Messages

61

Programming / "Strafe" sideways move

« on: December 23, 2012, 05:08:41 pm »

I pushed a fairly small change that implements a "strafing" or sideways movement, as follows:

- Requires option "strafe: true" in options.cfg
- Hold down Ctrl-key when clicking
- Only strafe to adjacent tiles, in front or beside but not behind
- Large units (tanks) cannot strafe
- Strafing during a change of z not allowed

Strafing increases TU cost by +1. This seems reasonable, as usually you will have already paid the TU cost of turning to face the wall before strafing sideways into a corridor.

Graphically, the units "moonwalk" while scooting sideways. It looks neat to me.

I spent a long time trying to get backwards-strafing to work, but the units would exit through the front of the tile, teleport backwards, and enter through the back of the tile behind. I turned off strafing backwards, but eventually I think it can be done by fudging the "frame" count passed to the draw routine.

I tried very hard to follow the instructions provided by radius75, but I still ended up with the change on "master" instead of on my branch. If you can't find the changes and want them, they are very minor and I can post them here. I also tried the changes integrated into the latest Cydonia changes from Warboy, and they work just fine. I don't know why (or rather, I do know why and don't know how) to post the changes pre-integrated with the latest Cydonia work.

62

Offtopic / Re: 1st Jan, 1999

« on: December 19, 2012, 03:15:35 pm »

Yep, that's right, just an excuse to crank up your favorite version of xcom every day, and play for between 10 seconds and an hour, and maybe blog what's going on.

63

Suggestions / Re: (after 1.0) Sun and Moon

« on: December 18, 2012, 12:29:07 am »

A moon base as a staging area or stepping stone is a very good idea. Could require a less-advanced craft than Cydonia.

64

Offtopic / 1st Jan, 1999

« on: December 15, 2012, 09:37:20 pm »

It might be fun for a group of us to start a new XCOM game, starting in a couple of weeks on Jan 1st, and playing through an actual game day (or thereabouts) per day. Just like it's 1999 all over again. It could be XCOM or TFTD, or whatever, just start your own game and put in progress reports.

65

Open Feedback / Re: Promo Stream

« on: December 15, 2012, 04:36:32 pm »

I would probably watch a play-through. Schedule-wize, it would be more likely I would watch a youtube than a live cast.

66

Offtopic / Re: shocking news: XCom: Enemy Unknown by Firaxis

« on: December 02, 2012, 03:32:04 pm »

Some stats on shots in the new XCOM 

https://sinepost.wordpress.com/2012/11/11/is-xcom-truly-random/

That's an interesting post, and eventually we ought to consider implementing "streakiness", which would allow some control of "randomness". The basic idea (like having a hot QB) is that when you start hitting you tend to keep hitting, and vice-versa. So when your QB turns cold, you don't go for long shots, you start again with high-percentage shots and try to rebuild your streak.

67

Programming / Re: Battlescape Save/Load speedup and file shrink

« on: November 28, 2012, 02:04:29 am »

I have no idea if the change is up there, or what the hell. If I did something stupid, which seems likely, let me know. I was hoping to reuse my fork or maybe my branch, but should I delete everything and start from nul for every change?

68

Programming / Battlescape Save/Load speedup and file shrink

« on: November 28, 2012, 01:08:05 am »

Battlescape saves contain much repetitive data, e.g. smoke is almost always 0, most mapData contains -1, -1, -1.

The patch affects only tile.cpp, and checks the data it is about to save. For each tile, it elides data from the save if it is "predictable". Equally, during load, each tile checks whether a value node exists before trying to load it; if the node is not available it inserts this "predictable" value instead.

My battlescape saves have gone from 601kb to 347kb, and my load times (oldish i7 laptop with SSD) from about 60 seconds to 45 seconds.

The patch is backward-compatible with existing saves, but don't overwrite your old saves if you want to be able to remove the patch.

69

Programming / Re: A nubb compiles and runs it

« on: November 24, 2012, 08:03:23 pm »

I can't imagine why I didn't notice the precompiled dependencies link, that is a lot quicker than struggling with yaml or cmake.

70

Programming / A nubb compiles and runs it

« on: November 24, 2012, 04:21:41 pm »

This is not targeted at the Warboys of the world. I got stuck at various points following the instructions, I wanted to pass along some notes in case others get stuck at the same places.

1. Endless trouble with yaml-cpp. It needs a dll and a lib, if you just import into a new VS "project from existing code" I couldn't get it to make the lib even though the import lib switch was set. You are much better off using CMake as suggested by yaml, EXCEPT don't create a "build" subdir, just run

cmake -G "Visual Studio 9 2008" -DBUILD_SHARED_LIBS=ON

right inside the directory where you extracted. Then, if you still have runtime issues, do a Release (not Debug) build on yaml, I could not get the sucker to run as a Debug build.

2. When you finally have it running, you are likely to get yaml errors about various keys not found. For instance, I saw "inDogfight", "interceptionOrder etc keys not found. This is because you will have pulled down source code which does not always have matching elements in Xcom1Ruleset.rul. The specifics change rapidly, because development is proceeding, but basically you have to perform a source search for the offending key, it will be in a line that looks like this:

    node["inDogfight"] >> _inDogfight;

Look at that line, and nearby you will probably find similar lines. Now grep through the rul file, find examples of the similar lines, and paste in a new line to handle the missing node.

71

Offtopic / Re: shocking news: XCom: Enemy Unknown by Firaxis

« on: January 06, 2012, 10:47:53 pm »

This is good news. It wouldn't take much to refresh X-COM, but the temptation is to do too much. A graphics refresh, a bit more in the research tree, some "optional" paths to further improve replayability, multi-player collaborative and competitive (multi-player competitive mode with turn time limits would be great). But start throwing out the turn-based format or make it a first-person action shooter, and it becomes just another Quake clone.

72

Open Feedback / appreciation thread

« on: December 19, 2011, 10:43:37 pm »

I downloaded the stable 0.3 version with low expectations. I must say how surprisingly far along you guys have gotten with the development. I wanted to express my appreciation at the hard work put in to get to this point.

The geoscape, base operations, the tactical screen, and infopedia are (to a casual observer) indistinguishable from the original, and they are tied together with all the appropriate in-game dialogs instead of just being roughed-in prototype modes. Installation was a snap, I unzipped the package and then copied in the data files from my X-Com, and bingo it was running.

I am excited about the potential for customization and gameplay options once this project has reached 1.0 status. I sure people have suggested things like internet connectivity for cooperative or competitive play, changes to the research tree with new buildable goodies (I want to build a battleship!), high resolution displays (perhaps interpolated using the existing data files), new alien AI rulesets.

I strongly encourage X-Com fans to stay current with this site, as I now have no doubt that this project will be completed.