Messages

61

Fan-Stuff / Re: what happened to "The Two Sides" art work?

« on: January 14, 2013, 05:53:20 pm »

But to answer OP's question more specifically " what happened to all that art" - you can still download it, if you search the interwebs good enough And a lot of xcom fans have it on their disk.

62

Fan-Stuff / Re: what happened to "The Two Sides" art work?

« on: January 14, 2013, 10:18:30 am »

I have had a chat with the ufo tts artwork people on their IRC channel right before the closed TTS down, don't remember the conversation in detail, but they didn't have the intention of permitting their artwork to be used in other projects.

63

Suggestions / Re: Battlescape Request : Who Died?

« on: January 14, 2013, 01:15:40 am »

I think it's similar to this request as well: https://openxcom.org/forum/index.php/topic,285.0.html

64

Suggestions / Re: Increase area on the screen in Battlegrounds

« on: January 13, 2013, 04:34:30 pm »

There are votes to add soldiers stats on the inventory screen, others want to make the "ground grid" larger, so you need less scrolling when you have a lot of available equipment.
Now I read just stretching the screen and a vote for multiple soldiers on the screen...

It just is an example of how hard it is to make a proper design for a higher resolution game, you can have endless discussions about just one screen, but there are dozens of screens out there. Enlarging the battlefield to show more tiles is peanuts, it's all the screens that is the biggest work.

Unless you keep it simple, as volutar says, only the battlescape map and geoscape globe in a higher resolution, and just stretch everything else.

65

Playthroughs / Re: Let's Play Is LIVE!

« on: January 12, 2013, 10:54:49 pm »

We could add a memorial screen as in the new xcom

66

Suggestions / Re: Increase area on the screen in Battlegrounds

« on: January 12, 2013, 07:56:19 pm »

what happens if you go into inventory view? can you make a screenshot of that? I'm just curious, and a bit lazy to try it myself 

67

Programming / Re: Battlescape development

« on: January 11, 2013, 10:00:11 pm »

I've put this little project on hold until we move to the new yaml cpp API I think, because I fail to see how the loading from binary nodes automatically base64 decodes using the old API. The saving (and base64 encoding) works fine, but the at loading I'm stuck.

68

Suggestions / Re: Increase area on the screen in Battlegrounds

« on: January 11, 2013, 09:14:18 pm »

someone is interested in creating a patch to make the game fully functional at this resolution?

Well, I'm certainly interested, as I said, I started it already. And it's probably easy to make it work quickly by hacking and code some ugly stuff in the battlescape, but I'd vote for an elegant solution, which works over the entire game, so including geoscape and every screen in the game. We need to carefully identify what needs to be stretched and what not and where all GUI stuff is positioned.

69

Suggestions / Re: Increase area on the screen in Battlegrounds

« on: January 11, 2013, 02:40:55 pm »

The reason it somewhat works in the battlescape is because I've once started to implement flexible screen resolutions in the battlescape to make this possible, but as you noticed it is far from complete.

70

Programming / Re: Battlescape development

« on: January 10, 2013, 09:30:56 pm »

thanks for the hint.
So if you save a file and transfer it to a system with other endianness and try to load it there, that'll not work with that casting/pointer thing. So I prefer the one with the shifts, so you convert using same endianness?

71

Programming / Re: Battlescape development

« on: January 09, 2013, 10:46:57 am »

The rest is still text, but they are a lot smaller. The yaml library automatically encodes binary to base64.

edit: having lots of troubles getting it working however. I'm not very experienced with binary, for example how to convert a series of unsigned char * to int's or vice versa. I'm doing things like buffer[ptr] + buffer[ptr+1] << 8 + buffer[ptr+2] << 16 + buffer[ptr+3] << 24 ... don't know if it's best practice. The version I currently have is constantly crashing on loading, so there must be things wrong.

72

Programming / Re: Battlescape development

« on: January 08, 2013, 11:16:43 pm »

Alienfoods' code change has been already implemented by Warboy in the master branch. My savegame with alienfoods' improvement is now 422kb and using my binary method further reduced to 161kb + the save/load time is reduced even more, because instead of a yaml key/value pair for each tile, the binary blob with all tiles is just 1 key/value pair.

73

Programming / Re: Battlescape development

« on: January 08, 2013, 04:44:24 pm »

It seems some people are saving their game during battle, I can advice to save and load as much as possible during geoscape only, and try to be a man and don't save/load during battle :p

But anyhow, for those people that still insist to save during battle, I'm (again) (thinking of) saving the battlescape terrain in a binary way.
Because of a current battlescape savegame, that's let's say 18000 lines, there are 12000 lines for the terrain only. It's a bit crazy to have it described in plain text. It's a waste of CPU time and Harddisk space and serves no real purpose, as it's almost as difficult to manually edit as it would be a binary blob.

So I've decided on the width of the fields, they are unsigned and as follows: 32bit for the index, (8bits for the terrain ID + 16 bits for the map data id ) x 4 terrain objects, 8 bits for smoke, 8 bits for fire, 8 bits for discovered flag (room for 4 player and 4 alien discovered flags, if that ever might be of any use)

On top of that the "nodelink" concept will be thrown in the bin. The distance between nodes and whether or not they can be reached are calculated on the fly - the precalculated values are nowhere used, but they take up 1500 lines in the savegame file and a bunch of useless objects in memory.

But in the mean time, save/load as much as possible in geoscape only 

74

Suggestions / Re: Character portraits on soldier stat screens, or gender field

« on: January 06, 2013, 10:22:45 am »

Countries are not that difficult to quickly translate. If you wanted to add soldier background info like in JA2: https://pcmedia.gamespy.com/pc/image/article/121/1219560/00_1330395279.jpg
now, that's something else

Also, "gender" shouldn't that be clear from the picture, as it's another field you could remove to make place for more important info.
In OP you said: "either add a gender field, or a character portrait in the soldier stat screen" - in your latest mockup you have added both.

75

Suggestions / Re: Character portraits on soldier stat screens, or gender field

« on: January 05, 2013, 10:43:28 pm »

And once we have a higher resolution you can add things like "country of origin", "years in xcom duty", "background story",...