Messages

2446

Work In Progress / Re: Recommended mods?

« on: July 31, 2014, 08:40:17 am »

To build on the mention of the Alien Armoury Expanded: I will be a good salesman and recommend you try the XCom Armoury Expanded.

It is the XCom pendent to the Alien Expansion and is meant to improve your capabilities in line with the improvements aliens get in their Expansion. It is a modest compilation of mods that stay close to the vanilla  game, trying to tune it rather than outright change it and works by itself or with a few recommended mods.

Plus, if you are interested in modding, it is a work in progress, so you can influence its development with your feedback or even contribute and get into the wonderful world of modding yourself!

2447

Work In Progress / Re: [Crafts][Weapons] XCom Armoury Expanded

« on: July 30, 2014, 09:22:04 am »

There is so much information out there, sometimes just under your nose, and yet if you don't realize it is there, it might as well not be. Thank you very much for bringing this ressource to my attention. It will be very useful!

I will look a little bit more into my issues. Now that I know what the properties of different things can be, I can look for what might be missing.

Thanks again!

2448

Work In Progress / Re: [Crafts][Weapons] XCom Armoury Expanded

« on: July 30, 2014, 08:21:21 am »

8 for handobs, 35 for bulletsprites

To not forget it, I always add it as comment

[...]

It is important when you are building a big mod as FMP and others

Thank you for the info! When your source of information on "how to build a mod" is other people's mods with no instructions on how to do it, extracting all the information is tricky. I'm glad to have figured it out and now have the hypothesis confirmed! The comment tip is good too. I had seen that comment but did not know what it meant...

You also gave me some extra info on how to approach the sniper rifle bullet issue. There is one included in the mod, but I don't as of now understand how the bullet sprite works.

Side note: still no idea why the sniper rifle looks weird in the battlescape. That one is annoying!
Side note2: Build 0.71 had a bad reference for alloy shotgun shells bigob, which caused the game to crash upon entering the inventory screen, and several other minor bugs. I have attached version 0.72 and will remove the link to 0.71 from above.

2449

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

« on: July 30, 2014, 07:46:08 am »

Nifty! That thing should be called: "Alien shooting gallery"!

I am very much looking forward to new base buildings! Hospitals and Cloning facilities (for crazies like me who try to keep every soldier alive) would be especially nice.

2450

Work In Progress / Re: [Crafts][Weapons] XCom Armoury Expanded

« on: July 30, 2014, 06:16:25 am »

AH! Found it! I just realized that there needs to be a gap between the IDs you give to different handobs, otherwise they overwrite each others. (8, I guess, for the 8 directions for which handobs are created).

Here is version 7.1, for which the shotgun works perfectly. The sniper rifle is still a bit wonky, not sure why...

2451

Work In Progress / Re: [Help!]XCOM Cyberdisc not working

« on: July 30, 2014, 05:49:03 am »

haha! I'm facing a stupid bug too, that I can't correct being the noob modder that I am as well... I'm on a trip right now (reason why I released the new XAE without spending more time on my sprite bug), but I'll be home next weekend and will take a look at it if it's not solved by then.

2452

Work In Progress / Re: [WIP] FlashBang Grenade

« on: July 30, 2014, 05:45:35 am »

I'm not sure it fits as a flash bang, but it would be a great weapon. Could it be possible to make a grenade that removes remaining TUs from whatever it hits, to prevent reaction fire?

I feel like stunning, which takes a few rounds to recover from, might be a bit much for a flashbang.

2453

Work In Progress / Re: Modding Ufopaedia

« on: July 30, 2014, 05:37:55 am »

Nice base personnel! Not sure it's quite the right image for the mood though

Aldorn: That's really interesting! When/if I finish the XCom Armoury Expanded, I might well look into this to make it look pretty! Not sure about the tech tree, but for the FMP that could be very useful indeed.

2454

Work In Progress / Re: [Crafts][Weapons] XCom Armoury Expanded

« on: July 30, 2014, 05:06:07 am »

Alright! A new version of the XCom Armoury Expanded that includes all the weapons.

Recommended mods:
- Alien Armoury Expanded
- Grav Armors
- Combat knife
- Plasma Needs Elerium Expanded (from this post above)
- Laser tech tweak, tank first (from this forum)
- Quickdraw mode A (uses belt slots)

I have an issue in the mod, where the shotgun uses some sprites from the sniper rifle (That doesn't happen in the shotgun mod I took, but I don't know why it happens here). And there is another issue in the sniper rifle mod where the sprites are not displayed properly, which is still present in this one. If anyone has an idea how to make them work, I'd be VERY happy to learn.

