Topics

1

OXCE Bugs FIXED / [FIXED] Unranked soldier types now count towards promotions

« on: October 10, 2023, 09:18:47 pm »

Someone on the XPZ Matrix server has reported that the manual promotion feature had a knock on effect that probably wasn't intended: unpromotable soldier types (like XPZ repentia and pirate dogs) are now counted for the purpose of determining additional promotions for other units.

They offered the following repo links in support of this statement:

- https://github.com/MeridianOXC/OpenXcom/pull/113/files#diff-38a268ab06f7fcb5ead399d427eef51f8e31623789d4821dc1eb87ea1a2f6d8d
- https://github.com/MeridianOXC/OpenXcom/blob/8f1dd59ad1a27485b841f68a068556c403f72fd0/src/Savegame/SavedGame.cpp#L2436C47-L2436C47
- https://github.com/MeridianOXC/OpenXcom/blob/90f79de0cb01926c79b48dfce57b4515b446f2dc/src/Savegame/RankCount.cpp#L55C2-L55C2

This has a significant gameplay effect in XPZ, since it substantially increases the effective costs for unpromotable troops that are balanced around being low cost.  Since it seems like an accidental consequence of a feature addition, it seemed right to treat it as a bug.

2

OXCE Suggestions OK / [Suggestion] Event shops

« on: February 19, 2023, 03:57:41 pm »

Basic idea: an event can have a shop associated with it, giving players an opportunity to do things like buy unusual items or get stuff at a discount.  Think travelling merchants, a sudden glut on the market, a chance to get some military surplus from friends on the Council...

Rough spec:

• If an event has an associated shop, in addition to the button to exit the event, there's another one to open a purchase screen.
• The purchase screen shows the list of available items, along with their price in this shop and how many of the item are available to buy, if the mod author has set a limit.
• Exiting the purchase screen takes them back to geoscape with the event message still up.  This is so they can refer back to it in case the mod author put some useful information there.

Increasingly fancy extensions:

• The purchase screen can have a custom background.
• The mod author can do some randomisation of the shop's contents: (a) they can set the chance of a particular item being available each time an event using this shop triggers; (b) they can set a delta value to partly randomise the amount of an item available (like the one for enemy numbers on missions, so e.g. if the base availability of the item =4 and the delta =2, the amount available each time the shop appears will be 4-6).
• As an alternative to money, the mod author can set a shop to require some item.  The shop's prices are then an amount of this item.  This would allow things like an event shop in Piratez that requires the player to spend Mutant Alliance bounty tokens.  This is set at the shop level, not the item level – this is to reduce UI complexity.

Would anyone use this?  I'm pretty sure Dioxine would use this in XPZ.  Today he was talking about a workaround he's been considering to mimic it, that would involve special 'shopping' missions – it sounded like a complex and kind of painful workaround for the above.