Messages

181

Suggestions / Re: air combat - just thinking about possibilities

« on: September 19, 2013, 08:46:07 pm »

Something that could be added, which would help make a differentiation between "Terrain alien alloy" craft capable of 4000~ Knots and advanced elerium fuelled craft such as Lightning (3100 kts) and Firestorm (4200 kts) is variable top speed depending on altitude.

Currently, we have the following altitudes:

VERY LOW
LOW
HIGH
VERY HIGH

Which as far as I know, don't do anything other than being for fluff. It's a bit jarring to see a hypersonic plane chasing an UFO at "low" altitude at 4000 knots.

Changing the game to have variable top speeds according to altitude might be worthwhile; the code could be like this in rulesets:

speedMax: 4000 = Flat performance envelope, irrespective of altitude. Default setting

speedMax_vLow: = Maximum speed at Very Low Altitude
speedMax_Low:  = Maximum speed at Low Altitude
speedMax_High:  = Maximum speed at High Altitude
speedMax_vHigh: = Maximum speed at Very High Altitude

Attached is the SR-71 performance envelope. You can see that at "on the deck", SR-71 performance is subsonic; and that she only goes supersonic around 20,000 feet; and in order to go to Mach 3.0 or higher, she has to be in excess of 70,000 feet altitude.

Some obvious things you could do with different maximum speeds: Make it so that human and slightly human (alien alloy) aerocraft are limited by the thermal limit -- the higher they go, the faster; but Alien UFOs are pretty much immune to the thermal limit; because they can form "shields" with their advanced gravity wave control through UFO power source/UFO Navigation to travel at maximum speed irrespective of the altitude.

This could lead to interesting UFO evasion options -- they could try escaping XCOM by "going to the deck" to outrun them; but this has a drawback -- damage at lower altitudes is much more severe than at high altitudes -- if you're travelling at 950 MPH (Mach 1.25) at virtually sea level, the dynamic pressure is approximately 2,300 pounds per square foot; whereas if you're travelling at 3,300 MPH (Mach 5.0) at 80,000 feet, dynamic pressure is approximately 1,000~ pounds per square foot.

This could have interesting implications if the UFO gravity wave control was...interrupted by laser blasts. 

182

Released Mods / Re: Tyran_nick's mods

« on: September 19, 2013, 02:38:26 am »

Here's my take on the Thunderstorm, using an X-30 NASP image as a starting base, with some redone fluff. Have yet to do the other images required for full implementation (base hangar image and intercept button).

183

Resources / Palettes for XCOM in GIMP/Paintshop format

« on: September 19, 2013, 12:41:44 am »

Just what the header of this thread says...

Anyone have them?

Admin Edit: Get the latest palettes here: https://github.com/MeridianOXC/OpenXcom/tree/oxce-plus/bin/common/Palettes

184

Suggestions / Re: Solider status icons

« on: September 19, 2013, 12:00:17 am »

These are actually a good idea!

Ones that could be used in XCOM vanilla:

Psi Control -- appears when the unit has been successfully psi attacked by the aliens during the mission, it doesn't go away, making it easy to remember who is a liability.

Panicking -- shows up when the unit has panicked and goes away a turn or two later.

EDIT:

Wounded -- shows up when the unit has a fatal untreated wound.

185

Suggestions / Re: Continue playing after the Council tries to shut you down

« on: September 18, 2013, 01:22:53 am »

Guys, the stuff you're talking about has pretty much no chance of being implemented in OXCOM; because it requires a lot of complex rules and basically changing major parts of the game.

Something that COULD be implemented for an "Ignore the council" decision is this:

In Advanced Options have:

IGNORE COUNCIL AND FIGHT ON: YES/NO

[description tbd]

On your final council report screen; where they say:

"You have not succeeded in dealing with the alien invasion and the council of funding nations has regrettably decided to terminate the project.  Each nation shall deal with the problem as they see fit.  We can only hope that we can come to some accommodation with these apparently hostile forces, and that the general population will come to terms with the alien visitors."

You'd have the "OK" button replaced with two buttons:

"ACCEPT" and "FIGHT ON".

If you chose ACCEPT; you get the standard "bad end" with the three armed mutant image.

If you chose FIGHT ON; you return to the geoscape, and can continue to play as before; but there are several significant differences in gameplay:

------------

Unable to Build New Bases.
This represents the fact that you now don't have official support to hide all the activity that goes into building a base.

Maintenance Cost of Base Facilities - 2x or 3x normal cost.
This is intended to represent the loss of 'official' support; meaning you now have to pay significant amounts of cash to bribe local officials instead of their governments pressuring them to look the other way, regarding strange aircraft taking off, mysterious construction in the middle of nowhere (all that dirt has to go somewhere)

Grey/Black Market Changes.
You can no longer hire personnel, purchase interceptors or skyrangers, and costs of all purchaseable human weapons are increased by 2x or 3x. Additionally, the money you get for selling alien corpses/weapons/etc is decreased by 2x or 3x.

