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Topics - Hythlodaeus

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1
Offtopic / The Battle for Wesnoth is looking for contributors
« on: September 07, 2021, 08:31:26 pm »

Hello everyone,

Today I am sharing an appeal by The Battle for Wesnoth development team, who is currently looking for new developers and contributors. We have decided to bring forth this appeal to other open source game projects in hopes of fostering collaboration between different community projects so we can trade skills, knowledge and benefit mutually from this.

As most of you might know, The Battle for Wesnoth is a turn-based strategy game project first started in 2003. The game is entirely open source (GNU GPLv2) with artwork licensed under CC-BY-SA. You can download the game entirely for free via Steam or on our website.

Presently we are looking for:

  • C++ programmers for core programming tasks
  • Lua programmers
  • Scripters willing to learn WML internal script language
  • Python programmers for helping with external tools
  • Pixel artists
  • Playtesters
  • A video editor that can help create a trailer for the incoming stable release
  • Other miscellaneous artists and programmers

For anyone interested in applying, you can read more details on the official announcement posted on the Wesnoth forums. You can also join us at our official Discord.

Our best regards to the OpenXCom community and have a nice day!

2
Playthroughs / Kikoskia is streaming OpenXCom
« on: November 04, 2019, 01:33:53 am »
Kikoskia is an LPer with one of the most famous original X-Com LPs on youtube. He has recently joined Twitch and began streaming Ufo Defense using X-Com every wednesday at 19:00 GMT. You can find his channel here.

https://www.twitch.tv/kikoskia

Also for those who missed it, Kiko paid us a visit this Sunday by briefly joining SupSuper for the extra life charity stream! You may find the video in SupSuper's channel, around 17:52:00.

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/502984556

3
Resources / custom geoscape background
« on: September 12, 2015, 04:14:34 am »
Robin, you're a kickass artist, so i'd like to ask you one  thing: would you consider creating expanded geoscape space backgrounds for UFO:EU and TFTD so we can use it when running the game on higher resolutions instead mirroring the same one over and over like OXC currently does? This is perhaps the last major graphics gap missing in the game, and one that would definitely improve the geoscape aesthetics when playing on hi-res, which a lot of players do.

(For the reference, I mean this)


4
Troubleshooting / Unable to compile on debian
« on: April 03, 2014, 09:43:46 pm »
Odd error while compiling. Says i'm missing OpenGL as a depency, but I have all respective mesa libs installed, methinks. Here's the log:

https://pastebin.com/XgCcnic4

Any help please?

5
Translations / Dont forget to upvote your own translations!
« on: December 25, 2013, 11:39:02 pm »
Because GetLocalization isn't flawless, always remember to upvote your translations to make sure they in 1st place in the list. Only the 1st rated translations are selected to integrate the translation file, so upvoting is important. And do it not once, but TWICE. There seems to be a small bug with getlocalization recognizing votes, so always make sure your translation is in 1st place after you vote. If somehow it doesn't work, ask someone else to upvote it for you. I'll personally try to upvote as many changes as I detect that aren't automatically sent to 1st place.

6
Work In Progress / A proposal: Mod translation project
« on: December 19, 2013, 03:30:36 pm »
There are plenty of mods already available for OXC, but given that it's more or less unwieldy for translators to download and translate them individually, I suggest we come up with a unified translation script that is frequently updated with all mod entries which include the project. We could similarly use GetLocalization for something like this.

What do you think of this idea?

7
Suggestions / [CORE] Special Armor Resistances
« on: November 18, 2013, 03:00:46 pm »
Both Power and Flying Suits are fireproof and smokeproof, but there's nothing in ufopedia that notifies the player of that. Why not adding two simple fields in the ufopedia article? For example:


8
Suggestions / [FORUM] Could we have some section rules/tags post here?
« on: November 18, 2013, 02:58:22 am »
Sometimes reading this forum is a bit a of mess, with people posting both mod suggestions and core feature suggestions at the same time. A rules post with some tag suggestions could help tidy this place a bit. Works great on the Mods section, after all!

