Messages

61

Offtopic / Re: WWII XCOM?

« on: March 14, 2015, 03:34:36 pm »

Perhaps these are creatures from Lemuria/hidden jungles in Antarctica. Rather than flying to Mars on 1940s tech, they head to the South Pole for the fianl mission of no return. (Functionally the same as Cydonia, just a palette swap.)

Oh man; even better! That ties into the whole Nazi "Hollow Earth" Mythology floating around!

What if you have to do a multi-level mission descending deeper into the caverns of the hollow earth for the final mission?

Also from the wiki on Hollow Earth:

George Papashvily in his Anything Can Happen (1940) claimed the discovery in the Caucasus mountains of a cavern containing human skeletons "with heads as big as bushel baskets" and an ancient tunnel leading to the centre of the earth. One man entered the tunnel and never returned.

62

Offtopic / Re: How would YOU handle creating a X-COM where you are the aliens?(What if)

« on: February 26, 2015, 12:49:41 am »

I also agree with the earlier sentiments stated by others that the alien commander in any XCOM "From the other side" is going to be operating his war on a shoestring -- sort of a guerilla war in space -- rather than having the full force of any alien empire at his command.

Basically; he's the equivalent of the guy in WWII that got told to conquer Guadalcanal with a scratch force of a division; as part of an overall war effort; explaining how the alien force is basically concentrated on a single base in Cydonia on Mars; rather than spread across the solar system.

Additionally, I agree with the points regarding biological harvesting -- because if the objective was to create a rear line depot to feed brand new battleships into the front lines of whatever war the aliens are fighting -- then you don't need to invade earth at all -- you just need to mine mars and the asteroids for all the raw materials you'd want to build 1 million battleships.

There's a reason they're messing around with earth. Could it be that lore-wise; the alien cloning methods are not quite perfect?

By that, I mean they can't just get raw materials from asteroids and comets (Carbon - Hydrogen - Oxygen - Nitrogen) (CHON) and use that with a few rare elements to clone away happily an army.

Perhaps there is an "x" factor to cloning? Perhaps you need high quality psi-organic material (read; human and animal brains) to make clones that last longer than a week without going insane?

63

Offtopic / Re: WWII XCOM?

« on: February 26, 2015, 12:30:22 am »

There's also a lot mythology tied into WWII; like the whole "foo fighters" phenomenon that could be exploited.

The biggest problem I can see is that even the slowest UFO's top speed of 2,200 km/h easily outpaces the fastest jet aircraft of WW2; the P-80 at 960~ km/h.

But there's something that could be used to shoot down UFOs -- rockets! But you'd have to redesign a lot of the intercept game to work around expendable surface to air missiles instead of manned reusable interceptors -- but that could also be carried over to "regular" XCOM -- imagine shooting down a battleship with a Patriot battery you placed near berlin

64

Offtopic / WWII XCOM?

« on: February 26, 2015, 12:16:31 am »

Way back when in the old days; I hex edited and PCK edited through magic a M1 Thompson SMG into XCOM; and at least one guy tried to make a good attempt at WWII rifles for UFO and WWII uniforms through editing the stock overalls.

Now that we have some more control over the game; I'm struck by the fact you could try making a WWII themed XCOM using the whole Nazi Flying Saucer mythology:



Imagine sending a Raumluftlandschiff to Cydonia to blow it up; and the Panzerkleins from Silent Storm replacing power suits; while surplus french sky blue uniforms replace the overalls (in a nod to Xenonauts).

65

Suggestions / Re: [SUGGESTION]Power of weapon function of distance

« on: February 14, 2015, 04:29:33 pm »

I suggested this long ago back in like 1997 or so on the usenet forums for XCOM (anyone remember those?).

Allow you to set ammunition to detonate after a certain distance -- e.g. if you're 25 squares away from a sectoid; set the ammo to detonate at 25 squares from the muzzle; so that even if you miss; the proximity detonation will kill him if you're close enough with your miss.

It was based off the XM-29 OICW weapon that was at the time the hottest thing in US Army technology some 15+ years ago; and the tech eventually showed up in Afghanistan as the XM-25 Punisher.

