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Messages - zee_ra

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1
The X-Com Files / Re: The X-Com Files - 3.4: Daggers for Hire
« on: August 19, 2024, 08:03:28 am »
I don't understand the problem at all. By clicking on the weapon slot you can easily check what goes there. Why would anything else be needed? Maybe if you have the Little Bird, but not a single heavy weapon, but how likely is that?

Is there a new feature that limits the types of engagements that the Humvee could participate in?  I thought that the vehicles could attack anything, including even airplanes and helicopters, as well as UFOs (hypothetically, since there's an issue of matching speeds, but it would work with hunter UFOs most likely).

2
The X-Com Files / Re: [submod] X-Com Files: Air Raids (2.0.0)
« on: August 19, 2024, 08:00:43 am »
With a good enough air defense, is it possible to prevent any damage from occurring to the base?  Would it make a difference if the air defense is based on kinetic cannons, lasers, plasma, or blaster rockets?

3
OXCE Suggestions OK / Re: [SUGGESTION]Custom Hangar/Craft types
« on: August 19, 2024, 12:55:40 am »


Alternative approach to what I implemented is simple brute-force: let modder assign, what crafts exactly can be housed in the specific hangar and push onto player the decision which craft will be put in which hangar and which other slots to block.

Could you please elaborate in detail on this?  Does the player make decisions to allocate crafts to hangars?

If the decision to allocate is automated, then we are back to your counter-example.


4
The X-Com Files / Re: the frustration about base size
« on: August 18, 2024, 08:53:29 am »
I love the mod but the size of the bases is one of my biggest frustration
You only have 36 squares for each base in a 6x6 grid
There's many things we will not build because we lack space
- Radar craft because we have at most 3 hangars (1 for interception, 1 for troop transport and 1 for construction or undercover operations)
- base defense automatic systems
- missile defense (you really need many of them be effective but no place)
- laser, plasma, fusion defense, gravity s  mind shield
- hallways. I really want to design a base but no place for them
- auxillaries armor testing because they are huge and you lack space even with a 2x2 hangar
- huge versions because it's hard to put a 3x3 structure on any base

My idea a 8x8 grid or a multi level base (there's a little space above the grid for level buttons)
I know it's a lot of work but a bigger base is what we really need I think.

It's possible to have more than 8 bases in the BAI (= Brutal AI) fork of OXCE.

Note that it really seems that there is actually too many hangars possible per base.  At least 4 per main assault base.  The research and manufacturing occur at their dedicated bases, of course.  To have a full global coverage, with just a small region in Pacific uncovered, it suffices to have 10 bases.

With 8 bases, it is possible to have a nearly global coverage, with portions of Atlantic and Pacific remaining uncovered.

Note that I actually have worked out a way to make space requirements per base even more constraining by modding in a 3x3 hangar for space-capable crafts, reducing the total number of hangars per base to 3, and this does not feel like a limitation.

5
A more interesting question if it is actually possible to opt out from the veteran system?

I feel that the set of gym training routines and the full set of modifications is more than sufficient to create a very strong novice in about 4-6 weeks, without a single combat engagement.

6
The X-Com Files / Re: [Submod] Facility Expansion Pack [X-Com Files]
« on: August 18, 2024, 07:15:43 am »
The idea with the antigrav 2x2 facility is quite ingenious.  And also the idea with manufacturing 3x3 facility.  This does help to workaround some of the current hangar spec limitations.

I think that some revision may be suitable, however.  The special grav-dock facility seems to be more appropriate for a space craft.  The question is what to do with the 3x3 facility?  A production base needs to be able to produce both spacecrafts and fighters, and ideally spacecrafts should be in their own exclusive category.  Does it mean that an advanced production base needs to have both 3x3 and 2x2 facilities in order to produce a full range of crafts?  The only downside I see with this approach is that there would be insufficient extra space available to place either workshops or living quarters, or base defenses.

Do you think this problem has a solution under current constraints?

