Messages

661

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

« on: November 02, 2016, 10:27:25 pm »

Somewhat related I thought I would post this really nifty technique I discovered for working with photoshop and spriting, take a screenshot of the palette editor, paste it into a new image then crop the image to the palette. You can even save that image for future use if you want.

It doesn't matter if that image is in 8bit or not, the point is it provides a literal artist's palette to pick colors from, and at least in PS7 you dont even have to switch to that image to pick a color or use the eyedropper (hold down ALT and it becomes the color picker, and picking a color from the other image will not switch to it).

There are some people who use the Swatches toolbar but I have never found it useful for anything or how to adapt it quickly like others do, and it just adds another layer of hassle to an already hassle-filled program. Id rather just have it as an image like so.

I discovered this actually when I was doing some ZDoom spriting because I wanted to pick colors that were most likely going to be on the ranges I wanted (rather than an off-red diverting to brown, it has an actual color on the palette to start with)

662

Work In Progress / Re: Palette question

« on: November 02, 2016, 10:19:13 pm »

On the wiki it says that "Each RGB value has a maximum intensity of 63/x3F", please could someone explain what this means? Does it mean that the RGB value from within the PNG palette https://www.ufopaedia.org/index.php/PALETTES.DAT can increase by 21 on each of the R, G, B values respectively?

Im not sure but I BELIEVE it may have something to do with how some VGA palette handling was done back in the early 90s. I encountered this first with Fractint since I used its internal palette editor extensively.

That being, even though you have 256 colors to work with, each of the channels RGB are limited to 64 Shades each.

So the RGB values would be in multiples of 4 and your actual choices to choose from would be 0-63 in each of the R, G, B fields.

So you would have values like 53, 61, 23 for some kind of faded greenish yellow. This would translate to R212/G244/B92


There are alot of older games that you can see this behavior on by checking the white color on their palette or anything that is saturated, you will find that the maximum value is actually 252 and think "thats odd, why isnt it 255? I guess its close enough but its kinda off?"

I dont know why they did this, probably to save memory, but thats one thing I noticed. So when you said "63" thats what tripped my recognition.

663

Playthroughs / funny realization

« on: November 02, 2016, 09:37:02 pm »

The damage numbers for equipment in xcom very closely resemble the upper maximum range for the ones in the original Fallout games. If you consider the actual hollowpoint damage equivalents for the pistols.
Fallout:
10mm pistol - 24
Desert Eagle - 32
Sniper Rifle - 34
Laser Rifle - 50
Rocket Launcher - 100
Alien Blaster - 90
Plasma Grenade - 90
Plastic Explosive - (90?)
Even in tactics the hollowpoint beretta would do 26 maximum.

Xcom:
Pistol - 26
Rifle - 30
Laser Rifle - 60
Rocket Launcher - 100
Alien Grenade - 90
High Explosive - 110

Its just funny that if you wanted to mod an xcom weapon into fallout like the heavy plasma, the damage would probably be directly equivalent.

664

Suggestions / some more suggestions

« on: November 02, 2016, 01:55:17 am »

These have probably been mentioned before, but its a suggestions board and I dunno if these have been implemented in any way:


Armor penetration adjustment:
# armorModifier: 0.5

with this any target hit will have their armor multiplied by the value indicated before its deducted from the damage (but not before the damage side of the equation has been resolved).

This makes it possible to have low damage / high penetration weapons like needlers, railguns, and beam weapons. They can punch through armor but against tough critters they're not going to be any more effective than their damage value indicates (30 damage rifle with 0.3 would be able to challenge power armor but unlike applying a damage multiplier, its not going to jack up that 0-60 points of damage). This way soldiers can be threatened by things that will make them bleed but not necessarily kill them straight away like high powered weapons will.

Likewise "focused plasma" weapons that do damage like gauss weapons but penetrate as well as the normal version.

Likewise this immediately addresses the needs for a Shotgun that does alot of damage but doesnt penetrate armor. Realistic shotguns pretty much fire in a straight line and would cause about as much damage as the autocannon, but rather than counting up a bunch of smaller hits its better to just sum it up as a single hit that is less effective against armor. And generally speaking whether you're talking about buckshot or a slug they both still do sum-total less damage than a .50 which sits at about 50-60 damage points by vanilla standards (I imagine its what the tank/cannon fires)

This probably shouldnt apply to scenery tile armor, since the "armor" the tile has is more like its health (or like the Break DC in d20 games) and thats much more of a Damage issue.


