Messages

211

Work In Progress / Re: additional armour types

« on: September 10, 2012, 09:51:34 pm »

I like the way you think, but I would like to suggest something:

Merge the Light/Medium Armor types into a generic "Standard Armor"; because with the way the game engine is currently set up, there's really no quantifiable difference between them; people will always pick medium armor, because there isn't code in the game engine to reward them for picking the light armor currently.

Plus, it also complicates the armor list. You want to give the player choices, but not TOO many choices -- it then becomes pointless, look at the billion and one guns of Jagged Alliance 2 1.13; all with near identical stats, and everyone just goes straight to SCAR :-P

Beef up the Assault Armor a bit more to make it worthwhile assigning it to the first man out of the Skyranger, and the first guy into that UFO; because being able to survive an alien shooting at you outweighs the fact that you move slow....and you'd be able to implement the armor differences in a tactically useful way.

212

Work In Progress / Re: Adding countries to Open-XCOM

« on: August 22, 2012, 12:31:45 am »

The game plays in the future, so enough time to change the political and economic landscape quite a bit. Also this should be after peak oil and a few crashed bubbles. 

I think you are confusing TFTD which is set in 2040, with UFO, which starts in 1999. 

--- posts merged ---

and if you scroll down a bit to here, that the countries aren't even respecting their own borders for in-game purposes. some even overlap. very weird.

Morarity, thanks for the map link. Very, very interesting. It shows how there are major missing holes in the global country map.

--- posts merged ---

Here's my crude rendering of what I would add once the game stabilizes.

213

Work In Progress / Re: Adding countries to Open-XCOM

« on: August 21, 2012, 10:00:41 pm »

I mean, why does Nigeria have a seat on the council of funding nations?

Nigeria spent $1,081 million in 1999 on military expenditures, and had a GDP of $44.25 billion.

Meanwhile, Poland, which spent $6,168 million in 1999 on military expenditures, and had a GDP of $164~ billion isn't on the CFN.

Places like South Korea aren't on the map either, which is inexplicable, given how South Korea was spending $17,300~ million on the military in 1999 (versus $4,000~ for Egypt).

I can understand some of these omissions given the technology in 1999 -- 320x200 screen limitations, memory limitations, and the need to provide enough countries in different globe regions to prevent the player from just defending Europe and the US and calling it a day...

--- posts merged ---

I continue to be impressed by the coding standard of Open XCOM.

The Country funding table....automatically generates a scroll-bar icon and goes up and down using the mouse scroll wheel if you add another country beyond the stock 16!

214

Work In Progress / Re: Adding countries to Open-XCOM

« on: August 21, 2012, 09:49:53 pm »

You don't need to add *every* country. Just those with sufficiently high GDP/military expenditure ratios to be worthy of inclusion on the Council of Funding Nations.

215

Work In Progress / Re: Globe variants

« on: August 21, 2012, 04:49:28 am »

You know, you could use a custom ruleset with a custom globe to create an unique game -- imagine a world in which the aliens decide to open the Alien War I (AWI) by smacking an asteroid into earth, and the resultant super-winter from all the asteroidal dust into the air has reduced the world to either arctic or desert tiles, and world population is much much lower; with fewer countries around to fund you...

216

Work In Progress / Adding countries to Open-XCOM

« on: August 21, 2012, 04:08:39 am »

So I did a very crude hackjob and possibly added Poland. Of course, it broke a lot of things due to my inexperience so far in OXCOM editing, but it would be nice to start adding in other countries, so that Africa is not dominated by the super states of Nigeria and South Africa. 

217

Suggestions / Original Alien Screams.

« on: April 29, 2012, 10:29:49 pm »

I just imaged my original 1.44MB floppies for X-COM, and I was wondering if there was plans at some point to incorporate dual loading; like having a folder in the OpenXCOM directory labelled ORIGINAL_SCREAMS; and the option to toggle between it and the later versions which some people say are not as good.

218

Work In Progress / Re: New weapon graphics

« on: January 24, 2012, 07:41:27 am »

One thing I always thought weird about the original XCom was that human researchers could reproduce alien technology so easily. Yeah, you hardly ever need to build Plasma rifles or their clips if you scavenged them from aliens, but you could build them, along with pretty much everything else.