9
Having the additional TFTD buttons is nice, however I can't stop thinking the "Expend remaining TUs" button is a hackish and potentially harmful way of making sure your soldier doesn't fire in the enemy turn. Here are my reasons why:

1 - It's not reversible. Once you spend all TUs, you're done. If an alien gets spotted after that, you can no longer move that soldier away from his line of fire or use him to snipe the alien from a long distance.
2 - It forces players to only apply it at the end of the turn, which is a direct consequence of 1 eventually leading to the aforementioned problems, if you spot an enemy target.
3 - It requires a fail-safe. Just two days ago, I was playing TFTD and I swear I couldn't figure out how to activate the expend remaining TUs button. I only learned how by reading the latest nightly log. I take it this isn't exactly good for new players either.
4 - It's still prone to accidents. Yes, it's RMB activated, but that doesn't mean it's entirely foolproof. An accidental RMB click could still throw your entire soldier's turn away.

For these problems I'd like to suggest a different solution: replace the Expend Remaining TUs function with a hold fire function, that instead of depleting the unit of TUs, forbids it to fire during the enemy turn. The pros of this function are as it follows:

. It would be reversible. A simple toggle on/off, like an reaction fire button is all you'd need. If you find an alien that you wanted to shoot after all, you can still do it.
. Allows more tactical flexibility. The player doesn't have to do it exclusively in the end of the turn to avoid regretful situations.
. Doesn't require a fail-safe and it's accident proof.

The only issue I can think of for this, would be that this would have to be a personal toggle, instead of a universal one, like the rest of the reaction buttons currently are. This means that you would individually pick which soldiers would be forbidden to fire, kinda how you already do it for depleting TUs, since if it was universal, it would mean all soldiers would be forbidden to fire. The switch would be reset on all soldiers at the beginning of a new turn. The button should be coloured differently (maybe brown) to mark it's individual nature.

*EDIT* One easier way to implement this to make it, would be to make the button work as in "Expend all remaining TUs at the end of the turn". This would allow the function to remain the same while being completely reversible, although it would still need to be an individual soldier toggle that would be reset at the beginning of the turn.

10
Released Mods / [UI] Amiga/PSX Fonts
« on: November 08, 2013, 03:48:07 pm »
Took me ages to finish this, but I'm finally done. I've successfully recreated and expanded the fontset from the Amiga and PSX versions of X-COM for use in OXC.

For those who have no idea of what I'm talking about, the Amiga/PSX version of Enemy Unknown featured a fontset that was considerably different from the PC versions fonts. These fonts were originally part of the (not-so-pretty) Amiga 500 port, but were later incorporated in the Amiga 1200 and PSX ports as well, with various changes and modifications. They were essentially more heavily stylized fonts with bigger, more readable characters, but also sharper contrast, and no anti-aliasing. They were used to give a more serious look to the UI, but weren't without their own flaws; whereas earlier implementations suffered from a limited character set, later ones had poor readability, in brighter backgrounds, due to the lack of proper shading.

What I've done here is not a 1:1 recreation, but rather a polished version of the best aspects of every version of this fontset. Aside from no longer suffering from poor readability, I've also expanded it to include both Cyrillic and Greek alphabet characters, as well as its respective diacritics. All diacritical marks were also optimized to be perfectly distinguishable even in the small set.

I'd appreciate everyone to give this a try, especially if you're either Greek or from a country which uses a Cyrillic-based alphabet, as I really want to make sure I made no big mistakes.

Here's a small preview, if you're curious:

English:



Greek:



Russian:



Romanian:



Portuguese:




HOW TO INSTALL:

Download AmigaFontsMod1.4 from this post. Extract the "AmigaFonts" folder from the archive, and place it in ./OpenXCom/standard folder. Start the game, and load the mod from the mod tab.

I'd like to thank the people of the English Amiga Boards for helping me rip the needed characters from the Amiga 1200 version,
and all the folks in #openxcom who helped with the testing.

Hope you all enjoy this mod.

11
Suggestions / Saving some more space
« on: September 01, 2013, 09:20:33 pm »
I previously made this thread about mashing some fields together in the manufacture menu in order to save some space. Turns out it worked quite well, and I thought the same could be done to a lot of other fields, in order to make the various basescape menus a lot less busy. Here are a few examples of fields that could easily be mashed together into a */* field:

Research menu: mash scientists allocated/available into a single field


Manufacture menu: same thing. Mash engineers allocated/available into a single field


Equip craft menu: mash space available/used into a single field


Assign crew menu: same as previous mash space available/used into a single field



Any other ideas on how to improve the readability of menus?

