Topics

46

Suggestions / Executing Aliens on the ground

« on: October 29, 2016, 06:05:24 am »

So you shoot an alien and he just falls down unconscious. Or maybe you used the stun launcher/thermal shok and put him down.

But you've already got a bunch of soldier aliens or deep one terrorists or whatever in your alien containment and you get marginally more points to actually killing certain species.

So you wanna kill the alien instead.
But to do that means you've either got to do one of three things:
* Wait until he wakes up and shoot him again.
* Walk over with a medi-kit and waste a ton of Stimulant on him to wake up up, and then shoot him. May need to do this twice depending on the species.
* Drop a grenade (or two, or three, or five) on him and blow it up.


(in a modded vanilla TFTD game I had this problem alot with Lobstermen because they had good armor and would end up being knocked unconscious alot rather than killed)


Now thats alot of work and resources to just be able to kill the thing. Also some aliens have built in weapons and if they wake up they can immediately start shooting at you on the turn they stand up on their own.

Also if its the last alien, and you're in the process of dispatching the other ones, that could mean getting several of them "captured" rather than dispatched too because the mission ends before you can destroy them.

Blowing up corpses can also destroy the loot too if you dont have time to carry the loot off first.


I want to stand over the body and blow its head off.
"Survivors? There are no survivors" - Davy Jones


Suggestion: If you are standing over or immediately adjacent to an unconscious unit and you direct your unit to Fire on that tile . . . it targets the unit laying there and shoots them instead of the tile if that tile is hit (if a location is favored it would be Under Armor since helmets tend to be the weakest part of most armor systems).

Obviously if there's somebody standing there besides the shooter it should target them instead, but if not it should shoot the guy on the ground.

If there are multiple unconscious units in the same tile, it should pick one at random (and even if you don't mean to execute them, having multiple bodies piled up in a 5x5ft space means logically its hard to miss them anyway).

This should probably extend to Xcom Soldiers too since their morale/mind controlling condition usually doesn't go away if you stun them, which means they could continue going crazy if they woke up within a meaningful amount of time (this being a real life concern, sometimes it may be necessary to put down your own men).

47

Troubleshooting / Help with running TFTD

« on: October 29, 2016, 04:33:30 am »

I just got OpenXcom 1.0 and added the newest nightly to it (10-27-2016).
I followed the instructions to put the game data in the respective folders (UFO and TFTD).

Started the game and it worked fine, but there was no option to choose to run TFTD instead. So I looked at the readme file and it suggested making a shortcut with -data <folder> to choose the proper place.

But when I ran the new TFTD shortcut all it did was load the standard UFO version (which ran fine as far as choosing the first base).

So... how do I get this to work?

Comp:
2Gb Ram
Windows 7
OpenGL 1.4

48

Work In Progress / Experimented with Large Projectile Sprites

« on: August 30, 2014, 03:29:44 am »

Anyway so im not sure if the projectile sprites are hardcoded to only be 3x3
But I just tried using 7x7 projectile sprites.
Yknow so I can make the Heavy Plasma fire a truly giant comical sized plasma ball.

The projectiles "displayed" (not sure if thats the proper word for it) but they were clipped badly. And im not sure if I was just seeing the Shadow of them on the ground or if I was seeing the bottom corner of the projectile.

I was careful to set the size to 7 x 7 and the total width and height of the sprite sheet accordingly

So whats the lowdown . . . are Projectile Sprites hardcoded to be only 3x3? what gives.

49

Suggestions / Weapons which Launch themselves

« on: August 27, 2014, 04:20:35 am »

Okay so in the xcom clone I was designing, I didnt want a big rocket launcher for the aliens, there was a focus on different-is-better rather than bigger-is-better. But I still wanted to give them a weapon of mass destruction like the Blaster Launcher (because its so dam cool).

So the answer was, they just have big grenades, which automatically launch themselves and guide to target when you toss them. An attached lanyard was used to toss it up in the air, and it would then speed off to the target with its own antigravity motor going up to 150kph, up to 10 km away (just imagine the possibilities).

Haha and then to my surprise in the future sequences on the movie Cloud Atlas one of the characters tosses grenades that act just like it.

So its a Blaster Launcher, minus the launcher.

Which would be made possible by making a weapon utterly disposable and non-reloadable. As in it disappears from your inventory as soon as you fire it or the number of shots is expended from it. Which might also suggest weapons which have an ammunition counter all to themselves (internalCapacity: xx). And possibly an additional boolean to destroyWhenEmpty.

