Messages

646

Work In Progress / Re: removing alien clips (among other things)

« on: November 09, 2016, 09:18:17 pm »

When you give an HWP a limited number of shots but you dont give it ammunition, it doesnt destroy the HWP or its weapon if you used it up completely (at least ive never seen this happen).

Same deal with Craft Weapons . . . Sonic Oscillator and Plasma Beam . . . if you use up all 100 shots all it does is get reloaded back at the base, it doesnt destroy the weapon.

^ Need to do this to a Handheld weapon.

647

XPiratez / Re: [MAIN] XPiratez - 0.99D.1 - 31 Oct - Learning not to Drown

« on: November 09, 2016, 12:02:56 am »

I'm always welcome to new goons to swap the deck with.

To get more purchase-option in the black market you need to research "Contact: xxx" research topics.

Its okay I figured out how it works, my eyes have seen the light. Research topics go pretty quick and I eventually hit those basic ones like "survival" and "violence" (waited a long time because I didn't think they'd amount to anything).

Though I will say that the Hammer can hit anything, I recognize thats an engine limitation though because its shooting a projectile. Im not complaining really, this is a hard game and having a weapon that hits like the Vibro Blade from TFTD for half the size is amazing. If anything the balance is it cant capture anything.

Ability to make a melee attack behave like a projectile but check % chance to hit rather than emit a trajectory is a engine change (OXCE or nightly) that has been neglected for a very long time. Should be able to use the TFTD drills to poke through walls after all.

648

XPiratez / Re: [MAIN] XPiratez - 0.99D.1 - 31 Oct - Learning not to Drown

« on: November 08, 2016, 05:37:27 am »

Unless things have changed, the laboratory is actually not something we can build, it's too advanced and complicated.  There are other ways to employ more brainers though, but they're all expensive.  You'll probably rely heavily on bootlegging for your finances.

On the last version, 0.99C, once I got the workshop the runt outfit was no longer limited, couldn't even make them anymore in that base.  Didn't get far beyond that, so I don't know if the base itself needed a workshop or if you just needed one to get the unlimited runt outfits, but it did have that effect.

how exactly do you build a Workshop anyway?
ive got an extractor and still but it wont even let me build new versions of those, and I have a bunch of things I wanna build that take a workshop.

Also im noticing a surprising number of items that are listed in the bootypedia as {Buy} but they're not available for purchase. Several guns. The only item listed as {Buy} that got added was the Hunting Bow.

649

Work In Progress / Basic workaround for antipersonnel damage

« on: November 08, 2016, 04:12:58 am »

Kinda silly but it should work, at least until the armor mod adjustment is added to the nightly (Dioxine's piratez has me considering upgrading to extended+, but its a different beast im not familiar with yet).

Take Melee damage and turn it into "Antipersonnel" type, this being for things like a shotgun slug and so forth.

Make some melee weapons do armor piercing. These being ones that you'd expect to rip through armor. Even though the melee type is technically different most of the enemies have about the same resistance against AP as they do Melee. The weaker aliens and civilians just dont have enough health to start with for the increase to melee damage to really matter (for it to be lost). Most melee damage starts at 80+ points.

Armored targets and tanks take less damage against anti-personnel, you adjust it based on threshold modeling of what you want it to be able to negate (and which attacks you want it to still be able to "just do enough" to get through). This would also include creatures that take deep wound penetration to kill, as is the case in real life with big game.

Unarmored or otherwise soft targets take most if not all of the damage.

This way you make the Antipersonnel weapons do the damage you want them to. For a shotgun delivering a tight spread it could be done with a single projectile like 45 or 50 damage. And also useful for cutting weapons like knives and swords.

Since I removed the zombie capability from my tentaculats I think im going to do this to them and set it at about 180 damage (or 60 + strength applied). That way its killing unarmored and plastic aqua armor, but with about 50% reduction applied to tanks and power armor tier its just dangerous against them not outright deadly. I also made melee attacks take longer but thats a sidenote.