Shotgun Pellets cone/spread modulation:
# shotgunPelletsAccuracy: 85
# shotgunPelletsDisplayEffects: true

Determines the cone of trajectories for any multi-projectile attacks, sets it as a flat rate. In this case the same as if a shooter had an 85% accuracy listed for their attack next to the TU value.

The other part would take a multi-projectile attack and emulate firing multiple times (not simultaneously) similar to the way Auto attacks are done. So if it had shotgunpellets: 5 that means you're going to see 5 separate attacks one after another similar to an auto attack.

Though it could also be combined with a weapon that can do auto attacks, unless you keep the number of pellets low it could be a torture test on the part of the player (like seeing a train of 15 separate attacks that all resolve individually), but oh well thats something a modder would have to consider.



Explosion Falloff adjustment:
# blastRadiusType: 0, 1, 2
# 0 = normal and truncated directly at blast radius limit if present
# 1 = falloff to the blast radius limit
# 2 = blast radius actually tells the game the extent that Full Damage reaches out to,
# then falls off normally after that

Mode 0 would be like it already is, falloff is handled normally, if "blastradius" is defined then it doesnt hit anything beyond that distance to the explosion.

Mode 1 is a direct scaler to the amount of damage that gets absorbed by tiles as the blast reaches out. Since the theoretical maximum blast size is 1 tile per 10 points caused, setting the "blastradius" to larger or smaller will act indirectly as a multiplier to the amount of damage that gets lost for each tile.

For example a blaster launcher with blastradius: 11 will multiply the damage absorbed per tile by 20/11 so that by the time it reaches a radius of 11 tiles the damage will have been reduced to 0 by then.

But likewise a "frag grenade" that does 45 damage but has blastradius: 12 will multiply the damage absorbed per tile by 4/11 giving it a much larger area of effect than its damage value might otherwise suggest (currently the way blastradius works would make this impossible).

Mode 2 works a little bit like the explosions in Halo: CE. This causes a big immersive fireball effect, everybody near ground zero takes damage as if they were hit directly since it doesn't get reduced. After that damage falls off at the normal rate. "blastradius" sets the distance for full damage.

These adjustments are mainly to curtail or increase the amount of reach the explosion has so it could be worthwhile to exclude any tiles set as Walls because these can still (logically) block explosions by virtue of toughness rather than the fact they are just extra distance to cover.

Or with some extra (or less?) effort, assume that plain flat ground tiles always deduct 10 and just apply adjustments to That Number only rather than the actual blast resistance value. For example if a tile blocks 20 exp damage then the frag grenade would only subtract ~6.7 points from it and be reduced to 13 rather than actually multiplying the value and it only blocking 7 points. A Ufo Wall wouldn't be impacted meaningfully doing it this way (it would only lose 6.7 points from its blocking power as well, fully containing the explosion).

665

Suggestions / Re: Land Use Only

« on: November 02, 2016, 01:16:14 am »

OXCE+

People keep referencing that but im interested in the nightlies/2.0.
Is OXCE+ compatible with the nightlies and the existing mods? It doesn't seem to be so?

666

Work In Progress / Re: How does facility "defence value" work?

« on: November 01, 2016, 05:32:43 am »

Oh boy im glad I saw this, all this time I thought both craft weapons and base defenses caused fixed damage. Good to know, really good.

667

Suggestions / Land Use Only

« on: November 01, 2016, 01:41:44 am »

For TFTD it would be nice if there was conversely an option to make items Land Use Only, cant use them underwater.

Though I would like to make that apply to grenades there's other equipment that could work as substitutions to aquatic items, and could even be more effective.

For example the original xcom laser weapons, available right from the start of the game because the technology has become commercialized and they've been sitting around in lockers for the past 40 years. And a rocket launcher to supplement the torpedo launcher. But in order to have those available for use for terror missions or base defense they'd be taking up storage space so there's the balance.

