Messages

1786

Suggestions / Re: Selling soliders

« on: June 12, 2010, 07:18:01 pm »

Hi all,

 Looking good so far.

Here's a couple of suggestions you may or may not have tthought about:
1. The ability to sell a solider from their stats screen
2. When selling craft, adjust their price to recover some of the armament costs, or provide a way to disarm craft

Also some interesting reading.
https://www.ufopaedia.org/index.php?title=User:Seb76

Sounds good. Selling crafts should definitely account for equipped weapons, or disarm them at least (like selling Skyrangers won't sell the contents).

People keep bringing up Seb76's work, and you can be assured I'll "borrow" as many good ideas from existing fan-patches as I can. No point in letting good ideas go to waste.

1787

Suggestions / Re: Soldier load-out profiles

« on: June 12, 2010, 06:56:52 pm »

My wish is for the game to remember what each soldier was equipped with in their last mission, and to try to load them with that same configuration for the next one.  As a bonus, on returning to base from a mission, the game could warn you if the base doesn't have enough (ammo) stock to re-equip for next time.

I also like the other ideas mentioned so far

I think that's what XcomUtil tried to do, but it had a lot of bugs when equipment changed or you lost soldiers.

My idea for a pre-equip screen to prevent these kind of issues is that you could individually equip your soldiers however you wanted, but it wouldn't be "real" equipment, more like a template. So the game would just fill out the templates with real equipment when you went out on missions, and would never lose them whenever your soldiers or equipment changed, it'd just warn you if you suddenly didn't have enough equipment to fill out the templates.

Personally I never bothered to have stats-specific equipment and just had everyone carry the same because I'm lazy but some ability to save templates shouldn't be too hard.

1788

Suggestions / Re: Support for interchangeable gameplay features from all 3 X-Com Games

« on: June 12, 2010, 06:48:39 pm »

I had planned on supporting UFO/TFTD features since both games are virtually the same and UFO could benefit from some of TFTD's improvements like the right-click doors, scrolling ground equipment, seeing soldier stats on the pre-equip screen, etc.

Apoc is probably much further down the line though, since stuff like collapsible destructible environment and real-time is a whole lot more complex and would probably take quite some time to properly integrate into a UFO/TFTD engine. I'll keep it in mind though.


I think some kind of menu for turning on/off extra features at will is gonna be inevitable since everyone has their own preferences for playing the game. The problem is figuring out what features are too major to be able to change mid-game, or which are too minor that there's no need for an option.
My main goal for now is to introduce features that don't have a major impact in the core gameplay, but are like minor fixes/patches to the original that feel natural like they should've always been there in the first place.

1789

Offtopic / Re: X-com Apocalypse

« on: June 12, 2010, 06:20:42 pm »

X-Com Apocalypse is interesting and does have a bunch of nice features like the improved battlescape and faction relations and closer cityscape view, but a lot of those things just made it harder for you (pretty easy to get anyone pissed at you) and the bland pre-rendered art style went a long way into making the game lose its charm and feel a lot more boring.

Also I haven't seen anyone try to remake X-Com 2 either so I think fans are just purists.

1790

Offtopic / Re: X-com-reloaded - another project similar to openxcom?

« on: June 06, 2010, 12:55:40 am »

I can see your point. From a fan's point of view, we just want someone to remake X-Com (or MoM or whatever) and we don't care how they do it and why they do it and just get more annoyed by more unfinished projects.

While you could just probably have one project for that, in most cases, each project has their own take or approach or things they'd like to see in a remake, and each project goes a different way even if they're all trying to remake X-Com at heart. A lot of people aren't encouraged unless they make the project their own special thing which they have input over, and wouldn't really work getting together with other projects with different goals. Forcing different teams to merge might just make the end result even less productive.

What the players end up choosing is another matter. Different strokes for different people and all that, otherwise we'd only have a single program for every single task.

In any case, while OpenXcom and X-Com Reloaded don't have that problem since they are pretty similar, they're still very early in development and might go different ways eventually. Plus everyone codes their own way, so code isn't really "mergable". You can try to learn from it and apply that knowledge in your own project, but at this point, for both projects to merge one of them would pretty much have to throw their code away and work on the other. A noble goal maybe, but there's no way I can force anyone to do that, we all love our projects dearly. Maybe if we had met up earlier things would be different. I hope you understand.

1791

Offtopic / Re: X-com-reloaded - another project similar to openxcom?

« on: June 04, 2010, 12:51:12 am »

I've contacted the author. Both projects will pretty much keep running their course as they are now, since any kind of merge would be incredibly tricky, but we'll try and help each other out if necessary.

1792

Programming / Re: Compiling OpenXCOM on Mac OS X

« on: June 03, 2010, 01:16:39 am »

so you can keep maintaining and testing it.

My pleasure! 

Concerning README - I see no problem there, since common users will never download source code in the first place. So only developers will read it, as intended.

Well I found it in the Resources of your Mac build, which is why I mentioned it.

