Messages

16

Programming / Re: Ufopaedia screens for Armor and Vehicles

« on: August 23, 2014, 05:13:40 pm »

I've actually already got some 3d models of tanks and a redesigned skyranger if anyone wants them.
I'd say they'd be a suitable basis for a paintover, but at low-resolution and 256 colour you might as well just do a straight conversion - I can't see it being possible to do much other than maybe use a few filters to make sure the image indexing comes out nicely.











I never actually bothered to mention it because.....well, we didnt have images in the research screens!

I was going for something a bit like the Wiesel mini-tank, but the funny thing is that if you look at some of the little TALON (?) drones being tested out by the US army atm, they can mount just as much firepower on a chassis half the size! If we dont want the HWP tanks to be underpowered, I guess we can say narratively that the extra mass comes from armour, fuel and extended rough-terrain ability or something. Plus they're much faster, so it's mostly engine I guess.

Actually, one thing I did think with these is that the storage bins could carry gear and the rack along the rear could seat troops or carry the wounded. Is it possible to give vehicles their own inventory space?

17

Suggestions / Re: [Suggestion] Airstikeing downed ufo's Xenonughts style

« on: August 22, 2014, 09:56:12 pm »

Narratively you could imagine them floating all kinds of cover story (ball lightning, training exercise, illegal rave).

Mechanically I'd say that it's somewhat self balancing in that you'd be denying yourself lots of loot, research and training potential.

18

Suggestions / Re: Armoured cilivans?

« on: August 09, 2014, 03:36:41 am »

Narratively I like the idea of governments keeping an 'open secret' til the bitter end.
Like, initially you'd have real efforts to cover up evidence.....it's a fun game to play with news headlines. Ebola? Nah, chryssalids. Missing airliner? Aliens. Tempora? Nah, Geoscape. Sinkhole? Alien base.

Then even after things are forced into the general public consciousness (like the aforementioned nsa stuff) the official bodies will only say 'no comment' while perhaps unofficially helping to organise neighbourhood militias and reinforcing essential infrastructure in case of 'terrorists'.

Of course it depends how you interpret the setting. Since original xcom was based in the late 90s you didnt have social media or prevalent video recording....although if you absolutely had to you could probably engineer a narrative around that too, afterall real life has governments planning social media blackouts at the drop of the hat in the right circumstances.

But that's the story. In terms of actual game mechanics I like the idea of armed civvies mainly just for the friendly fire potential. I like the idea of your star doorman meeting his demise because of some dumb scared teenager in a closet with dads service pistol.

19

Work In Progress / Re: [CRAFTS] Material for Modders (Skyranger, SkyTrooper, SkySpotter, ...)

« on: August 09, 2014, 01:26:55 am »

Out of curiosity, is the size of the wings dictated by engine limitations (like how big a map area you'd need to land it), or is it a stylistic thing?

I'm just thinking regarding your 'long skinny' comment....most aircraft tend to stick to a particular ratio in terms of length/width due to increased mass requiring increased lift surfaces. For a big transport with a delta-type wing you'd probably expect the whole thing to be as wide as it is long, like an equilateral triangle.

The original skyranger has that kind of profile (plus forward canards). As far as forward wings go, they're usually small and used for increased maneuvrability....in real life I dont think both sets of wings being the same size would work too well (pretty sure it'd mess up the airflow) but if you can only make wings so big it's probably a good fictional way of increasing lift surface size to make the plane look more balanced.

Shame the engine doesnt let you do wingtip stabilisers....again, from a design perspective they just look very cool.

Not that these rangers dont look cool, I just have a habit of overthinking unecessarily. :p
Keep up the good work dude.

20

Work In Progress / Re: [Request] Extra facilities for human base

« on: July 20, 2014, 05:05:29 pm »

Re cloning tanks -
If you're worried about the lore implications of adopting alien cloning tech, you could always just say they've been adapted for conventional healing techniques, more like a Star Wars bacta tank?

Otherwise I suppose you could just outright steal a couple of alien surgery tables?

21

Suggestions / Re: SUGGESTION - Fatigue?