This represents the fact that the program has been formally shut down -- and you can no longer get things easily through various national governments. The reduction in money from selling recovered alien artefacts is due to there being some sort of proviso in the agreements between the council of funding nations and the aliens regarding this stuff.

Basically, all the stuff you recover becomes radioactively "hot" on the black market, and this is reflected in the going price.

Essentially, it's no longer worth it for Jimmy the Blackmarketeer to pay $84,000 for the Plasma Pistol; because  selling it now means he attracts all sorts of unwanted attention, so he won't pay the premium prices he did before.

Aliens now know locations of *most* XCOM Bases.
Any agreement between the CFN and the Aliens would undoubtly include a "now tell us where all those bases that contain those craft that are shooting down our UFOs are!".

Detection would depend on base size, e.g. that huge base with 100 engineers, 100 researchers, 40 soldiers and three hangars would definitely be turned over to the aliens in the initial transmission of information, but the small radar station or small storage base wouldn't be.

There'd also be a small chance that the base location wouldn't be turned over to the aliens, to represent still-exant dissent on the CFN; not everyone will agree with the decision to sign a pact with the aliens; but over time, this dissent would decrease, representing that these dissenters are being 'turfed out' of their respective governments.

So basically:

Month 1 after XCOM termination:

Large Base: 75% chance the aliens know it's location
Medium Base: 65% ""
Small Base: 50% ""

Month 2 after XCOM termination:

Large Base: 85% chance the aliens know it's location
Medium Base: 75% ""
Small Base: 60% ""

Aliens now destroy bases upon defeating base defenses.
Basically, instead of going to a ground assault once they get past your base defenses; the aliens fusion ball bomb the base into a smoking crater.

This represents the fact that their modus operandi has changed -- before, they had a reason to keep everything on the quiet to avoid spooking the human race; but now they can go all out. This is backed by the BAD END fluff.

----------------------

Basically, all these changes (some of them would need to be worked out for balancing), mean that choosing to fight on is more of a "hail mary" pass; intended to take some of the aggravation out of a XCOM game, where you've gotten to within 25 days of being ready to assault Cydonia, but the game ends because of a bad score. *angryface*.

186

Suggestions / Re: Multiple skyrangers/craft and maybe bigger ufos?

« on: September 12, 2013, 08:50:04 am »

There are also more important mechanics to consider -- can you send a skyranger to loiter or hang around a landed/crashed UFO to prevent the aliens from taking off or cleaning up the crash site until a second skyranger shows up?

187

Work In Progress / Re: Consequences for selling items?

« on: September 03, 2013, 11:14:22 pm »

Imagine selling snakemen or chryssalids.  Good money, but they'll be infested with chryssalids later, and you'll have to do a mission, or a series of missions to clear out chryssalid infestations.

You can simulate the difficulty of dealing with snakemen or Cryssalid corpses by creating a ruleset called "SafeSelling.rul" or whatever, and putting forth:

Code: [Select]

items:
  - type: STR_ETHEREAL_CORPSE
    costSell: -20000
  - type: STR_CHRYSSALID_CORPSE
    costSell: -10000

It will now cost you $20K to dispose of an ethereal corpse safely, and 10K for a Cryssalid corpse.

Basically figure in the cost of making sure the bodies are all incinerated, and maintaining a chain of custody so that nobody can walk off with one.

188

Suggestions / Re: Additional Geoscape Debug Features

« on: August 30, 2013, 03:30:15 am »

Real world coordinates from Google Earth don't quite line up with the coordinates for XCOM's globe; I tried that.

Currently, there's no substitute for a lot of trial and error to find the LATLONG coords for the nation boxes.

189

Released Mods / [GLOBE] Improved Nations Mod

« on: August 29, 2013, 09:42:33 pm »

This mod adds several dozen new nations to the game; along with many more cities.

Basic formula I used to determine funding pricing was:

All nations contribute a flat fee of 75 to the XCOM project.

Then they're assessed a basic GDP contribution fee of their GDP divided by 125. E.g. a nation with $7,751 per capita GDP would have to pay 62.01.

Next up is population contribution fee; population divided by 5,000,000. A nation with 1.2 billion people would then have to pay approximately 240.

Finally there's special fees:

NUCLEAR POWER: 135 (Known nuclear powers like US, UK, France, Israel, India, Pakistan, China, Russia)

SHARED NUCLEAR POWER: 62.5 (People who share nukes under dual NATO control -- Germany, Netherlands, Belgium, Italy, Greece, Turkey)

It's important to note that 1999 was a long time ago regarding economic growth -- Russia was still in the dumps following the breakup of the USSR; along with many former WARPAC states -- Germany was still swallowing up Eastern Germany, etc.