1793

Offtopic / Re: How did you find this project?

« on: June 02, 2010, 01:01:56 pm »

Thanks for the feedback, hope everyone keeps spreading the word.

Ya know, with all the love of Xcom, ya think someone would make a "dos-mode" bugfix release, combined with a preset/customized emulator, that could be easily installed on any modern system. We see that in video games all the time, so ...

(I know, it can be done manually. I've done that myself. But it's time consuming, error prone, and learning the proper way to use the two different programs that patch xcom -- and one apparently only patches the window's version -- is a very high bar of entry).

Well the Xcom Windows version is pretty much a custom-built emulator wrapped around the original, and it's even more bug-prone, so it's probably not as easy as it seems.

Plus without the original code, all people can do is keep poking at the original executables from the outside in an attempt to find and fix the bugs, a challenge on its own, so they probably can't focus much on making it completely user-friendly. But hopefully projects like this will change that.

1794

Programming / Re: Compiling OpenXCOM on Mac OS X

« on: June 02, 2010, 12:53:13 pm »

I got it all working now. Seemed a bit slow, but that might just be crappy university Macs at work...

And as long as it works on typical Mac systems I'm happy, I just wanted to make sure it ran on more than the latest brand new updated state-of-the-art Mac OS X or something... thanks for clearing that up. I'll put up my Xcode project soon for any other Mac users, although it's still not my platform of choice so you can keep maintaining and testing it.


P.S. The README in the SVN is meant for developers, so not sure if it's worth including in builds, it might just confuse users.

1795

Programming / Re: Compiling OpenXCOM on Mac OS X

« on: May 31, 2010, 04:38:44 am »

I finally had a chance to get on a Mac and try this myself. Here's some issues I ran into:

Running your build: The application only includes the SDL.framework, it's missing SDL_mixer.framework and SDL_gfx.framework.

Compiling it myself: I got the application and all the frameworks set up fine. My only problem is SDL_gfx. I figured out how to compile the source into a framework with Xcode, my only problem is it's stuck building only for "i386" architecture, even though Active Architectures Only is disabled and all the available Architectures seem to be listed. Any idea what the problem might be?

Also, regarding this step:

One more thing  - go up the list in this tab, select "All Configurations" from the "Configuration" drop-down menu, and corresponding to "Base SDK" key choose "Mac OS X 10.6" value.

I set it to "Mac OS X 10.4" and that seemed to work fine. If that affects backwards compatibility, I'd like if it worked on as many versions as possible.


Everything else seems fine though. I might commit the Xcode project once this is done to save all those steps.

1796

Offtopic / Re: X-com-reloaded - another project similar to openxcom?

« on: May 27, 2010, 03:07:35 am »

Damn michal, you have quite the skill for finding fresh new X-Com projects. I've finally had time to properly look into this project, code and all, and I must say it's kinda scary.

Even though neither of us has ever heard of or contacted the other before, and have developed our projects completely independently, there are a whole lot of similarities between the two, both in goal and in code. Funny old world.

Sadly I can't seem to find any contact methods either, although someone seems to have posted there about it: https://code.google.com/p/x-com-reloaded/issues/detail?id=1#c0

1797

Programming / Re: Compiling OpenXCOM on Mac OS X

« on: May 24, 2010, 09:51:02 pm »

Someone posted this on another forum:

When I attempted to run Openxcom, it gave an error saying I might not have the right OSX for it. I have 10.6.3, do you know what version do I need to make it work?

It seems I've left a build option "active architectures only" for that previous build. And since my working arch is x86_64 - that quite possibly may be the culprit. I'm going to make a new build with more compatibility turned on. However, there is a file missing in the trunk - https://openxcom.ninex.info/index.php/2010/05/random-numbers-suck/#comments and thus I'm stuck at this point until it reemerges there 

I have saved the missing file.

1798

Programming / Re: Compiling OpenXCOM on Mac OS X

« on: May 24, 2010, 12:41:08 pm »

Someone posted this on another forum:

When I attempted to run Openxcom, it gave an error saying I might not have the right OSX for it. I have 10.6.3, do you know what version do I need to make it work?

1799

Offtopic / Re: Other games worthy of engine recreation

« on: May 19, 2010, 12:07:41 pm »

Games like that are a bitch to reproduce I imagine, although I am particularly fond of MOM.

1800

Programming / Re: Compiling OpenXCOM on Mac OS X

« on: May 19, 2010, 03:47:19 am »

Thanks for the help, I've put up your build (can't try it myself though) and link to the instructions on the website if that's ok with you.

Go to SCM > Configure SCM Repositories > + and enter a name (I chose "OpenXcom") and type (Subversion) for your new repo. Now the tricky part!!! Add THIS address to the URL field -
https:https://openxcom.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/openxcom. For some reason the URL given by SupSuper didn't quite work - showed an error.

I've corrected the link now, you could've also used https:https://openxcom.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/openxcom/trunk/ to avoid the subfolder.