(They use their tentacles to find weak points (critical hit) and break people's necks so the damage is unrealistically high compared to their strength, but hardened objects still take time to break down)

650

XPiratez / Re: [MAIN] XPiratez - 0.99D.1 - 31 Oct - Learning not to Drown

« on: November 07, 2016, 10:58:38 pm »

Just picked up X-Pratez for the first time.
Dioxine - you're brilliant, the theme and everything, its almost like a completely different game. Reminds me very much of Firefly/Serenity.

Really love those temple of sirius missions, reminds me of scientology or that heaven's gate thing where all those people killed themselves in real life. Very satisfying to beat those guys to a pulp.

Im only like 2 months into the game, and I have to wonder since I haven't broken $1 million yet, when or if ill ever get a craft that can actually shoot down other crafts (airbus has no guns even though ive got a laser thing in inventory). Laboratory will cost 75 million so thats not happening for a long time.

I can keep going after ratmen rodeos and watchtowers to my heart's content but none of the other craft seem to ever land near me except once during the first month. My base is located in the turkey region. But I do have 6 brainers though and they're churning through research about every 2 days.

Also noticed that my hands will sometimes lose Morale like crazy for no reason at all, like im even killing guys and it doesnt bump the morale one bit, and I havent lost anybody at all. Might be a spoiler to say why?

Im guessing the ratmen are using psi-weapon and its just not displaying or notifying about it at all.

Its also happening on the watchtower maps too, like my hands are just sitting around the fire roasting marshmellows, watching the robot combust, and people start going "insane" for no reason and then I notice everybody's morale has been hit.

also im gonna say... "f-ck the white shambler", just screw that, I drag the thing back to my base after it puts two of my ladies in the hospital, and my brainers just Dissect the thing and tell me "yeah its a beast, so what" ... and now I cant even sell it (but whatever, thats me having a fun laughing rant not an upset one)

651

Work In Progress / So you say you want a Palette huh?

« on: November 07, 2016, 01:22:53 am »

Just thought id post it because its something I recently worked on for zdoom, that game has some limited palette issues also given that it was optimized only for the stuff they had in it. So there were alot of colors that had large ranges given to them while maybe it could have been done with fewer.

I cooked up a new palette for zdoom which works by having all the original textures and sprites converted to .png format (as a spare resource file loaded after the primary one) so that their colors would remap using the game engine, and it works pretty well.

The thing is, while this palette may not be entirely ideal for UFO Defense or TFTD, with some tweaking it could easily do what the game/style needs it to do while offering color availability that just isnt present in either game. Like for example the pinkish skin tones can become the soft lavender that is frequently seen in TFTD.

One way I do it is taking a color range - say the Grays or the Skin Tones, and every other color down the range scintillates between saturated and unsaturated. Not a big difference but its "just enough" that it can provide a bridge or make do.

They gray tones especially, while some people like seeing flat gray ranges in my experience actual gray isnt a realistic color to see, usually you see off-white yellowish ivories, faded taupe and bluish slate. So it actually cycles between those.

The darker colors are also hard to make out or notice to the human eye anyway, so alot of colors that fade into darkness, they fade into like one of 3 applicable colors so a bunch of extra dark tones are truncated to make room for more hues.

Im probably not going to fork much work into adapting it because palette adaptability seems like its in its infancy for OXC and im unlikely to get into any heavy lifting with mod work.

This .png file has the palette in it, and I dont mind if somebody else takes it and modifies it or gets inspired by it.

652

Work In Progress / removing alien clips (among other things)

« on: November 07, 2016, 12:47:17 am »

Oooh boy, so one of the things im gonna be doing is removing all of the alien clips, this being a tftd mod I dont see too much problem with it because the sonic weapons are fairly slow firing. Gonna have to go through all the deployments data and change that info.

And im wanting to start giving the aliens human weapons for the early part of the game, but with souped up ammunition you cant produce because they've done funny stuff to it chemically. I figure the human weapons are dangerous enough against your own guys so having an aquatoid with a gas cannon that does 75 HE is going to be raep.

Plus thinking of taking the Beta pre-release xcom Grenade from the tftd bigobs and having that as an advanced alternative to the Sonic Pulser that goes 80 HE. Sorta like having an alien grenade in tftd that isnt as heinous as the pulser. Then later on they upgrade to pulsers.

