Messages

151

Offtopic / Re: XCOM Inspired Fantasy Game

« on: May 29, 2020, 08:01:08 pm »

But you in reality replace one save-scum with another. Now player can scout in ineffective way losing most of int units, checking what he can grain, then he reload and only do things in effective way, skipping all fights that do not give any benefits.
Another problem is "groundhog-day" where you can predict events in future.

I think maybe better system would be hybrid one, you precalculate 20 rolls ahead, and you store them in save. This mean couple of roll after reload will give same results but after som time you will have diffident outcomes.

Of corse this system could explored too, you can still reroll chest but it would need reload and doing lot of actions to exhaust all random buffer and try again.

Since saving/loading obviously has in-game economic value, it would make sense to require player spending some resources to save the progress. Similarly to how Tomb Raider games used save crystals. In a fantasy strategy game setting, saving the game can be represented as a visit to Oracle, who takes money to predict future. Now usual supply/demand rules apply to the save-game economy. And suddenly you have save-system which work even in multiplayer games. In fact, both sides can agree on saving the game at some point and pay agreed price for that. Then any of the participating players could invoke the save. Obviously that would need to be somehow integrated with the diplomacy system.

Same way I plan to implement battlescape saves as a time travel spell, which would work even in multiplayer.


Currently I'm still struggling with getting the time system itself correctly. Original XCOM had only geoscape time, while battlescape was almost disconnected from the geoscape time-wise, with the only exception being night/day battles. And night missions were a special kind of nightmare, since aliens all had night vision. Now I want to connect the battlescape time with geoscape. Each Action Point squad spends on the world map this day will be subtracted from the time available on the battlescape, if squad enters the site exploration stage today. If the battlescape time runs out, then visitor will be forced to retreat unconditionally, losing any units surrounded by the enemy. Obviously battlescape time amount should be generous enough. Say 100 or 200 turns per day, but still encourage having some reserve time. Now time travel spell will not only help with the exploration, but will also unwind the time. The only catch is that the unit performing the time travel should survive.

The remaining questions is about making it possible to travel into the future from the past. That is always harder, since future is less known than the past. Or is it? Guess physicists will correct me that future is more stable and predictable than the past ( https://www.sciencealert.com/three-black-holes-orbiting-each-other-can-t-always-go-backwards-in-time ), since the future is still there, while the past has already dissipated, leaving a few fossils at best ( https://www.space.com/tunguska-meteor-impact-explained.html ).

152

Offtopic / Re: XCOM Inspired Fantasy Game

« on: May 28, 2020, 07:09:08 pm »

Guess the thread is a bit difficulty to follow and it all may look a bit confusing. But what I'm trying to do is to merge a Civ-type game with XCOM. In a fantasy setting. In the current state I have finished the battlescape (on-site) engine, and the geoscape (the world) engine, complete with all mechanics. Now I'm doing unit balancing, trying to give each of the many units some unique role. After it gets done, I will do a campaign encompassing several random generated world maps, each with different goals.

Compared to XCOM, battles are expected to be completed faster, and there is no save in the battle. The only opportunity to save would be on the world map. But I will try to prevent save scumming. Still I guess people could save-scum anyway, running in the emulator. But at least I could use the PRNG to prevent reloading to achieve different result. I.e. all sites are pre-determined on the world generation, so there will be no way to reload the game until it spawns the type of monsters which can be easily defeated by the player's current army. Same with AI, which uses pre-seeded RNG, so reloading wont affect AI's behavior. IIRC, Heroes of Might & Magic IV determined when player reloaded the game to save scum some chests with random content and locked-up the PRGN, although that could have been a glitch. But I believe the error was determining the chest content on the pickup stages, instead of at its generation time.