7
OXCE Suggestions OK / Re: [Suggestion] Craft size and Hangar capacity
« on: August 18, 2024, 12:58:21 am »
Yes, both can be implemented.

I just said I will do type first and then reevaluate.

We actually could have both more-or-less.  We really don't need size, but rather an ordering (an ordered sequence) of size-types.  That is, sizes are just points, they are not additive.

For some units, we need to have them confined to their type (e.g. vehicles need a garage, period).  That could be done with a flag that would prevent these vehicles for being considered for higher size types.

For some units we may want to consider placement to into larger sized containers.  A specific example would be placing two fighters into a spacedock (or it could be a transport ship dock).  That could be done by setting the flag to confine to size to false.

With submarines and other entirely disjoint types, the key aspect is that these types are truly disjoint.  Thus, it would suffice to introduce an additional parameter to designate the category.  The land crafts could have 0 (which would include cars, confined to their garages, fighters that could inhabit larger hangars based on their type-size ordering, larger vessels and space-crafts residing in top-tier type-size).  The submarine crafts could have 1.  The difference here is:

  • Categories are always disjoint.
  • Type-sizes need not be disjoint.  Some vehicles (like e.g. cars) could be confined to their type-size.  (Note that this system doesn't forbid for e.g. Jeep to be confined to garage, while mudranger be eligible to both hangar and garage, if desired.)

I think this approach is very natural and covers almost all use cases that are encountered in practice.

Check out discussion at https://openxcom.org/forum/index.php?topic=10870.msg165711#msg165711 as well.

My aim with designing these rules has been to avoid the pitfalls associated with the unrestricted assignment of subsets or intervals to hangars or vehicles.  One of the relevant counterexamples is noted by the WarStalkeR at the https://openxcom.org/forum/index.php?topic=10870.msg162989#msg162989.  He spoke of pitfalls with assigning arbitrary subsets to hangars, but the same kind of problems and counter-examples arise when we assign arbitrary subsets to vehicles.  In fact, the problem remains if we assign not just arbitrary subsets, but only arbitrary intervals to vehicles.

The only place where we may assign arbitrary subset (and it is highly desirable for this to be a subset rather than a wildcard, including all possible values) in the specifications is only when we have one hangar type with such assignment present at a base (e.g. two space-ports on a base that could take fighters and larger transports is feasible, and also at the same time another base could have a repair dock that may hold more craft types, but may either cost more or require a special workshop, etc.).  What is important is that the types of multiple housing should not be mixed.

The dilemma is that there needs to be one base with hangar admitting multiple types (workshop base making fighters and heavy transports).  It is not necessary to use the system of unrestricted sizes in order to have this, since both within the system of exclusive categories, sizes, and a system of sizes with per-vehicle optional category restrictions, it is still possible to have one type of hangars with explicit multi-vehicle configuration (that could admit an arbitrary subset of vehicle types).


8
OXCE Suggestions OK / Re: [Suggestion] Craft size and Hangar capacity
« on: August 18, 2024, 12:43:00 am »
Yeah, I had to go along with sizes (which also can be granulated into classes/types, if you want), because otherwise there is no way to sort and allocate them algorithmically in a proper manner.

We can go either with sizes or exclusive categories, and we could have one type of multi-vehicle hangar per base.  Check out my comments here https://openxcom.org/forum/index.php?topic=10870.msg165711#msg165711.

9
Brutal AI / Re: Brutal-OXCE 9.1.0
« on: August 18, 2024, 12:21:38 am »
@Xilmi

I have some thoughts here https://openxcom.org/forum/index.php?topic=10870.msg165711#msg165711, with the interesting part of the thread starting at https://openxcom.org/forum/index.php?topic=10870.msg162989#msg162989, about how to slightly adjust the current hangar index system at the BAI.  Ultimately, the system is not bad, but there exists a snag with setting up a production base, which could produce two types of crafts -- space and fighter -- when we maintain distinction between space and fighter crafts (with the space-crafts requiring larger hangars).  The changes necessary should be relatively minimal, and would play very well in line with the current implementation.

