 2018, 03:31:35 am »

Unrelated topic post was going to be Street Fighter 2: The Movie The Game based on the trope. After seeing what dioxine has accomplished with the underwater missions in X-Piratez I was wondering about the feasibility of doing the following:

Creating a total conversion for Xcom 1 (under oxce+) which turns it into Xcom 2 TFTD. It wouldnt exactly be tftd but a reworked version of it. The ufopaedia entries would follow the xcom1 format though for the most part.

Along those lines I need some general info on how to handle the mapping - which tools do you guys use for mapping in openxcom and is it possible to use resource images for tiles or do you still have to work with .pck and .mcd files to do that?

Im also wondering if its possible to have vapor trails emitted by a shot when you're running openxcom under Xcom 1 (whether its on land or underwater).