Topics

1

Suggestions / The unused? PSI button

« on: January 04, 2013, 11:48:30 am »

Hi, I've added code for the PSI button:
https://www.ufopaedia.org/index.php?title=SPICONS.DAT

to show when you are under control of an alien that has psionic skill. You can click it to use it's "built-in" psionic attack, since aliens don't carry psi-amps. Only panic attack, since it doesn't  show an action menu to choose between mind control and panic. So I've chosen panic as it is probably the least powerful.

But while doing it, I was having questions. Why wasn't this in the original? Was it for balancing reasons? I think aliens were not able to use your psi amp when they mind control an xcom soldier, but that's a guess too... so for that reason they might have decided not letting you use alien psionic powers. Or was it technical, story-wise or perhaps just not enough time to fully implement and test it....


PS. it's also useful when playing as alien side on a hot-seat or multiplayer battle, but in that case the choice between panic and mind control is probably a must.

2

Programming / openxcom3D

« on: August 04, 2012, 01:14:01 pm »

Isn't it april 1st yet? Damn, otherwise I could trick the people saying that the 3D version of the battlescape is starting to work:

(credits to Kaki for the model)

3

Offtopic / Company of heroes

« on: May 12, 2012, 12:20:16 pm »

For the people that haven't played CoH yet, it's this weekend on steam for 1,59€, a great RTS experience for that price I'm picking it up anyway, maybe I can get some inspiration for new features in the openxcom battlescape :p

For the fans it's also nice to know there is a new company of heroes coming up. It will have an amazing physics engine that simulates the effects of snow as never seen in an RTS, which is nice when the missions will be in eastern europe winters.

4

Offtopic / Heavy Plasma Bolt heading for earth!

« on: January 24, 2012, 01:16:35 pm »

I hope some people here are near the earth poles to witness the fascinating effect of this morning's M9-class solar flare that will be streaming past Earth. On the NOAA scale of radiation storms, this one ranks S3, which means it could, e.g., cause isolated reboots of computers onboard Earth-orbiting satellites.
I could probably witness northern light here in Belgium too, it's too bad the sky will be very cloudy

source: https://spaceweather.com/

picture in attachement was from a smaller(!) solar flare hitting us last Saturday, viewed from Tromsø, Norway.

5

Suggestions / 3D explosions

« on: January 13, 2012, 11:47:37 am »

I always found it curious how explosions are confined to one level. I'm suggesting (to myself) making an option that the explosion affects a sphere-shaped area. Also for smoke grenades (smoke being blocked by floors and ceilings of course). Incendiary probably has not a lot of spreading upwards, as it is more affected by gravity, so I'm leaving that as it is.

6

Suggestions / Small medi-kit / first-aid

« on: December 12, 2011, 12:06:56 pm »

A nice addition to the game's equipment list would probably be a small medikit, which does not need to be manufactured but can be bought. And 2 of these small ones should be in your starting equipment of your first skyranger.
This can be very interesting for early missions, because you probably want to allocate your manufacturing to more interesting stuff first, like laser weapons. Or worse, you start a mission, but don't have a medikit produced yet.

Because it can be very frustrating in your first mission seeing one of your best units bleed to death from a fatal wound and nothing you can do to save him. (One of the early lessons in game development is: the first experience in the game should never be frustrating)

The kit itself takes only 1 inventoryslot (instead of 2), but has less charges of healing,stimulant,pain killers. I was thinking 3, 4 or 5 charges.

7

Translations / Dutch translation

« on: September 05, 2011, 10:20:57 pm »

I started the horrible Dutch translation 

8

Programming / Custom blitter (need some people to test)

« on: August 28, 2011, 12:31:31 pm »

Hi,
since build 08_27 a custom blitter has been implemented for both rescaling the screen and for blitting shaded battlescape tiles. Two places where the "standard" SDL methods proved to be a slowdown.
This should normally result in higher FPS (and less RAM usage in battlescape due to disabling of caching).

In the included screenshot you see the effect on my pc (it's about 150% FPS gain) and 4,2 Mb less ram used.

I would like to know if the same improvements are visible on other systems. I hope it is not going to slow down on any kind of configuration  and no new bugs are introduced.

9

Suggestions / "grey" fog of war

« on: August 26, 2011, 11:48:24 pm »

I was having fun with a custom blit function - it gives the opportunity to have very fast effects on the color per pixel - almost like a pixel shader.
Blitting certain tiles in a grey-scale color for example. See screenshot.
It could serve a purpose some time?

10

Suggestions / opengl

« on: August 17, 2011, 06:47:06 pm »

This is not really a suggestion, as I'm already working on it (in my own sandbox not in the official openxcom repository): people that are on IRC already know all of this, they are already totally bored with my rambling.
But I just wanted the forums opinion or comments too, regarding the implementation of it.