10
OXCE Suggestions OK / Re: [SUGGESTION]Custom Hangar/Craft types
« on: August 18, 2024, 12:16:01 am »
This implementation has one big issue: sorting and allocation. Lets assume that your two hangars. One allows types {0,1,2,3} and another allows types {0,1,3,4} and here you encounter issue - which craft type should be placed first? Basically, you might end up with issue: you've bough type 3 craft and it was placed in first hangar, the second hangar is still empty. And if you're trying to buy type 2 craft, you can't because the only compatible hangar is occupied, whilst 2nd hangar is unused.

In my case, to avoid this issue, I implemented craft size parameter, allowed granulation of craft size ranges to a craft class and only then implemented multi-craft hangars support that rely on craft size to sort crafts via heuristic approach into craft slots provided by hangars.

You can take a look at my approach here:
https://github.com/WarStalkeR/OpenXcomExMore/commit/41d4bd5395ad8327cda2008c4da191300bbba3ef
https://github.com/WarStalkeR/OpenXcomExMore/commit/7a661b2b5fea8a13a2fa4b738206f76ebe48b897

Another way we may eliminate this counter-example is if we allow only one class of hangars that allow multiple vehicle types per base.  All the rest of hangars might as well be strictly class-specific.

I think this is an even better approach than ordering by size or sequence.  If we proceed with ordering, then we would be in a situation where vehicles could be distributed among different hangar types.  This may not be desirable lore-wise, since aircraft hangar, vehicle hangar, and space hangar are rather different.

We should always have the ability to have at least one hangar type that admits multiple vehicle types, because such hangar is necessary for a production base.  However, would it really make sense for a space hangar to admit cars?  In general, a space hangar should admit only one vehicle type, which is a spacecraft.  If a hangar admits more than one vehicle type, then it is either because it is a production dock (producing Interceptor and Avenger), or maybe a spacedock that could receive airplanes.  In general, the use case for more than one type of hangar that could admit more than one type of vehicle is at best rare.

Thus, I think that the logic should be as follows.

  • Keep the current logic with allowing only one vehicle category per hangar with hangar types specified.
  • Allow only one type of hangar (that is, there could be two or more, but they must admit the same set of vehicles) per base that could admit more than one vehicle types.

An extension of this approach is possible.

  • Implement an index-ordering (basically, ordering by index that represents an idea of greater or lesser size) logic discussed in my previous message.
  • Allow vehicles to specify a flag that would make them exclusive to their size (as a boolean value).
  • Allow only one type of hangar that could admit multiple vehicles.




11
OXCE Suggestions OK / Re: [SUGGESTION]Custom Hangar/Craft types
« on: August 17, 2024, 11:54:09 pm »
This implementation has one big issue: sorting and allocation. Lets assume that your two hangars. One allows types {0,1,2,3} and another allows types {0,1,3,4} and here you encounter issue - which craft type should be placed first? Basically, you might end up with issue: you've bough type 3 craft and it was placed in first hangar, the second hangar is still empty. And if you're trying to buy type 2 craft, you can't because the only compatible hangar is occupied, whilst 2nd hangar is unused.

In my case, to avoid this issue, I implemented craft size parameter, allowed granulation of craft size ranges to a craft class and only then implemented multi-craft hangars support that rely on craft size to sort crafts via heuristic approach into craft slots provided by hangars.

You can take a look at my approach here:
https://github.com/WarStalkeR/OpenXcomExMore/commit/41d4bd5395ad8327cda2008c4da191300bbba3ef
https://github.com/WarStalkeR/OpenXcomExMore/commit/7a661b2b5fea8a13a2fa4b738206f76ebe48b897

I think there's an even simpler solution that exists.  Even the idea of wildcards discussed earlier today would not be necessary.

