Messages

991

Released Mods / [WEAPON] Clips for laser weapons

« on: December 30, 2013, 06:49:57 am »

Why? Well, I played TFTD first, so when I discovered UFO's laser weapons, the infinite ammo looked like "easy mode". OpenXCom removes the 80-item limit anyway.
Stats are mostly based on TFTD gauss clips. I reduced the manufacturing costs (time and money) of the 3 laser weapons by "2 clips" each, so it's not too hard in early game, when you just become able to build them.

I pixelled clips based on the weapon's colors, so it should be easy to see which one goes where.
The "ListOrder" is set, so the clips appear in the right position for ship equipment and manufacturing.
Translations are given for en-US and fr.

License: Public domain

992

Suggestions / Re: LAN PvP?

« on: December 29, 2013, 06:58:06 pm »

Install the latest version (beta), choose option "Enlarge battlefield (doubled pixels)" and "Prefer X-COM graphics", and you get this:

993

Suggestions / Re: LAN PvP?

« on: December 28, 2013, 11:56:47 pm »

I've tested playing UFO2000's hotseat mode, and it shows the complexity is not trivial :
On each player's turn, the game needs to "replay" all actions of the previous turn from the new player's perspective.

994

Translations / Uppercase accents (French, and probably other languages)

« on: December 26, 2013, 07:04:48 pm »

I really don't like the accented characters that have a different height than their non-accented counterpart.
Linguistically, accents should be kept in uppercase French, but it's very common to skip them (Most people think that it's an error to keep them) Especially when there is not much room, like in game that plays in 320x200.

Here are 2 rather obvious cases :

(dégâts, équipage, équipement)

(énergétique, fumée)

Here I've tested reducing the entire fonts to match the accents' sizes :


The words look much better. But I can't say it's overall better, because the originals looked... well, bolder. I attach the font files to this post, in case somebody wants to see for himself.

I think I'm going with a 2nd option : to keep copies of the fonts that replace the accented uppercase vowels with their non-accented version.

995

Suggestions / Re: [Windowed Mode] Cursor Lock

« on: December 22, 2013, 06:08:30 pm »

You can also use the "drag middle mouse" option, or my favorite : cursor keys to move the view (plus mouse wheel to view up and down)

996

Work In Progress / [WIP] Alien melee sprites

« on: December 19, 2013, 05:35:25 pm »

I saw that a Psi-controlled Chtyssalid had a "stun rod" image as a melee image, so I started drawing melee sprites for aliens.


I looked at the in-game ufopedia for reference, but I drew it from scratch (not a copy/transform of the original art). I release it to public domain - feel free to use or modify.

Still have zombie and reaper to, from what I can see of the rul files (entries that use "bigSprite: 26")

997

Work In Progress / Re: Civilian medi-kit

« on: December 18, 2013, 10:56:18 pm »

Great! Thank you for the information.

998

Open Feedback / Re: Change music quality

« on: December 18, 2013, 07:34:59 pm »

The SoundBlaster 16 used a Yamaha OPL-3 chip to play MIDI songs. Try the collection "MIDI-OPL-3_FM_128M.zip" on the page above.

999

Open Feedback / Re: SOLDIER GENDER

« on: December 18, 2013, 04:41:47 pm »

It can't be tweaked using text files, the odds are 50%.
It's in RuleSet/SoldierNamePool.cpp, function SoldierNamePool::genName()

1000

Troubleshooting / healing and melee don't like stairs

« on: December 17, 2013, 01:46:05 am »

Soldiers A and B can't heal each other using medi-kit, they get the message "There's nobody here".
Function ActionMenuState::btnActionMenuItemClick() checks that units are on the same "map level", it ignores the units heights and whether they stand on a "stair" block. This is probably going to be annoying on long slopes like mountains (TFTD had quite a few)
 
More strangely, A can't strike B with a stun rod with the same message, and if B tries to strike A he loses TUs but nothing happens.
In this case the first check is TileEngine::validMeleeRange(), and the actual hit, I don't know where it is.

1001

Work In Progress / Re: Translation / encoding ?

« on: December 16, 2013, 04:30:03 pm »

OpenXCom is using a library called YAML to load (and sometimes write)  the data text files. According to the docs, it should support quite a few encodings.
In my opinion, you should use the same encoding as the files from "stock" OpenXcom distribution : if a curious user wants to look or modify files, your files will behave like the others.

1002

Open Feedback / Re: New AI feedback

« on: December 16, 2013, 12:19:06 pm »

During a Terror Ship assault, an undiscovered sectoid went berserk in the engine room and immediately blew up 3 of the 4 power sources !  This is such a great game 

1003

Work In Progress / Civilian medi-kit

« on: December 14, 2013, 08:25:25 pm »

In the early days of the alien invasion, XCOM could use civilian-grade medi-kits. They provided 3 uses of HEALING, STIMULANT and PAIN KILLER. However, their bulk and weight limited their use to dedicated "Combat medics". Soon, XCOM felt the need to invent more efficient healing tools.


This expensive kit (10000$) may be used if you feel the need to save some rookie's life before medikit become available. Weight is 15 (!) and the 2x2 box can only fit in hand and backpack.
The Ufopedia text points to the other medikit's, so it uses available translations. I originally called it Medipack but the action "Use medi-kit" can't be customized by item.

I don't know what's the norm for modders to number new resources (like bigSprite), so I picked my member number (1020) and started counting at 00 for any sprite I may add. This should avoid conflicts.

Caveat:
The auto-equip system assumes that any healing item (battleType 6 = BT_MEDIKIT) is 1x2 and should be auto-equipped in top-right slot of belt...
I'm really not sure what to suggest to coders to make auto-equip more mod-friendly, because it's just impossible to be future-proof. Maybe, just maybe, it would already solve a lot of cases by providing a "no auto-equip" flag that modders can put on all items that auto-equip can't handle by itself. Anyway, auto-equip was only useful in vanilla because it didn't remember soldiers' equipments.

I drew the graphic from scratch, I put all this in public domain : Feel free to re-use, tweak to your liking, or use as a base for anything.

1004

Open Feedback / Re: New AI feedback

« on: December 14, 2013, 07:12:15 pm »

Ooh sorry, I misunderstood that. I had only looked at the commit changes, and somehow missed that in this place the unit is the thrower.

1005

Open Feedback / Re: New AI feedback

« on: December 14, 2013, 05:02:08 pm »

About the recent changes where aliens try avoid places where grenades land, for one turn (https://github.com/SupSuper/OpenXcom/commit/d3c38d7629e547219e4812ae294d685676ca4d23) :

I'm not sure how necessary it is... We want aliens to fall for proximity mines, and both player and AI use explosives with timer 0 normally.

At the moment it seems to ignore whether the grenade is live (activated) or not. It *is* realistic, but I'm afraid it can be abused by throwing un-primed grenades through a building's window every turn, until all aliens are flushed out. Compared to using incendiary ammo, it costs nothing, is much more controllable and eliminates the risk of destroying precious alien artifacts.