BTW, there was a somewhat successful merge of Civ and Warhammer as part of the Total War franchise. In fact, they even remade the original Warhammer Dark Omen campaign in the Total War engine. Earlier there was even a mix between Doom and Civilization - in the Sierra's Birthright game, which had Warhammer style army battles (dumbed down of course), but also site exploration part, looking like Doom and using a rather complex raycasting (?) engine for it.

153

Offtopic / Re: XCOM Inspired Fantasy Game

« on: May 22, 2020, 09:11:06 pm »

The problem with rotation is that you need to have 4 walls, not just 2 like X-Com does...

Yeah. In case of OXC you will have to swap walls between the map cells. That is tricky, but possible.

2d Sim City games also had map rotation, but the Sims haven't got it. Although the Sims had 2-layer buildings and some tricky occlusion code to expose buildings interiors properly. The Sims also had stairs object.

As a side note, there was a crazy Warcraft 2 clone RTS, which had building interiors (with removable roof) as a gimmick:

154

Offtopic / Re: XCOM Inspired Fantasy Game

« on: May 22, 2020, 10:24:08 am »

Code: [Select]

You just need a rotated version of each sprite, and there will be additional 3 views, each different by 90 degrees.At first glance this is disadvantage, because you need do 4 times more work than normally, but there is trick, each tile can have its own rotation, this mean if you see 4 same item each can facing different direction, this mean every version can be used even if player do not rotate map, even once.

Not really 4-times, you can mirror isometric sprites, and many sprites already have 180-rotated versions, while say trees can be reused for all directions, since they are nearly round. But rotating some locations (like that ship in TFTD) would indeed require supplying additional tiles.

Equilateral triangles work if you allow for half of them to be rotated 180 degrees.  I'm not familiar with any computer game that uses them, but there are some board games that use them IIRC.  They end up being similar to the hexagons since a hexagon can be made with 6 equilateral triangles

That wont be uniform and will create a lot of problems processing such structure. Even hexes are much trickier than squares.

155

Offtopic / Re: XCOM Inspired Fantasy Game

« on: May 21, 2020, 10:10:40 pm »

Isometric with rotating camera is perfect and what every high-budget game in the genre uses.

One can implement rotation even in a 2d isometric engine. IIRC Stronghold had it. You just need a rotated version of each sprite, and there will be additional 3 views, each different by 90 degrees. These would solve most of "that unit got behind that hill" problems, but wont help with a unit inside the forest. I haven't implemented the general rotation as of now (since many objects, like the ship above, don't have all angles present), but there is a site part rotation, for premade parts, during site generation. Original XCOMs had no rotation for the same reason - some parts are missing. But I really dislike the collection of stumps forests.

BTW, if you have hexagonal tiles, you can 6 angles of rotation, instead of just 4 in square based tiles. Still puzzles me why only hexagons and squares produce perfect tesselations of a 2d plane, but as they say one person's square is another person's hexagon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wigner%E2%80%93Seitz_cell

156

Offtopic / Re: XCOM Inspired Fantasy Game

« on: May 20, 2020, 08:26:02 pm »

Let me just say that I 100% love the manually switchable Z layers. They are both functional and aesthetically pleasing. Terrain features getting transparent look meh and are not very comfortable to understand where things are, especially in a terrain heavy game like X-Com.

Well, in my case, there are like 64 layers (XCOM has just 4, and 9 in Apocalypse), and typical human unit is 2 layers tall. It would be incredible confusing to expose the layer system. Already in Dwarf Fortress layers are a nightmare, and I'm surprised authors decided to keep them for the commercial version.

So I've put a lot of effort to solve the problem with a large set of hacks. I don't make sprites transparent, I just cut their upper half, since transparency wont solve it.