So the idea is to keep support for SDL, Pallettes, 8bit graphics, software blitting, 320x200 - the oldskool stuff.
But on top of that have the option for OpenGL, truecolor graphics, hardware blitting and higher resolutions.

Apart from the differences in intialisation, support for both opengl/sdl is done by abstracting the Surface class and creating two new implementations: SDLSurface and OGLSurface. The second one will load the surfaces as textures into video memory: blitting (and shading) surfaces will be done in video memory. (when it makes sense, because video memory has its limits)
New blitting functions, text & simple geometry rendering functions will have to be written in openGL versions.

I got the basic lines and pieces of code for the most part. I must give credit to the FIFE engine for it, as I take a lot of inspiration from there.
For testing I'm currently using UFO:TTS's graphics (which I converted to PNG, because I wanted to make sure SDL could handle that format also).

On the geoscape part we got another fun new toy to play with: drawing teh globe in opengl. In theory it would dramatically simplify the globe code (also the shading of the day/night cycle, which could be done simply by adding a rotating light to the scene), while dramatically increase the fps.
However I did not try anything on that front yet... it's just theory and ideas.

11

Suggestions / other psionic powers

« on: May 23, 2011, 09:15:56 am »

I wonder if there would be room in x-com (later stage) for other -well known- psionic powers:

- psionic healing: increase morale level of a friendly target, slightly increase health and chance on healing a fatal wound
- psionic intuition: can reveal enemy location(s)
- psionic translocation: teleport to any location on the map

I know they could be very powerful and unbalance the game a lot, but I was just brainstorming :p I'm always thinking of suggestions that hardly cost anything in terms of development, and nothing in terms of adding graphics

12

Suggestions / variable bullet speed

« on: May 20, 2011, 10:00:42 am »

The autoshot bullet speed is now a little faster and the aimed shot bullet speed a little slower than the normal bullet speed.
I thought it would be some nice feature to test and see if it enhances the gameplay.

The idea behind it is to match the length of the action more with the amout of TUs. So with an autoshot you really get the feeling of 3 rapid shots wildly fired, and with aimed shot you get the feeling it costs time and it is calculated.

(enabled/disable by options in the future)

13

Suggestions / The weapon upgrade idea.

« on: February 15, 2011, 12:45:39 pm »

I always found that the conventional weapons (pistol, grenade, rifle, auto-cannon, heavy cannon, rocket launcher, stun rod, grenade, proximity grenade) became obsolete too fast in the game. It just feels more rewarding to me to kill an alien with my own technology rather than theirs.

So I was thinking about weapon upgrades, it's a system used in a lot of RTS games. Probably because it is not so hard to implement: the item graphics stay exactly the same, only some of the item stats are better than the normal item.
Visually it can be sufficient to add just a little icon on the weapon graphic to indicate this is an enhanced version of an item. The name can have a certain prefix like "Enhanced".

Of course these upgrades should be researched, preferably at some point in the tree that is on the same level of alien weapons. For example: you have the option to research plasma rifles or to research a rifle upgrade which makes the conventional rifle a nice alternative for the plasma rifle.
The upgrades are then manufactured using the base weapon as material (your conventional weapons can be recycled) + alien materials.

Upgrades can increase damage, lower time unit cost, increase accuracy or maybe add some new side-effects or firing modes.
And to take it even further you have upgrades to ammo too...

Examples:
- the stun-gas hi explosive pack - set timer high enough to evacuate the area
- armour piercing rifle ammo  - don't even try unloading a rifle on a sectopod without this upgrade
- rocket launcher with guided rockets - almost like the blaster launcher, but less destructive
- auto-cannon autoshot fires 6 rounds instead of 3 - from ta-ta-ta to tatatatatata
- auto-cannon ammo rounds with twice the number of bullets in it - let it rain bullets
- heavy cannon that acts as a high power launcher for ANY grenade that will detonate/activate on impact

14

Suggestions / RuleUnitStats

« on: December 16, 2010, 01:20:48 pm »

Hi SupSuper,
Just thinking, I see that the starting stats of soldiers are hardcoded. Are they supposed to go into some kind of RuleUnitStats?
Something like that could be used to create aliens on the battlescape too.
For each race, rank and difficulty level, those starting stats differ.

15

Suggestions / externalization of small bitmaps that are now hardcoded

« on: November 17, 2010, 03:28:10 pm »

Probably something that is interesting to add somewhere on the way: the hardcoded bitmaps (for eg. drawing a base, ufo, craft on the globe and the recently added small number font, or the yellow arrow in the battlescape) may be externalized by BMP(or PNG) files?
To further increase the flexibility/moddability of the game.