The XM25 CDTE fires 25 mm grenades that are set to explode in mid-air at or near the target. A laser rangefinder in the weapon is used to determine the distance to the target. The user can manually adjust the detonating distance by up to 10 feet (3.0 m) shorter or longer; the XM25 automatically transmits the detonating distance to the grenade in the firing chamber. The grenade tracks the distance it has traveled by the number of spiral rotations after it is fired,[5] then detonates at the proper distance to produce an air burst effect. These features make the XM25 more effective than traditional grenade launchers at the task of hitting targets that are behind cover or dug into the ground (i.e. in defilade.)

66

Work In Progress / Re: [CONVERSION] Higher resolution

« on: October 11, 2014, 03:43:51 pm »

Will you make it so that the new "high res" stuff has bigger fonts to go with the increased screen area?

I realize some people have bad experiences from XCOM 2012's UI design, which was designed around being visible on a television at 10 feet in 720p (huge fonts), but the inverse is also equally bad -- microscopic font in high resolution.

67

Work In Progress / Re: [GLOBE] random desert world

« on: September 20, 2014, 04:23:28 pm »

The Spice Must Flow!

68

Offtopic / Re: What's your final verdict on Firaxis' X-com: Enemy Unknown?

« on: July 19, 2014, 12:47:00 am »

"Okay, worth playing but nothing all that special" -- too many niggles with the game that I can't seriously play it over and over the way I did UFO.

69

Released Mods / Re: [GLOBE] Improved Nations Mod

« on: July 10, 2014, 10:33:37 pm »

XCOM is set in 1999 remember? Not 2014. 

70

Offtopic / Re: What do you think has caused OpenXcom to succeed?

« on: July 07, 2014, 04:21:39 am »

Everyone else has nailed it:

1.) XCOM itself was a big sell. It attracts people in a way that "open source remake of random game nobody's ever heard of" doesn't.

2.) Limited Project scope -- no trying to redo it in 3D or to fight from the alien side or redraw everything in high resolution. Just simple vanilla XCOM -- and that's hard enough -- a lot of projects only get to the geoscape and then sputter out, much less any kind of battlescape.

3.) Project management was truly open source -- as others have said earlier in the thread - there's been a succession of 'big time' contributors to the code base; along with a bunch of smaller time contributors, allowing progress to be made on a somewhat steady basis over the years.

4.) Steady drip drip of nightlies (Precompiled binaries) to enable those of us who can't code to help bugtest or see if the latest new trick works (or doesn't). A lot of open source projects forget about this part; I think because the larger open source community on the internet views having to compile code yourself as a rite of passage -- "becoming leet".

5.) A decent modding community, with a lot of changes to the code being made (within reason) to cater to modders; like the recent git push:

Warboy, Sat Jul 5 19:26:56 2014
add item limit

configurable in craft rules, does not limit base defenses.
why you people want this is beyond me.

 

71

Fan-Stuff / Re: UFO enemy unknown/TFTD mods form the internet

« on: July 07, 2014, 04:07:40 am »

Stay the hell away from the link in the Original Post.

A drive by pop up showed up and tried to claim that my computer was locked up and that I'd have to pay, etc.

The specific attack was "YOUR BROWSER HAS BEEN BLOCKED"

It got past even my Chrome Adblock and Popup Blocker.

Thankfully, because I was running a fully patched chrome (latest build) and not IE, I was able to bring up windows task manager and hard-kill chrome without touching anything; preventing the drive by infection (I think).

72

Tools / Re: sprite tools

« on: July 04, 2014, 06:13:56 pm »

So how do you recolor existing sprites?

73

Released Mods / Re: [CRAFT][WIP] E-3 Sentry AWACS

« on: July 03, 2014, 02:27:02 pm »

I've always liked that XCOM allows you to use aircraft as mobile detection stations. The old trick of using a Skyranger's superior fuel and range to scout for alien bases got me thinking: Why not a dedicated mobile detection craft?

[snippity snip]

GENIOUS.

Though; an E-3 would be too big to fit in XCOM hangars and it couldn't take off from an XCOM base :-P

74

OXCE Suggestions DONE / Re: [SUGGESTION-CUT][#004] Motion Scanner without pencil and paper

« on: July 02, 2014, 07:00:13 am »

I once suggested an upgraded motion scanner with race recognition -- but you would have to do autopsies and interrogations first to build up a database of how humans move vs aliens before you could use that.

75

Work In Progress / Re: Real World Weapons

« on: July 01, 2014, 01:51:39 am »

It doesn't make sense to add more weapons because they are already supposed to be the best thing available

So XCOM uses M-16s then, like almost every SOF team in the west