Specifically thinking of a double barreled rocket launcher so that it can also be used in terror missions, and it launches smaller but equally potent rockets (yes rockets, underwater, and now on land too).

Reason being that whatever automated factories in T'Leth that produce their own stuff wont have a problem churning out 3d molecular printed copies of human tech that they've secretly observed being used for the last 40 years. Along with advanced explosives or even aqua-plastic mono-sharpened projectiles. Also that signal from Cydonia could have had a plethora of information in it gathered on the previous xcom by the alien brain computer.

But to keep the special ammo from being listed on the normal item ufopaedia entries im thinking of making special versions, so that like the russian cold war manufacturing scheme you cant just use their ammo in your guns. Plus maybe gives options to minor-upgrade from the stuff you purchase so you can actually build human-like equipment and repurpose ammunition for it (ie, take Gas Cannon AP rounds, pour 50 man hours and $200 into it and now you've got AP rounds for the Aqua Cannon).

Of course the alien items would be easy to research but they'd go in the alien artifacts section and you'd have no problem picking them up and using them on the battlefield without researching them (the research just allows manufacture).

Terror missions is where you'd normally find the sonic weapons being used because they have infinite ammunition and the idea is to kill as many civilians as possible. They wouldn't ever use the sonic pistols except on ships roughly mid-game, but 0-Tier technology use would have aliens using humanlike equipment across the board except for the biggest ships and the alien colonies.

May also have a human sonic weapons family that doesnt use zrbite but does crap damage. Im thinking of it being an upgrade over gauss and that im going to hit the damage numbers on gauss (like 45/55/65 and make the heavy into a sniper rifle). Maybe


Also thinking of expanding the alien tech items into two or 3 tiers and only giving the most powerful crap to dreadnought, colony and synomium missions:

* DPL and DPLmk2 torpedoes - standard one does 140 HE and the markII does 210 like usual. That way they're still really dangerous but unless you're using the hot ammo you're not going to be able to blow a hole in alien subs (and it limits the hot ammo that gets recovered, so you might have to produce it at a higher material cost).

* Pulser and PulserMk2 grenades - standard goes down to 100 HE but the markII is actually a DPL torpedo converted for primed use (140 HE).


Ive already adjusted some of the craft weapon and sws stuff:
* PW Torpedoes for the displacer now just cost 1 DPL ammo + 1 Aqua Plastic each. This is sensible, they just make a torpedo and stick the warhead part of a DPL on the front of it.

* PWT ammo costs 4 DPL ammo + 1 Aqua Plastic each. That way manufacturing it can draw first from the stock of DPL shots that are piling up, then make you have to manufacture more of those if you want to keep feeding the PWT cannon. I figure a sub-launched PWT is going to be like field artillery compared to small arms fire with respect to the handled version.

===

I may do something similar for UFO defense in which case the aliens are actually using heavy weapons made out of alien alloys so they're light.

And they might have a Blaster style missile launcher that can shoot around corners but doesn't use elerium and only does damage on par with normal rockets. So they field that advantage against you right away. And its only 1x3 inventory like a LAW rocket not a full size launcher.


EDIT:
Along these lines im wondering if its possible to give a ClipSize to a handheld weapon that doesnt use ammunition.

Sort-of like the sonic oscillator or plasma beam craft weapons where they have 100 charges but they dont actually use ammunition.

Because then I could give the alien weapons (and gauss weapons) built in charges use and thats just how many times you can fire it for that mission, and they refresh as soon as the mission is over.

Its an alternative for the infinite gauss so that they have a limit but its reasonable, and if you need to shoot more with it thats just tough because you'll have to borrow a buddies' weapon.

Not really an issue with aliens running out of shots since I dont think ive ever seen tftd aliens go through all 3 sonic cannon clips. But I can easily replace the clips with pulsers so if they truly do run out of ammo they can just start bombarding you (difficult goes to hardmode).

653

Open Feedback / Re: How Often do You Use the Heavy Cannon?

