Messages

16

Suggestions / Re: Make Dual Wielding Useful

« on: February 17, 2014, 06:06:11 am »

Actually, X-Com is not a well-balanced game. It never intended to be. It's a game about tipping the balance in your favour - for example, going for plasma weapons straight away. You can ignore this and play a harder way, but the game doesn't force you to.

Back to the point: I believe we are of the same opinion, so there's not much to add. I'll just sum it up, so please correct me if I'm wrong:

• Akimbo should be allowed when two one-handed weapons are held. The weapons must be of the same type (this actually is debatable, I can't see why you wouldn't be able to use two different pistols).
• You can either fire both weapons or just one. Firing one works normally.
• You can shoot both weapons. It costs a little more TUs and Accuracy is somewhat lower for both weapons; the exact numbers are left to be determined later.

Anything else?

A special clause for Stunrods, that are nominally two-handed, however should allow a double attack when dual-wielded - for double damage, and at decreased accuracy and increased TU cost.

Perhaps worsen accuracy penalties for shooting weapons of different types? The reason you can coordinate your hands at all during akimbo shooting is because you expect both weapons to behave the same. Shooting from a recoilless laser pistol and a standard pistol simultaneously is going to hideously throw off your aim with one or both of them.

17

Suggestions / Re: Make Dual Wielding Useful

« on: February 16, 2014, 08:22:19 pm »

Yes, using two weapons at once is considerably harder than using just one. (Well I never attempted it myself, but try drawing with two pencils...)

AFAIK it does now. And I think it should stay so, especially if we add one-handed melee weapons.

On a separate note, I believe that even when dual-wielding, we still should be allowed to fire only one weapon. The firing menu should reflect this by adding additional options (Aimed/Snap/Auto x2).

You can't shoot accurately with two hands because you can't aim accurately with two hands. Experiment sometime, take two laser pointers and point them at the same spot. How hard is it? Now imagine you can't see the spots to converge them.

A 20% reduction in accuracy would be too much (it's leave a Laser Pistol with just 8% base accuracy), but 10-15% is reasonable. Akimbo shooting is always "spray and pray" - there is no way to really aim except in the "general direction" of the enemy. TU increase should also be proportional to the weapon, for instance the Laser Pistol's akimbo auto-shot could take up 30%, enabling three volleys of six shots at 13% accuracy, versus a single weapon's four volleys of three at 28% (if not moving).

The whole point of akimbo shooting, I think, is to trade accuracy for volume of fire - it won't make sense to really increase TU use much. Double snap shots could really take just as much time as single weapon snap shots.

Shooting just one weapon should be unaffected, of course, even while dual-wielding - it'd be exactly as it is now.

18

Suggestions / Re: Make Dual Wielding Useful

« on: February 16, 2014, 12:03:46 pm »

Afaik projectiles can't impact handobs.

Don't have to. Just make them add a boost to "forward" armor.

And I'd really like to see akimbo auto-shooting from dual-wielded pistols, with minimal accuracy and just sheer rate of fire.
And you should not be able to akimbo-shoot weapons it takes two hands to wield.

Dual-striking with stunrods should be an option though.

19

Suggestions / Re: [UI] Some final touches on touch friendliness

« on: February 09, 2014, 10:00:53 am »

It's theoretically possible in portrait mode and with a window just narrow enough to fit, but it's far from simple enough to always use. Plus not many people know that little options switch to enable the full onscreen keyboard in Win8. Thankfully, force-fire's not an XCOM standard option, so it's very much possible to play without.

And yes, it's possible. The range of tablets that run full windows 8 isn't terribly wide, but it's growing. Granted, few of those are actual tablets - most are convertibles and hybrids. Mine is a hybrid, a tablet/UMPC with a detachable keyboard dock.

20

Suggestions / Re: [UI] Some final touches on touch friendliness

« on: February 08, 2014, 11:49:59 pm »

We do not maintain the Android port, it's third-party. We can look into these issues once it's brought into the main codebase and SDL2/mobile support becomes official.

I'm not on Android. I'm on Windows 8, I believe I mentioned. ^_^

A slightly harder-to-fix problem is force-firing... but, well, it's not standard X-Com anyway.
Still, an option for, say, "double-click to force-fire" would be neat.

21

Suggestions / Re: [UI] Some final touches on touch friendliness

« on: February 08, 2014, 09:26:19 am »

Ah, so it is there on the base name screen. Me not noticing it probably stems from half the screen being hidden under the onscreen keyboard at the time.

And thanks! One less hiccup in the rapidly drying puddle of little inconveniences for pure tablet playing. ^_^

(your generosity wouldn't perchance extend to looking into the problem with tablet right-click-drag, would it? :hopeful:  not sure what goes on in there, but right-click works and right-click-drag doesn't... or else I fail at config file. Default is 2 for middle-click, right? That means 1 for right-click?)

edit: okay nevermind that last bit, that's just me. Set it to 3 and right-click-drag scrolling works too. Huzzah!

22

Suggestions / [UI] Some final touches on touch friendliness

« on: February 05, 2014, 08:54:51 pm »

Greetings.

I'm a somewhat proud owner of a Windows 8 hybrid tablet, and I found it quite surprising that, in its existing state, OpenXCom is tablet-friendly to an unexpected extent.

Menus respond perfectly to touch input, buttons are large so that missing is difficult, and even in Battlescape it's surprisingly easy to get around (though right-click-drag scrolling doesn't work for some reason, and left-click-drag denies the targeting preview, but it's workable). The only times you ever actually need to bring up the keyboard are when you're building a new base, and when you're saving a game.

But, typing a name of the savegame is one thing. A completely baffling oversight, however, is the lack of a "save game" button. Even if you're overwriting an existing save (playing "ironman", as it were), you still need that keyboard up to press "enter" in order to save.

When creating a new base there is a similar problem, though I guess it's expected. However, perhaps slapping a default name on the base according to its region, and adding a "confirm" button would be feasible? Not that it's actually required - the onscreen keyboard is a touch away and base-building is a fairly infrequent task - but it could be a neat thing to have.

There are probably similar issues elsewhere, where you can enter a text field with a mouseclick or touch, but can't back out of text entry without keyboard input. But those are fairly rare and not essential.

All in all, I was rather surprised at how X-Com's UI design would happen to be perfectly playable without a physical keyboard, with only a few hiccups.

Core of the suggestion:
Add a "Save Game" button to the save game screen, so that a game can be saved without pressing the enter key when a physical keyboard is unavailable.
Add a "Confirm" button and a (optional?) default name to the Base Creation dialogue, for the same purpose.

And before I forget, thanks for breathing new life into an old classic. ^_^