We need not sizes, but rather an ordered sequence of hangar types.  We could think intuitively of this sequence as a sequence of sizes, of course.  The numeral order provides a natural relation for ordering the chosen hangar type values, without explicitly specifying an ordering relation anywhere.

The hangars are filled with the smallest (i.e. earliest in sequence) size of a vehicle.  This way, we would never run into a counter-example of the type you have proposed earlier.



12
OXCE Suggestions OK / Re: [SUGGESTION]Custom Hangar/Craft types
« on: August 17, 2024, 08:42:18 pm »
With the second approach, where we specify the default type specifically, we could have a repair dock, which would be able to accommodate some of the relevant craft types.  For example, we may want certain airplanes and vehicles to be able to undergo modifications.  Then, we just specify for them


defaultHangarType: 4


Where 4 is the type of the repair dock (where modifications to the craft could be made).  This allows us to have a special type of hangar at a production base, while keeping the crafts completely segregated otherwise.

13
OXCE Suggestions OK / Re: [SUGGESTION]Custom Hangar/Craft types
« on: August 17, 2024, 08:34:37 pm »
This implementation has one big issue: sorting and allocation. Lets assume that your two hangars. One allows types {0,1,2,3} and another allows types {0,1,3,4} and here you encounter issue - which craft type should be placed first? Basically, you might end up with issue: you've bough type 3 craft and it was placed in first hangar, the second hangar is still empty. And if you're trying to buy type 2 craft, you can't because the only compatible hangar is occupied, whilst 2nd hangar is unused.

In my case, to avoid this issue, I implemented craft size parameter, allowed granulation of craft size ranges to a craft class and only then implemented multi-craft hangars support that rely on craft size to sort crafts via heuristic approach into craft slots provided by hangars.

You can take a look at my approach here:
https://github.com/WarStalkeR/OpenXcomExMore/commit/41d4bd5395ad8327cda2008c4da191300bbba3ef
https://github.com/WarStalkeR/OpenXcomExMore/commit/7a661b2b5fea8a13a2fa4b738206f76ebe48b897

The problem arises from having multiple types per hangar.  Now, we may have just one possible type per hangar.  It may either be a numeral or a wildcard.  For most practical purposes it is sufficient.

  • There could be one huge space port for e.g. Avenger.
  • There could be regular hangars for airplanes.
  • There could be garages for cars.
  • There could be a wildcard aerodock for 2-4 planes.

Now, the only practical difficulty that occurs with this specification is that it's undesirable for space planes to be fittable into aerodock.  That could be solved by forbidding the wildcard matching in the craft specification.  In fact, we could do differently:

  • Crafts could only be matched with their specified hangar type.
  • For some crafts, wildcard matching could be enabled.

Given that, we actually don't need the wildcard matching, but rather an ability to specify an alternate default match for some crafts.  For crafts without a hangar type set, we might as well assume a zero value, which would be a default one.

Thus, we have the following approaches for craft definitions:


hangarType: 1
defaultHangarTypeEnabled: true



hangarType: 1
defaultHangarType: 0


14
The X-Com Files / Re: [Submod] Everyone surrender
« on: January 02, 2024, 12:15:34 pm »
It's pretty easy to make:

Code: [Select]
units:
  - type: STR_ALIEN_BRAIN
    canSurrender: true
  - type: STR_DREAMSPRITE_RED
    canSurrender: true
  - type: STR_SKELETON
    canSurrender: true
(...)

Repeat for every unit which doesn't have the "canSurrender: true" flag. And also make the metadata file.

Should the type: be instead override:.  I assume, it's a more correct approach when developing a submod.

15
OXCE Suggestions DONE / Re: [Suggestion]Psi camouflage
« on: January 01, 2024, 10:57:04 am »
Long-ranged psi vision of advanced xcom psionics(will do anyway) and mental ninjas who can sneak them. Like "Dont allways trust your psi-vision"
Fearimmune makes them COMPLETELY invisible. And i think, immune to psi. This is too powerful.

The downside of fear immunity is inability to recover morale.  This makes this trait much less useful.

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