« on: July 16, 2014, 09:56:47 pm »

Well I dont know the first thing about coding (I just paint stuff), so didnt want to get carried away, but yes I did wonder about how they might accrue temporary stat maluses in the tactical layer. Assuming the code allows that to even be implemented, you could take it in any number of directions. Less energy seems obvious, less reaction maybe, and everything besides.

As for implementation, I'd presume it could be done like in Longwar where they get flagged by the game as injured and are therefor benched for a number of days derived from their stats. I would presume that if the game can derive the number of injured days from damage taken, it could just as easily be told to check fatigue against other stats (morale, energy, mission score, mission type). If it could be scaled against stats, I wonder if it would have to scale linearly or if you could put a curve of it?
Or you could sideline the stats entirely and enforce a hard limit from the moment they land back at base. I'm not too keen on tying it to turns, but the idea of a disastrous drop burning out your troops is interesting. But then again I suppose a disasterous drop is going to leave them with injuries and morale hits anyway, so maybe that's enough. I dunno, I'm just spitballing.

To me it seems the hardest part would be balancing....given how quickly missions can appear in the late game in old x-com as opposed to 2012 xcom, the recovery time would need to be much shorter. I'd strongly suggest a day or two, although if multiple-drops per flight are ever possible I'd suggest it scales with that. 2 missions back-to-back equals double the down time, etc.

Also, this means any given base would need an A-squad for big missions, a rapid-response team kept on backup for unpredictable situations, and probably a full squad of security guys in case of base assault. Lots of guys. Dunno if that'd necessitate a cost rebalancing, but I always ran with 100+ troops in vanilla and still made more money than I could spend. Always found that there was still plenty of experience to spread around the men too.

Worth noting that it necessitates good balanced recruitment too. It's no good just having lots of bodies, you want some redundancy built into your roster. Have spare specialists. And while you want them to perform their designated role well, you also need them to be able to fill in for benched men. Personally I always have a pretty standard deployment (two 5-man fireteams with good aim, mobility and reaction, and a base-of fire element with the rocket, a loader, and autocannons...all strongmen, basically), but this'd force me to either adapt that setup or make sure I have enough appropriately skilled men to fill it.

Mainly I was just wondering if anyone more familiar with the code could confirm whether it is theoretically possible. As I said, curiosity.

22

Suggestions / Re: SUGGESTION - Fatigue?

« on: July 16, 2014, 03:33:21 pm »

Same.
Or at least I try to rp it that way, but without any in-game mechanic to communicate it, I have to fudge it by just recruiting lots of different strike teams across the globe and arbitrarily swapping them out when I remember.

I suppose I could continually note down who did what on a word doc, but nobody got time for that.

If I'm going to crit my own idea, I'd suggest that it may make bit multi-mission operations (like when you get supply ships and battleships swarming around a new alien base site) a bit tricky....at the moment it may not be a huge deal since you have to scramble several teams anyway because the skyranger cant go direct from mission to mission, but if that ever changes it'd potentially conflict with fatigue. Maybe the fatigue would only be applied after they return to base? Maybe it'd be proportional to how much work they did, by some measure or another?

Probably overcomplicating it a bit now, but I just wanted to explore any potential extra headroom for the future. Could be a great way of making such big 'operations' a bit more strategic, especially synergised with the other logistic considerations that have been discussed like awacs, refuelling, transport interceptions and fighter escorts.....

23

Work In Progress / Re: Mercenaries - Total Conversion

« on: July 15, 2014, 10:32:35 pm »

'Contracts'?

24

Suggestions / SUGGESTION - Fatigue?

« on: July 15, 2014, 09:57:44 pm »

Hi,

Apologies if this has been bought up already (didnt find anything by Search) but is it theoretically possible to add a fatigue state to your troops, pretty much directly ripped-off from LongWar?

I figure it may make for interesting logistical/strategic considerations for pretty much the same reason as in Longwar.....it's doubly important to spread your experience around and not have all your eggs in one basket. Unless you have a dearth of veteran badasses, you may not be able to commit all of your best men to a single mission, no matter the importance, just in case you find yourself shorthanded a day later. And I am suggesting a day or two....I dont think Longwars week off per mission would work here!

Might provide a bit more impetus to continually train rooks too....I dunno about anyone else, but (aside from the old psi-screening stage) I always found that in the late game once I had managed to collect a couple of A-Teams, I hadnt much reason not to keep using them, even on reaaaally busy months.