« on: November 06, 2016, 10:05:45 pm »

EDIT:

So in working on my own mod, I was left with a "problem" in wondering if I should leave the Heavy Cannon in the game or remove it entirely.  I know the Heavy Cannon has its place, especially in Superhuman mode because it can carry more ammunition than the Rocket Launcher, but it's nowhere near the "workhorse" that the Gas Cannon is in TFTD.

My suggestion is give the Heavy Cannon the same stats as the Gas Cannon for your mod. Maybe another +5 damage or so.

But get rid of the Auto Cannon, or recycle the graphics to make it a Gatling Laser (oooohhhh what an idea, and it looks like it could fit the part too).

===

In both UFO/TFTD I use the cannon almost exclusively for killing aliens, along with the tank/coelecanth.

I have 3-4 heavy weapons guys, and if they cant heft it I make them carry it until they get the strength exp. One of them will carry a rocket launcher/torpedo with the heavy ammo.

Everybody else is a spotter, rifles and jet harpoons are backup weapons. They throw grenades, everybody gets 2 (pulsers/alien grenades) even in late game. Alien grenades get researched before direct energy weapons do, the research is faster and I can build them if I run out.

Vanilla item limits and tediously filling the shoulder slots are the only thing that would limit me using grenades. Soldiers use rifles/lasers inside buildings and ships and almost always because I can autofire.

If I have a soldier with bad accuracy he becomes a grenader with a pistol. Gets 6 grenades. Buuttt... if he's got the strength he just might get a Cannon because at medium/short range he can still snap shot wildly and hit the alien. I might keep him just out of the blast radius, but otherwise his bad accuracy makes him expendible.

When I get Lasers the heavy weapons guys get a Laser Pistol. Somebody usually also carries some Cannon/AP rounds, so the heavy weapons dudes dont have to. That way the capability to fire the thing up close is available, but as of Mid-Game they dont carry the AP ammo anymore only the HE ammo exclusively.

The problem with the Autocannon is it just doesnt do enough damage. With AP ammo its just fine for storming a ufo or challenging tougher aliens like gill men/snakes but its even heavier than the cannon so thats a problem. Explosive ammo will usually kill sectoids on a near miss but its not reliable on floaters, and autoshot makes it a bigger hazard for any soldiers or civilians who might be anywhere near that area. Id rather use AP ammo with the thing honestly.

(in TFTD the hydro jet had a game bug where all the damage it does is doubled though the blast radius is still small, which is really interesting in that it can blow a hole in the angled sides of an alien sub, but I dont consider this to be the way it was intended to work so I generally refrain from cheating this way)

Snipers? If anybody ends up with 70+ Firing Accuracy I give them the Rocket Launcher. They sit near the transport or up on a perch somewhere so any aliens I sight can be hit from across the map.

===
Incendiaries:

I almost never use Flares or Incendiary, it takes too much time and the fires burn out too quickly. Instead I send the Tank to get as close as I can, and hope it doesn't provoke reaction fire. This makes the really dark night missions a challenge, you should try it.

I cheat on night missions by waiting until the transport would intercept them at dawn. For terror missions I cycle fighters going to them to keep them from de-spawning because "there is always a craft en-route".

It doesnt matter whats going on, it can wait until the morning.

===

Bottom Line:

I use Heavy Cannon/Gas Cannon until the approach of Late Game. The only weapon that adequately replaces it is the Blaster or DPL.

And on TFTD terror missions it ups the ante that I cant use the DPL... the aliens being fought are about impervious to the gas cannon... and they're difficult to adequately take out with the aliens' own weapons (I need to be able to have 2 Guys open fire on the same target at the Same Time).

So that makes the game harder than UFO Defense by a long shot.

Stun Launchers:
They do not replace the Cannon because they dont have lethal ordinance, I almost always wanna kill aliens not capture them. Only capture aliens for access to techs and plot techs... deep one, calcinite, leaders and commanders.

I even use my medi-kits to revive them so I can direct kill them, or I waste a grenade/pulser to finish the job. The usual routine is I have a guy pick up a stunned alien, carry him over some ways and toss him on the ground, then somebody pings him with a grenade/pulser. That way his loot doesnt get blown up. Tentaculats frequently get stunned rather than die so pinging them with a pulser is standard procedure until my soldiers hear that satsfying squish sound, but theh have no equip so i dont bother picking them up (!!!)