BTW, Apocalypse had one interesting feature - units jumping over holes (that is before Quake 3 and Unreal bots, and still the only one RTS game with such feature):

Now I think resized to youtube wide screen the game looks more stylish, as opposed to the normal isometry, and the units are a bit fatter and easier to notice. And some people suggested modding Apoc to use XCOM1 pixelart graphics: https://www.deviantart.com/makus82/art/PSD-Aliens-Sprites-from-XCom-1-in-XCom-Apocalypse-804133851

157

Offtopic / Re: XCOM Inspired Fantasy Game

« on: May 20, 2020, 03:54:57 pm »

That depends on whether you want to get into a complex vehicle system, where different subsystems (sails, rudder etc.) have some impact on the whole unit's performance, which is obvious if they get damaged. I think it would be very fun, but I'm not sure if it fits your general vision and plans.

And of course, a hole in the hull would fill the ship with water until it sinks. Countered by the crew using buckets and long-term by repairs.

I will likely leave it for a post-release update, like say a pirate campaign. For now I have to balance just the basic game and do bug fixes. Then it will be easier just adding fitting parts to fill in the niche.

I.e. just adding these ships required a lot of modifications to the drawing algorithm and occlusion hiding algorithms. Ships masts had to be moved into separate class of objects, that always get "folded" to unobscure units behind them, when player moves cursor. Trees are handled differently. I.e. they don't disappear when cursor is on a cliff above them, only when it moves inside forest.

Original XCOM games handled it very differently, requiring player to manually switch layers. It worker well, but was a bit clunky and dated. Probably the worst part of the original games. Magic & Mayhem had just two layers: land and roof. And most of the time all trees were hidden, just like in XCOM where trees had only trunks visible most of the time. Beside being ugly visually and ruining the whole scene look, it also made it very hard to deal with floating aliens or aliens on higher layers, since player was bound to a single layer.

Now adding ships as separate vehicles could overly complicate the game for players. IIRC, most players had problems loading troops and items on the ship in the original XCOM game. That was a rather clunky part of the game. OpenXCOM modded it a bit, allowing to pre-equip items, but people still forget to load the operatives onto the aircraft, and then find themselves on a mission with a single squaddie.

158

Offtopic / Re: XCOM Inspired Fantasy Game

« on: May 19, 2020, 10:11:59 am »

A gameplay question still remains: should these ships sustain damage from stuff like fire? How would it be implemented?

Basically that is just a scene which occurs when one squad with a boat attack another squad with a boat on sea. Now what if one party gets its boat destroyed or heavily damaged? As of now the boat inside the squad is just a usual unit, with damage meter, which is unused. XCOM games treated vehicles as a special entities. Especially XCOM Apocalypse. But it still had no way to damage them outside of air combat. Although in Apocalypse there was indeed map damage, resulting penalties for player and incentivizing scaling down the destruction, which was like fun police, but it still happened.


There are also flying boats, but the mechanics would be similar, with the exception of clouds replacing the water around the boats.

159

Offtopic / Re: XCOM Inspired Fantasy Game

« on: May 18, 2020, 01:23:05 pm »

Time to learn Blender then...

Yeah. Blender or other 3d package can help. You can model even 2d scenes in it, and then export them as a set of objects for your ingame use. But I wont recommend Blender to newbies. It has a rather clunky, cryptic and generally unfriendly UI, mostly relaying on obscure hotkeys. No way you can learn it quickly and make something in a few days. 3ds Max is lot easier if you have access to it. But a room-mate artist where I live uses Cinema 4d, but I heard it is geared more towards TV and Movies, while 3ds Max and Maya were initially developed for gamedev people.

160

Offtopic / Re: XCOM Inspired Fantasy Game

« on: May 17, 2020, 11:37:53 pm »

Ok. With some debugging I managed to avoid the circular dependencies (resulting in the locked-in areas not drawn), while still maintaining proper parts breakage. I.e. moving cursor behind the ship will hide its back revealing units behind it. Still a few draw order bugs, which can be easily fixed. Since the algorithm is slow, I will use it only for several special hand crafted areas, like ship boarding and boss battle arenas. At least until I find a way to optimize it.