You want to download and use

XCOM1_Improved_Nations_Final.rul

Original post below:

*******************************************************

First of all, I'd like to thank SupSuper for adding LAT/LONG coordinates when you click the cursor in debug mode; that has made adding nations to OXCOM a lot easier.

My current plan is to fill in a lot of the world, as shown by the map, along with doing minor globe nation defended area fixes.

Attached is my current ruleset as of 25 SEP 2013. (Depreciated, go down a few posts for latest version)

Progress on it is:

JAPAN:
Sakhalin Island added to territory

USA:
Hawaii added
Alaska added

Russia
Siberia has been extended a bit towards the pole.
Sakhalin Island added to territory (RUS/JAPAN claim it in real life)

Australia:
Tasmania added to territory
New Zealand added to territory (ANZUS Pact)

Canada:
Territory has been extended a bit towards the pole.

MEXICO has been added.
PHILIPPINES has been added
TAIWAN has been added
--Tapei has been added as a city.
KOREA has been added.
PAKISTAN has been added
IRAN has been added
SAUDI ARABIA has been added
--Riyadh has been added as a city.

190

Suggestions / Re: Additional Geoscape Debug Features

« on: August 29, 2013, 09:10:43 pm »

EDIT: no; this won't work.

191

Suggestions / Re: Additional Geoscape Debug Features

« on: August 29, 2013, 08:31:42 pm »

I thought the Geoscape debug mode already did that.

There's a debug mode?

edit:

You enable it by opening options.cfg and making this string be:

debug: true

then on geoscape you hit CTRL-D several times to cycle through modes.

There are three modes.

NONE: Doesn't display debug areas.

REGIONS: Shows regions -- the areas used for scoring performance, e.g. "North Atlantic".

COUNTRIES: Shows the countries -- their areas used for scoring performance.

(see attachments)

EDIT II -- doesn't appear to be any way that returns the LON and LAT of where the cursor is hovering over.

192

Fan-Stuff / Any pointers for learning C++?

« on: August 29, 2013, 07:33:46 am »

Currently, I'm playing around in Microsoft Visual Studio 2012 Express; and I've got a ton of C++ books, some on loan from the library, some bought from used book stores; and there's always the INTERTUBEZ to help me.

Right now, I've managed to make a simple Win32 Console CLI application that does simple area calculations (hey a start is a start), but I was wondering if you guys had any specific recommendations regarding books for learning or any rules of thumb that you've painfully learned.

PS - Yes, I admit the big reason I picked C++ to learn was because OpenXCOM is programmed in it 

193

Suggestions / Additional Geoscape Debug Features

« on: August 29, 2013, 07:22:08 am »

Was wondering if it would be possible to toggle drawing the country polygon areas on the geoglobe; along with another debug that shows the current coordinates of the mouse cursor on the geoglobe.

This would make adding new countries to any "extended" XCOM a lot easier and require less trial and error.

194

Work In Progress / Re: New soldier?

« on: July 22, 2013, 06:53:35 pm »

Actually, this would be a splendid idea to work into stock XCOM as an "advanced option" -- "Enable purchase of trained operatives".

It always bugged me how you were supposedly recruiting the best of the best from special forces around the world, yet they always panicked or couldn't hit the broad side of a barn.

Same issue with Mass Effect 1 --Shepard was supposedly a top grade special operative (the whole N7 thing on your suit), but shot like a rookie at the beginning of the game.

If you could buy decently trained operatives, it would I think help alleviate the 'save-scumming' so prevalent in X-COM -- because then losing someone wouldn't be a critical blow to your organization; since you could just buy a replacement "Falcon" (Chengdu Military Region Special Forces Unit) from the PRC.

Of course, you'd have to design it so that it wouldn't break the game horribly -- maybe work in a cool-down factor so you can't just purchase 30 top flight soldiers in a single month -- because I imagine the global pool of special forces operators capable of being "scrubbed" is pretty small!

[By scrubbed, I mean all traces of their existence were wiped from all global government databases. Why? Just imagine the stink if a former US Delta Force operative was found dead in mainland China with a 10cm plasma hole in his chest, or vice versa!]

195

Programming / Re: Advanced Options Menu

« on: July 12, 2013, 05:05:01 am »

Is it possible to add the following options

Display Resolution
Display Mode (Windowed/Fullscreen)
Display Filter

to the following option screens:

Geoscape Game Option Screen
Battlescape Game Option Screen

Currently you have to abandon your game to go to the main menu in order to change these settings.