With that I had an idea for special rules for artificially scaling up the weight of items when it comes to throwing (underwater) to avoid breaking game mechanics, but artificially increase their weight so you cant throw them far. Or imply they are fired from some kind of non-item launcher which gives them a limited range and arcing trajectory similar to the deep-one weapon (maybe all the grenades including sonic pulsers are hand launched mini-torpedoes that only have enough thrust to launch them in an arc).

668

Work In Progress / Re: [SUGGESTION] Terminator series

« on: November 01, 2016, 01:14:20 am »

Also its worth noting that while Skynet used the time travel technology there's nothing saying that this wasnt all started in some way by Humans developing time travel Before all of this, which because of their awkwardness somehow gets advanced tech deposited in the past and sets the stage for a very angry AI to be developed without the proper conditioning to keep it from becoming murderous.

And in their attempts to somehow Fix That, that group ends up getting eliminated somehow (that first terminator could have done that). The probability matrix for the rise of Skynet becomes so high that their timeline is pretty much eliminated.

This is also possible if its a small group doing it rather than an institution, meaning they are doing it in secret and have no institutional backing, resulting in a limited number of attempts. Taking a page from 90s sci-fi here with shows like Sliders and The Outer Limits.

And unlike robotic infiltrators humans are squishy and have limitations - especially for the fact that living in a modern environment requires alot of personal infrastructure just to survive (money, work history, credit history, fake SSN and papers). So the few time travelers, or the one left, who would be able to fix things actually fails or "Gets Fixed" by a T-800.

This is like the initial virus that mutates into the deadly virus that kills everybody, nobody remembers the initial thing and it may disappear quietly but it's what was actually responsible.

Somebody in a previous post also mentioned about Skynet getting access to advanced tech, the hyper-alloys, fusion tech and the plasma weapons. But even if we dont consider somebody dropping tech from an initial sunny bright future...

...thats where it can incorporate some of the ideas of black projects, darpa and sandia labs working on things in addition to other branches working on what would become Skynet. Cyber intelligence isnt their only pursuit and Skynet is smart, as a supercomputer it can sift through any information it collects from these research institutions, while it conducts its war against humanity.

It also has plenty of time (processing cycles) to ponder things, experiment and test on stuff, and like Xcom Research it can just sit there and keep working its way up the tech tree. And like Xcom is able to apply recent discoveries to its manufacturing. The improvements to the robotics up to the point of the T-700 may just have been straightforward refinement.

Just because it tries something and fails doesn't mean that it proves (for example Fusion) is impossible, a machine is heartless, and although as an AI it may have threshold controls on when to consider something hopeless - all it means is That Way doesn't work and there's no reason to give up. Skynet is an inventor, and at the least it would be able to take unfinished science projects humans were working on and continue research. Skynet doesn't require money or payment or coffee breaks for its work, it doesn't have a bureaucracy to answer to.

As for hapless Time Travelers, they would have developed their technology based on the efforts of humanity (even Tesla expanded on previous theories). But those theories could also be scavenged up by Skynet, even the possibility of using time travel would be a back burner project to look into. Skynet existed shortly before the nuclear war, it had plenty of time* to make backups of its information on mediums that would be unaffected by the EMP.

They wouldn't need to necessarily have left behind their Time Travel tech, whatever else they left behind to secure the possibility of Skynet was all that would be needed.

And as a movie or story plot, it could be eschewed because all it does is give a +1 bump to the possibility of skynet, it isnt required.

But it would explain how the original (earliest alpha) timeline could somehow produce John Connor from Sarah Conner, and something still be terribly wrong even though she survived the first terminator attack.

It might even change who John is, who his father was, maybe the most original John really would have gone on to become a humanity saviour just on his wits and skill alone.

Maybe that John ceases to exist, but because he's willing to send another man to go back in time and secure that lineage the new John Conner still ends up becoming an effective replacement. Maybe he ended up looking a little different, but because of his mom's training he still does the job.

669

Work In Progress / Get moar elerium/zrbite

« on: October 31, 2016, 11:16:12 pm »

Old trick I did on vanilla editing was to take the Zrbite item and give it alot of armor, usually like 190-200 armor. Since the game places this "item" on the map right under the engines that explode, it means it invariably eats the fuel since the item traditionally has 0 armor (even a minor explosion near it will kill it too). Dont remember how much damage the exploding engines does but after some tweaking I found when I dropped the armor on the fuel to like 160-190 it started eating it sometimes and thats what I wanted.