If I need to capture something I might bring 1 Stun Launcher and I leave the extra ammo back at the transport. Aliens usually carry alot of it themselves so ill just scavenge theirs if I run out of stun ammo to capture the commander or whatever.


The Gas Cannon is useful even on the alien base and synomium raids because itll kill Hallucinoids pretty quick and they cant be hit with a grenade when theyre swimming. Also these maps still have Aquatoids/Sectoids and it doesnt matter if the little guy has a Blaster in his hands, 40 or 50 explosive damage landing near him still puts him down. I dont have to hit him, only the wall behind him.


If anything I wish the Tank/Rocket and Coelecanth/Torpedo actually fired from a belt of explosive ammunition like the Heavy Cannon does. Maybe like 16 round capacity because then it still does the same job I usually need it to but I dont care if I miss 3 or 4 times.

Maybe more damage like 70 HE because it uses smaller rockets or larger gun grenades (the 43mm GM-94 thermobaric ammunition is a good candidate for ufopaedia explanation).

In UFO I might make laser tanks but they die too easily for me to mass produce them and the regular tank/cannon I buy can do the same job on most of the starter aliens.

654

Programming / Dart Pistol auto shot costs 0 TU

« on: November 06, 2016, 04:56:15 am »

Dart Pistol

autoShots is set to 2 (a "double tap")
the tuAuto was set to 30 and the accuracyAuto set to 50

though when I went to use it the TU cost for shooting auto was 0, was able to fire it even though the soldier had no TU left.

655

Work In Progress / How does fire work?

« on: November 05, 2016, 12:02:37 am »

So if I set up an incendiary bomb that does 200 damage but then set it with BlastRadius: 2 am I really just defeating the purpose of it?

I understand the "caught on fire" damage is universal (and low) but what about Initial Hit damage?

Is it going to cause 200 damage to people and kill them, or does that just set up the potential area effected and liklihood of setting things on fire (via flammability)?

Main idea is a plasma bomb that causes fire damage but it causes a hell of alot of it, but its confined to a limited area. Supposed to set fires in all the tiles right there as well as kill things immediately.


Somewhat Unrelated:
Is explosive/stun/fire damage the only damage types which will cause an explosion?

If I set an HWP weapon to cause Armor Piercing damage but give it Blast Radius: 1 is it going to force it to blow up rather than just cause a direct hit normally?

... idea is its a craft gas cannon mounted on an sws or displacer so its got to cause radius damage to potentially break alien sub hull (those funky angled tiles that arent true north walls). But really its an armor peircing weapon (110 damage lets say) and causes armor piercing damage against the critters it hits (rather than explosive which a bunch of stuff has resistance to).

Idea being its got an explosive warhead but its a shaped charge and its small, it will mess you up if you're close to it.


And additionally:
Does blastRadius: 0 stop an explosion or does it confine it only to the tile it hit in (ie, doesnt hit adjacent tiles)



EDIT:
To avoid double posting ill also ask this here too:

I wanna remove the Crafts from the starting base, so you have the sub pens/hangars but you dont have any ships yet . . . so do I just write that as:

- delete: crafts

under the starting base section?

(no this doesnt make the game all that much harder, but it may cost you the first or second ufo detection while you wait 4-5 days for your ships to come in. The player gets enough extra money to compensate)

656

Work In Progress / Re: Palette question

« on: November 04, 2016, 11:51:06 pm »

Cool thanks for replies everyone

Yeah I've been experimenting with colours, working out all the permutations of increasing rgb values by 4 was fun.  My webpage is nearly 40 meg that displays them all so can see how this would suck memory.

Been quite interesting actually to learn about how colours work in general.

64x64x64 is
262,144 colors

Which for the 25% savings on memory compared to 8bit per channel is actually Pretty Dang Good since its "possible" to notice the difference, but its much less pronounced than it is with 15/16 bit graphics (im pretty sure my netbook has a 16 bit display and just hardware downconverts 24bit in realtime because it will stipple colors that should be solid).