Let me know how it goes,

2455

Work In Progress / Re: [RESEARCH/PROGRESSION] Lasers from Heavy to Pistol

« on: July 28, 2014, 07:19:31 am »

You make a good point. I'm not sure I agree with the laser pistol at the end of the tree meaning that it should compete with mutons or snakemen. It's an early mid-game side arm, the plasma pistol at the beginning of the plasma tree is there for when you face resilient opponents.

There needs to be something to make it desirable, firepower isn't really it as it just looks wrong if laser becomes more damaging than plasma. Low TU costs, more shots on autoshot and better accuracy than it currently has might be it. Actually, high RoF autoshot and some improvement in accuracy would work really well. It's the same expected result, more dependable (more shots = closer to the average) and fits well with other modded high end high RoF laser weapons like scatter lasers.

2456

Work In Progress / Re: [RESEARCH/PROGRESSION] Lasers from Heavy to Pistol

« on: July 28, 2014, 01:09:30 am »

I agree that mods should try to change as little as possible, especially if it is just rewriting stuff from the original rules.

As for the laser pistol, I don't think it should have the same power as the rifle, for the simple reason that a plasma pistol doesn't even do that much damage and plasma should remain the best weapon, as in the original game.

I think making the pistol a bit more accurate (it is SO MUCH WORSE than the plasma one in accuracy) is the way to make it relevant as a dependable (free-use) side-arm for close work by explosive/heavy troopers.

2457

Work In Progress / Re: [HWP/WIP]Tanks, Drones, Sectopods? Oh my! Version 0.0

« on: July 27, 2014, 05:38:04 pm »

Well done dude! Congrats on the release of v0.1! I'm on the road right now but will play around with it.

I guess you're right. and yes, the other system you describe is precisely what I meant. tedious, lots of ruleset lines, but probably doable.

The manufacture mod is certainly doable and as long as you keep times small it could be useful. Get your chassis, put a rocket launcher on it. Terror comes? Switch to cannon so you don't blow up the civilians by mistake.

One thing that would be really cool is swapping ammo (for free or very little TUs) for a given gun. Cannon tank spots a sectoid next to a civilian: ap-rounds; need to destroy some cover the next to another alien; explosives! Being able to swap ammo easily (multiple ammo feeds for the turret) could be one more reason to use HWPs at the beginning. Rookies rarely can afford to swap and fire in the same turn. Later in the game, with single type weapons, the gain would have to be stopping power and resilience though. Although a tank with small launcher + blaster launcher could be interesting too.

2458

Work In Progress / Re: [HWP/WIP]Tanks, Drones, Sectopods? Oh my! Version 0.0

« on: July 27, 2014, 10:09:00 am »

The turret/chassis combo is actually quite approachable, beyond being tediously repetitive to code. I might look into that!

1- Change research so that a turret or chassis is unlocked, instead of a whole tank.

As it is, game would start with conventional chassis, unlocks overcraft chassis with UFO construction. Game start with a few "normal weapons" turrets, laser cannon unlocks laser turret, plasma cannon unlocks plasma turret and blaster craft weapon unlocks blaster turret.

2- Add in the manufacturing jobs for chassis/turrets
3- Add in another layer of manufacturing that takes 1 chassis and 1 turret to give you one HWP
4- Add the last part, taking an HWP and returning its turret and chassis

That sounds pretty cool. The unfortunate thing is: I don't know why one would bother.. Being short on storage? As it is, you can easily have a few HWPs hanging out in your base, ready for whichever one is most appropriate to be taken on a mission. As a bonus, they all help defend the base..

Hum.. I don't know what the incentive could be to keep things modular, except maybe making chassis/turrets much more expensive. (But that's not really a good one, since then you would just use soldiers, unless the HWP is overpowered)

2459

Open Feedback / Re: Is the firestorm and lighting elerium design flaw bug fixed?

« on: July 27, 2014, 09:51:31 am »

It's not just about patrolling. Intercept courses in XCom are woefully inefficient. By aiming at where the enemy craft is instead of where it is going, you can spend well above 50% of your fuel on the way to an UFO, while still having enough fuel to make it back to base.

A better trajectory calculation would be quite an improvement to better Elerium efficiency. Of course, just fixing the bug also made a big difference.

2460

Suggestions / Re: [MISSIONS] Including some conditions to start or complete missions

« on: July 27, 2014, 06:36:24 am »

More "hooks" in the code for modders to hang a mod onto is always a good thing. Multipart missions could be really cool (especially for base assaults and defences, but also in terrors where step 2 could be going for the not very well defended landed UFO after finishing the usual "save the civilian" part.

Should they be forced upon us by being hardcoded into the core game? Hell no!
Should a "hook" be placed so the the mars mission is not the only 2 part mission in the gane? Why not! The feature is already (almost?) there, it just needs to be more general, which makes sense from a programming point of view (coding general functions instead of specific ones)