161

Offtopic / Re: XCOM Inspired Fantasy Game

« on: May 17, 2020, 09:14:47 pm »

Or store accurate depths of each pixel in graphic and final surface. With this draw order will not matter but each pixel daw will take more time.
At some point I will try implementing something like that.

That is called Z-buffer. A thing 3d hardware implements very efficiently.

But in case of tile-based isometric game with oversized sprites, you want to be very careful with Z-Buffer, so objects wont clip through walls. I.e. you want to render your giant units with Z-test turned off, just like you render HUD in FPS games to avoid it clashing with objects on screen. Then there are also transparent surfaces, which still require tricky sorting. Unless you do physically based rendering, where actual light rays travel the scene.

Although games like Warcraft III turned the clipping bug into a feature, providing buildings with foundation, that can be unearthed on uneven terrain.

162

Offtopic / Re: XCOM Inspired Fantasy Game

« on: May 17, 2020, 09:01:35 pm »

Researching further, most of the slow down was the result of empty spaces now now being part of the input for the occlusion algorithm. I'm sure there is a way to optimize the handling of the invisible cells, but it wont be easy.

In addition, any occlusion graph makes it easy to create circular dependency bugs, including rarely occurring ones. And then you will wonder where it happened. Especially nasty problems occur when one large multicell sprite resides on top of another, since there is a large loss of granularity. The obvious way of solve is automagically breaking large objects into isometric tiles.

That is why you use 3d engine even for 2d games.

163

Offtopic / Re: XCOM Inspired Fantasy Game

« on: May 17, 2020, 03:32:55 am »

Was looking for a way to import that ship without breaking it into cubes. There is actually a special algorithm to do that - hierarchical sprite sorting. Basically one has to produce occlusion forest graph, and then instead of calling qsort, just walk the forest from the roots. It works, but it is slower than qsort, since building the occlusion graph is a non-trivial task.

164

Offtopic / Re: XCOM Inspired Fantasy Game

« on: May 13, 2020, 11:02:32 pm »

So, to Tl;Dr; it: make a 3D game, with only one view point and a layering component, that it will work out better?

Yes.

Consider the following ship sprite (taken from my game). In a proper z-buffered 3d engine importing the ship into the game is as simple as breaking it into elements, assign them proper Zs and just passing to the engine. But in the original XCOM or in say Magic & Mayhem, you will have to break this ship into cubes or similar boxes (together with complex geometry objects, like the rope ladders and the masts with sails). Obviously will still have to devise some way to hide occluding items, even with the true 3d objects. So most 3d strategy games (i.e. Starcraft 2) and RPGs are actually 2d, having just a single layer, to avoid the confusion. XCOM/Dwarf Fortress like games open a pandora box of problems.

165

Offtopic / Re: XCOM Inspired Fantasy Game

« on: May 12, 2020, 11:52:20 am »

I imagine an isometric view is pretty complicated graphics-wise and unity might not be the best for it. But google unity isometric tutorials and see what you get.

But on r/roguelikedev there's a strong consensus that you don't need complex graphical engines, depending on what your plans are.  Very simple input and output things like bearlibterminal are consistent and powerful (for ASCII games, not isometric). Most of the more complicated stuff needs to be implemented/tweaked yourself anyways.

Just don't try to make something as complex to design as XCOM.

Actually, Unity has this thing called hardware Z-buffer and each sprite texel will get a camera Z, which would solve your z-sorting problem without much effort (your will still need to set up a proper orthographic projection).

I don't use Z-buffer, but instead actually sort sprites by a specially crafted Z, and then apply seveal tricks, so larger sprites, like dragon, wont have wings clipping through the ceiling, and multicell sprites, like say a dinning table, would be correctly drawn before the items stand on top of them.

Similar method (but only with neighborhood sorting) was apparently used in Ultima 8, while Magic & Mayhem had some tricky hacks. As a rule of thumb, when isometric game has more than 1 z-layer, expect a lot of ugly hacks, unless you use actual 3d hardware.