12
Suggestions / Re-arranging the Manufacture Menu
« on: June 08, 2013, 02:47:15 pm »
As a translator, I always found the X-COM UI to be troublesome and hard to deal with, when it comes to adjust translated text strings to particular menus. One of the most troublesome menus I've found so far is the Manufacture menu mostly because it features too much uncompressed information for its own sake:



Even in the original English, the various fields for each item seem to fit poorly. This is even worse in translated versions were the "Engineers Allocated" field eats up part of the item's name, as shown here:





The funny thing is that even Microprose realized how poorly structured how this menu was, resulting in a lot of information cut from it, in TFTD:



However, I feel the TFTD version of this menu cut too much information, forcing the player to open each item individually, in order to check how many engineers are attributed, and how many units have currently been produced.
In the meantime, I believe I have a small solution to save some space without sacrificing any information: mashing the "Units Produced" and "Total to Produce" fields into a single */* field, so it would be something like:

Production
2/100

This way, the player knows exactly how much units are left, and it saves a truckload of space that will surely make translated versions of this menu a lot more appealing.

Aside from this, does anyone else have any idea on how to save some space in the Manufactures menu?

13
Offtopic / Cannon Fodder remake - WE NEED HELP!
« on: March 27, 2013, 05:53:44 pm »
Hello folks.

Many of the retrogamers around here may be familiar with Sensible Software's wonderful wargame Cannon Fodder. We've recently secured the source code of an unofficial SDL fan-port made for the nintendo wii by Foxysofts, and while the gameplay code seems to be all neat and tight, this port unfortunately uses sprite and music rips and includes them directly within the package, which is borderline illegal, considering the game is still being actively sold on Good Old Games.

I've been collaborating with some of the folks of the GCW Zero crew, who have shown interest in using this code to create a universal open source port that would work with the original and legally acquired gamedata the same way OpenXcom does, in order to have it run both on their handheld and practically every other device imaginable. The problem is, we're having trouble reverse engineering the original PC data which all appears to be stored in some sort of compressed .dat file.

Given the general enthusiasm for retrogaming in this board, we were wondering if anyone would like to give us a hand with this task. We need to know how we can incorporate the original Cannon Fodder data with this engine so we're able to deliver a universal port. Would anyone around here be interested in helping us?

14
Suggestions / Building damage = Score/cash penalty
« on: March 06, 2013, 02:33:20 pm »
Not sure if this has already been suggested, but for an enhanced game feature, how about having scenario destruction having an impact on your mission score, or better yet, forcing you to pay straight cash reparations, so as to make things a little more challenging in the later game? I feel this would make the player avoid abusing weapons like high explosives and blaster bombs, unless they're really necessary, or when it's "safe" to use them (like on pure wilderness maps).

15
Offtopic / Freesynd 0.7!
« on: March 05, 2013, 12:58:28 am »
Probably one of the projects I've been following as religiously as OpenXcom is Freesynd, but boy do they take time between releases.

https://freesynd.sourceforge.net/

For those who don't know, Freesynd is to Syndicate what OpenXcom is to the original X-COM: an open source engine re-implementation. I love the original Syndicate, but I also acknowledge it has always been a deeply flawed and partially incomplete game, with shitty AI, unpolished gameplay and, for some reason, no interior graphics whatsoever. The sheer brutality and fast pacing of Syndicate is what made it so great, along with the awesome industrial cyberpunk setting. But now, fortunately, there's Freesynd, restoring the hopes that someone, some day, might actually pick it up and use it to rebuild Syndicate as the game it always deserved to be.

The aim of the current team is to have everything up and running at 1.0 and only then start adding improvements, but since they can take YEARS before releasing an update, it might still be a long time before we see a proper advancement of classic Syndicate. As of 0.7, there's still a lot to be  fixed and implemented as the game still isn't completable at all. And remember kids, you need and original copy of Syndicate, (which can be purchased here, for what I consider to be a more or less unfair price) in order to play Freesynd.

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