(with OXC it can be put somewhere else, but if it had 0 armor it might still vanish anyway along with the dead aliens in the ship)

While purists would call having more fuel heresy, aside from giving the capability to actually manufacture the stuff, game mod balance can be used to make sure the player has to use more of it aside from it also being used as fuel for the advanced ships.

(unrelated: I am considering making zrbite manufacture capable, but itll cost about as much as a medikit in money and time to produce every unit, and it doesnt get unlocked until you unlock the final mission because of 11th hour superpower)

I do have the question though - does OpenXcom proclude that process now and just deletes those items if the ufo is crashed? Havent checked yet, but I don't wanna get heartbroken over it.

670

Work In Progress / Re: tentaculat/chrissy stuff

« on: October 31, 2016, 10:38:29 pm »

Wow awesome, thanks man. Been waiting forever to do that. Sorry for the typos it was my phone, my laptop internet has been seriously messing up lately.

671

Work In Progress / tentaculat/chrissy stuff

« on: October 30, 2016, 10:19:13 pm »

Will removing the zombietype keep the creature from turning soldiers into zombies?
I had an idea for making them only capable of making zombies if they manage to kill a soldier but i wouldnt have a clue how to script that, so im happy with just jacking up their melee damage to make them more lethal to soldiers in a traditional way.

Could they be given a built in weapon like the reapers do? Or even a built in gun thing? (Would love to emulate Hydralisk style thorn shooting weapons since both tentaculats and chryssalids look like tgey cpuld be packing them)

672

Work In Progress / Re: [WIP] Pulse Weapons and Other Stuff

« on: October 30, 2016, 10:09:51 pm »

Sounds cool. In scifi it seems Pulse weapons often are interpreted to work in some mysterious wsy or fit into an almost mundane weapon category. In Aliens its just implied they were caseless firearms that used an electrical Pulse to ignite the propellant. In Fallout its exotic disintegrator tech.

I always interpreted the tftd gauss weapons to fire a Particle Beam and shoot through things with unholy penetration like the Assault Phaser does in Star Trek 6 (with the vicious zorch sound to boot).

I think the real thing missing from the game are human developed weapons which have Both outstanding accuracy and speed... 2 aimed/ 4 snap shots per turn and aimed is at 120%. The firepower can even be crap starting tier ... this be like the Half Life pulse rifles the combine use. Who needs firepower when you can firing squad aliens from halfway across the map? 30 pistol damage and 36 rifle damage ate acceptable if it also gets 60 shots (laser weapins were infinite!)

Ahh but you dont always have a range advantage and sometimes you need a one shot stop (or dude will get a chance to use his blaster/dpl, or tentaculat/chrissy gets One More Turn)

673

Troubleshooting / Re: Help with running TFTD

« on: October 30, 2016, 04:00:02 am »

@ivan thanks but I don't have them installed, I have copies of the dos games zipped.

I just figured out how to get it running from the post on ufopaedia, sorry for the trouble. I figured it would probably be in the Options but I missed it at first.

674

Troubleshooting / Re: Alien is hiding in base mission

« on: October 29, 2016, 11:10:45 pm »

My suggestion for the surrender dynamic is to do a couple checks:
* Is it earlier than Turn 30?
* Are there at least 3 conscious aliens left?

If both are untrue then wait until the end of the next turn and permanently Reveal their presence on the map. In fact the entire map could be revealed from that point on too.

Then you know where they are, you can rush your units there, or ship them a blaster bomb and be done with it. Its satisfying to know where they are and then be able to deal with them yourself, even if it means costing you 3-5 more turns because you know the end is near.


Maybe post a popup like this to give it a logical reason:
"Advanced reconnaissance satellites have mapped the area and isolated hostile signatures in your area"


Additionally having a Mind Reader / MC Reader equipped with a soldier somewhere could hasten the delay to Turn 20 and thus give another practical use for having it

(aside from tuning into mindwaves, maybe it also generally detects their presence in the area, if its reading less activity then xcom may have reason to want to confirm with a satellite scan)

675

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).