Tbh I'd be amazed if this hasnt been discussed already but I was just curious.

25

Fan-Stuff / Re: Fanart / Armour

« on: July 14, 2014, 06:43:24 pm »

3 more for this afternoon - fusion weapon calibration, fusion weapons in use, and plasma.

26

Released Mods / Re: [COMPILATION][RESEARCH] FMP Core/Tech Tree part

« on: July 14, 2014, 05:16:33 am »

When you say 'not compatible', do you mean they cant be run together at all or just that it cant be included in the compilation and needs installing separately? I've been watching the diary mod progress and it looks fantastic. I always found myself wanting for something like that in vanilla xcom.....too hard to remember who did what otherwise.

27

Fan-Stuff / Re: Fanart / Armour

« on: July 14, 2014, 04:59:23 am »

Yup.
Got one more for tonight....Plasma wep maintenance, although I suspect some of the other weapon ones may end up being vaguely interchangeable. In any case, actually coming up with weapons is pretty fun.

28

Fan-Stuff / Re: Fanart / Armour

« on: July 14, 2014, 12:43:44 am »

Ah, they arent really 'hi-res' in the conventional sense.
They're still 160x160.

....however, doing index-art allows you 'hi-res' input on 'lo-res' imagery. Normally when you try to convert something to an indexed 256-colour palette you dont know exactly how it's going to look until you do so, which is potentially problematic, and once an image is in indexed mode you lose all your high-fidelity Photoshoppy input, like soft brushes or a smudge, or even multiple layers. It basically becomes MSPaint. What this method does is allow you to paint something up with full Photoshoppy controls, and pre-visualise what it'll look like after being converted to the game palette. Very handy.

But yeah, they're still otherwise just 160x160 grayscale images. Wouldnt be hard to upscale them and do a bit more detail though. Working up a decent render in greyscale and then doing a gradient map (or whatever kind of colouring, really) is pretty quick and efficient. Could probably just ramp them up to 4k and do a quick paintover.

You know what isn't quick and efficient? Line art. Urgh.

29

Fan-Stuff / Re: Fanart / Armour

« on: July 13, 2014, 11:48:28 pm »

Shouldnt be a problem, I can just resize the canvas.
Tbh for the time being I've just taken the template from earlier in the thread and worked on the assumption that all screens would be the same, but in retrospect it does seem that some of these have quite a lot of text. I dont know if that makes any difference to how the image has to be aligned.

Also, be aware that I have a feeling I may have absent-mindedly done a global levels adjustment on one of the images AFTER converting it to the game palette, so it may display a bit off, especially if black is taken as transparency or something. I dunno, it might be fine, but would take seconds to fix anyway, so let me know if that's the case.

Anyway, did another quick one for the antimatter reactor.



If anyone gets a chance they should google some of the new fusion research designs (not just tokomaks, but the crossfire or wiffleball), there's a lot of stuff now that has that really awesome sci-tech geometry thing going on. Very nice to look at.

30

Fan-Stuff / Re: Fanart / Armour

« on: July 13, 2014, 04:10:42 pm »

Oooh, right, yeah.

Er, ok, from top to bottom you've got:

Dude holding bullet is Alloy Ammo (Could just as easily do a closer-up view of a stylised bullet itself though, it's just that you can't get much clean detail in these)

Dude floating in a scaffold is testing out Alien Gravity Generator (I'm thinking of the elevators, see)

Dude in a helmet with big bright eyes is testing the Alien Optical Processor. This was inspired by those new helmets for F35 pilots that have external projectors aimed into the visor, but again this is one of those ones that isnt as clear or detailed as it might need to be. I could tighten in on the head/face a bit more maybe.

Sectoid Trio is Alien Subjugation. I figure they're looming over the viewer, mid-abduction like.

Supply ship with purple beam is Tractor technology, being bought in for a landing.

Orange hazmat guys inside the sectoid guts are researching Alien Biology.

The last one is Alien Neuropsych. I was utterly stuck on how to visually represent psychic communication, so in the end went with one of those old Zener Card tests from MK Ultra (and Ghostbusters).