When you think things through, alien tech scavenging and reuse is a major flaw in gameplay in UFO and it's sequels.

Consider: You research Heavy Plasma and that's it; you basically never ever need to manufacture personal weapons anymore; except maybe for small production runs of Stun Bombs for the Small Launcher since you now have weapons piling up after each mission.

It makes more sense if you cannot use alien weapons because they are:

A.) Designed for alien hands and musculature.
B.) The weapon itself has a wireless RFID chip that interfaces with a RFID chip in each alien soldier.

Thus explaining why your soldiers can't just pick up a heavy plasma and push the firing stud and fire it; thus requiring research into how to overcome the RFID encryption to 'unlock' the weapon.

Thus, you would then need to "remanufacture" alien weapons into human-useable weapons, e.g. replace the alien handgrips with human ones, remove the alien RFID lockout, and add other useable indicators. Maybe the aliens use psionics to tell the soldier that there are only five rounds left in the magazine; requiring the design of a LCD panel on the side of the weapon to make it useable to humans, etc.

And all this remanufacturing has a non-trivial failure rate -- e.g. you need to have three heavy plasmas to make a remanufactured heavy plasma; and the gun has a random chance of breaking after each mission.

I'm not quite sure how well that last point would be received. There's a lot of stuff that makes sense -- on paper -- in Game Design. It would add a lot of overhead to the player if they had to go: "welp, I had five guns broken from my last shootout, guess I need to remanufacture more guns."

219

Suggestions / Re: Pathfinder

« on: November 03, 2011, 05:03:15 pm »

The first click will let you preview the path calculated by the pathfinder, a second click on the same tile confirms the path and makes the unit move.

Suggestion.

How about having it so that holding down SHIFT makes the pathfinder appear after you have selected a unit?

This lets you preview the path without clicking; an important consideration if OpenX-COM is going to be played on laptops with badly laid-out mousepads.

220

Suggestions / Re: Pathfinder

« on: October 30, 2011, 03:00:41 am »

This is very, very, awesome! It takes a lot of the guesswork out of moving your units and actually fits in with the rest of the user interface! 

221

Fan-Stuff / YAML based Savegames = Win.

« on: October 11, 2011, 02:25:07 am »

It was remarkably easy to create my favorite X-COM character; which I had previously done via UGE editing of original XCOM files way back when. 

Yes, it was fun to create super soldiers with game editors and try to win the game with just two quasi-terminators killing all they met. 

222

Suggestions / Re: "grey" fog of war

« on: October 02, 2011, 10:18:38 pm »

What about using this to give X-COM different uniform colors?

I always found it hilarious you used the same color of jumpsuits/personal armor/power armor whether it was urban combat, desert combat, jungle combat or arctic combat.

223

Work In Progress / Re: Some thoughts for after version 1.0

« on: October 02, 2011, 09:45:37 pm »

Option to let morale track over between missions. When people got iced on a mission, global morale for that mission went down; but it always reset between missions - e.g. nobody cared that the last mission that went out got 75% casualties. This led to 'gamey' cheats like sending rookies with pistols and a primed prox grenades into UFOs to clear out the entrance.

224

Work In Progress / Re: Some thoughts for after version 1.0

« on: September 26, 2011, 05:04:56 pm »

Well, if a country has signed a pact with the aliens, would make sense that attacking a downed/landed UFO on that country's territory would mean encountering armed humans that will fight for the alines? Aliens are included on the battlescape too

Or the country randomly spawns interceptors which try to escort the UFOs or intercept XCOM craft over their territory?

225

Work In Progress / Re: Some thoughts for after version 1.0

« on: September 26, 2011, 05:01:28 pm »

Shouldn't the aliens be starting up the drive systems of the UFO so they can escape?

Further tying into this; you could have a sort of "counter" in the lower right screen after you research two alien engineers. You know from them, the signs and symbols of alien ships spooling up for takeoff -- the panels on the wall start blinking in this manner, and that once X starts blinking, it is Y amount before full antigravitic reduction is achieved, and thus takeoff.

Right now, the Alien Engineers reveal UFOpedia images, which were useful the first time we played the game in 1994; but not so anymore.