So thats like getting 25% of your memory back for free, back in the days of 512kb conventional memory and (maybe) 2Mb of Ram that was a killer deal.

The Trident SVGA video card my dad had installed on our x286 had 1Mb of video ram. That was pretty dam awesome though it was entirely incapable of displaying HiColor or TrueColor.

Im not sure but I think the original NES gaming system, based on my observations with using an old emulator that allowed me to mess with the colors . . . actually used 4 bits per channel or worse.

It only displayed 16 colors at a time, but from the color mixer selection it seemed that all of the colors it could switch out were actually mapped or had noticeable increments on its sliders.

Even a 16 color EGA display can adjust the individual color values usually by 64 shades each. So the original NES game system is actually a little bit less capable than EGA is. Though with the optimized way they programmed the games back then you really wouldn't notice (like the siezure inducing screen flashes, and the palette cycling on those zelda fireballs and sword bolts that somehow looked pretty awesome but at 60hz framerate made them look ultraviolet and stuff).

657

Work In Progress / Re: Transparency LUTs

« on: November 04, 2016, 11:26:43 pm »

This could be solved with a simple boolean switch, or more, but a boolean would do it also:

Code: [Select]

     alwaysVape: true# defaults to false, false means it only generates a vapor trail in an underwater mission
# true means it always generates a vapor trail... a l w a y s

the non-boolean version would be like:

Code: [Select]

     vaporbehavior: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4# 0 is only during underwater missions
# 1 is only during land missions
# 2 is only during cydonia
(or t'leth, but I dont see why, but maybe somebody wants to mod that t'leth is actually a teleporter array that goes to some place on ganymede and the water is funky there)
# 3 is only during normal missions (land & underwater)
# 4 a l w a y s

658

Work In Progress / Re: Transparency LUTs

« on: November 03, 2016, 09:42:03 pm »

Wow thanks, I never would have figured that out (usually color values are 0-255 not 0-16).

I was thinking "these numbers must mean stages of the vapor trail, the colors it goes through based on how dense it is like for every 5 density . . . the colors must be a 16 color range of the palette, like 4 for green must mean that 4th range after the first one since its green . . . but 16 is completely off the palette by that logic"

I digress...

Yeah purple is on my list.

Also a kind of Dark Blue with a stronger alpha that looks kinda like squid ink (or dark blue laundry detergent) being shot in a line.

Tentaculats will shoot this with bio-spines for 50 damage each and they will autofire like crazy. Not much danger to ion armor and just annoying but their melee does 140 so its still death even without the zombies. Flying seed spitter.

659

Resources / Re: Palettes for XCOM in GIMP/Paintshop format

« on: November 02, 2016, 10:39:38 pm »

Also another useful tip for fixing colors after conversion is getting the paint bucket tool and turning off the "contiguous" function. Set the tolerance real low or even to 0.

Might be a no brainer, but after working on explosion stuff and having all these little islands of off-colored pixels after converting, going after all of them with the pencil tool is pretty hard and tedious.

Also found it useful because if I decided the entire color-banding on something wasnt coming out correctly I could fix the entire sequence on a macro level by replacing all of the in-between colors as desired. And if you select an area you can make sure that it only affects that sprite at a time, or hits the off-colored pixels on the outside of something but not the ones in the inside of it.

(for explosions and such this is an issue because maybe sparks or flaming bits on the outside could end up being unusually white or have red spots in them, but you dont want it to affect the white/red spots on the main body of the fireball, so if you select the sprite then de-select the parts you dont wanna effect)

Also good for matting, to get rid of darker colors that you're just not sure are bright enough on the fringe to adequately transition. Or even replace them with colors that are more like the rest of the sprite.

660

Work In Progress / Transparency LUTs

« on: November 02, 2016, 10:32:11 pm »

Code: [Select]

transparencyLUTs: #done
  - colors:
      - [  8,  8, 12, 2 ] # "white"
      - [ 16,  8,  0, 2 ] # orange
      - [  0, 12, 12, 2 ] # cyan
      - [  4, 16,  4, 2 ] # green
What format is used for these?
I would like to add more of them but I dont know what they mean.
(I do know they dictate vapor color for underwater shots, I want to add more colors)