Disposable weapons with an internal capacity would also be great for low manpower hours construction items - disposable laser pistols (welcome to the land of chinese industry). But at least if they get brought back to the base they get reloaded (or possibly not with treatedAsMagazine so that if it has lost any shots at all, it is discarded upon mission end)

Leading to a scenario that if you do fire the last shot in it "this message will self destruct in 30 seconds mr phelps" because you dont want tech just laying around on the ground even if the battery is dead. (though this of course is just flavor text)

50

Suggestions / Weapon has Capacity for multiple Ammo Mags

« on: August 25, 2014, 04:02:40 am »

Okay so check this out . . . we know the ammo mag carries the ammo capacity for the gun.
But what if the gun can also be loaded up with multiple ammo mags at the same time.

Obviously they would have to be the same kind of ammo magazines.
But you could have more than one loaded into the weapon at a time.

So you could have a 4 Shot Rocket Launcher which is reloaded with Rockets, but each Rocket only carries 1 capacity. So the shooter can dump 4 rockets into the rocket launcher but they will need to store any additional rockets in their backpack/etc one at a time.
Example Image

I mean with stuff like the Halo Rocket Launcher its easy because the launcher has fixed tubes of two shots, but not all weapons are like that, and if you have a launcher that can load multiple individual rounds at a time it may be more balancing or practical to just have each one of them separate.

Or with the Autocannon you can just basically connect one belt of ammunition to the next, in effect stacking up the number of magazines for AC ammo that have been loaded into the weapon

Easy enough to add this . . .
maxMagazines:
(lack of it defaults to 1 if it has any compatibleAmmo)

The companion to this, a different feature but something that might often be used in conjunction with it. . .
ammoPerShot:
(for every time this weapon shoots, it eats this many shots from the magazine, but still only shoots once)



(on a sidenote, I cant seem to find how the HWP Cannon is able to define a capacity of 30 shots for HWP Cannon shells, yet unlike all other weapons "HWP Cannon Shells" ammo is only ordered 1 shot at a time - - thats what reminded me of this suggestion because it looks like the HWP Cannon already does this by accepting up to 30 magazines of HWP Cannon Shells at a time. The aircraft cannon works in a similar way, allowing up to 200 shots, but that means accepting up to 4 magazines of Cannon Rounds which each have a capacity of 50 shots)

51

Suggestions / In Soviet Russia, UFO chases You.

« on: August 25, 2014, 02:15:53 am »

Engage in air combat with a big beefy UFO and rather than running away at some point . . . instead it decides its going to CHARGE you and shoot down your interceptor.

No more sitting there for what seems like days plugging away at battleships, terror ships, and supply ships. They know they're tough, and you're not. And they're going to prove it, by chasing you down and eliminating your pestulant flying toys.

So there you have it.
* If enabled for an enemy ship, and its maximum speed is greater than yours, after a certain period of time it will force "Aggressive" air combat mode and lock you out from being able to fly away. And its a fight to the death.
* If more than one interceptor is present as a valid target, it can only charge one of them at a time, but unless it is close to being shot down (lower than 60% max damage remaining) the alien ship will continue down the list after each one of your interceptors is shot down.

I suppose there could also be a interception AI mode where one of these ships that detects one of your ships close to it will change course, intercept you, and do all of the above.

* * * For those of us who like our Games as Hard as our Liquor.

52

Tools / Another pixel editor

« on: August 24, 2014, 10:42:24 pm »

In response to another thread about palette wrangling I remembered this old editor I used to use sometimes.

Its called I.Mage
https://sourceforge.net/projects/image-editor/

It looks like it would be a good sprite editor to boot, but the main feature I always use it for is generating Custom Palettes. It does a good job of creating and changing palette colors quickly and has a Gradient function to give you an entire spread of colors in an instant.

(in contrast I used to rely on an old dos build of Fractint to mess around with color palettes, saving them in an image screenshot . . . how archaic).

This is good for creating Matte Palettes for Recoloring sprites, and funneling color indexes away from bad colors that you dont want to use (id change those to something you'd never use in your image, like Flaming-Gay Hot Flamingo Pink rather than an utterly confusable black).

But really I was just using the program to generate the palettes, have them saved in a .GIF file so some other program like Paint Shop Pro or Photoshop could pick it up out of the image.

Speaking of which, I should probably pick up PSP again

53

Troubleshooting / Blank White Screen on Startup (OpenGL)

« on: August 22, 2014, 07:53:29 pm »

I am an avid lover of xcom and have been modding it for years.
So I was pretty excited to find OpenXcom

I managed to get it working, but on the first run with OpenGL enabled all it did was display a Blank White Screen, even though I could hear clicks and beeps in the background when I was clicking.

So the game itself loaded, but the Video was flummoxed, and it shouldnt be.

OpenGL works just fine in other games and applications though.