Messages

166

Open Feedback / Re: 0.5 in 2012?

« on: January 16, 2013, 08:20:36 am »

Hey Devs, now that the Mayans are finished not destroying the world, and indigestible medical tricorders have officially been invented, how about we get a stable 0.5?

What the fuck Devs?

What .... The .... Fuck?

Naw I'm just kidding around. 2013s not going anywhere and last I checked the git-builds were more then fully playable.

167

Suggestions / New Player Messages and Right Click Tooltips

« on: January 01, 2013, 09:15:38 pm »

I would like to see OXC be accessible to new players or younger/noober players, much more so then XCOM1 was. Veteran XCOM masters like us can easily overlook how steep the learning curve actually is. It's obvious when you new it about 20 years ago.

Messages/tooltips could be added later as MODs but that would kind-of defeat their purpose. New players don't try a new game out with the best MODs for learning the game already installed, they actually only look to the modding scene once they decide they like the game. Most new players won't even look at the manual, and for most games why would anyone?

New Player Messages would show once per game when getting to a screen for the first time. Right-click notifications would provide in-depth descriptions of specific things anytime you click on them. Both could be turned off in the options menu (for all games, in options.cfg) and New Player Messages could be reset, all flagged as unseen for the current game, or all flagged as already seen for the duration of the current game.

New Player message examples:

• Geoscape: This is the Geoscape. Here you control the X-COM organization on a global level. The Geoscape connects all other areas of the game. Here you control your crafts and can detect and shot-down hostile alien UFOs, land soldiers at crashed or landed UFOs and respond to various global events.
• Monthly Costs: This Screen shows a readout of the monthly costs associated with running this base, followed by the total monthly income of the X-COM project. This includes craft monthly rental costs, personnel wages, and the maintenance costs of the base itself. Beware that his does not include costs associated with another base, nor the costs of any spending you do throughout the month. If the sum total of the costs of each base is greater then your monthly income, you will lose money at the end of each month. This can cause you to go into debt.
• Pre-battle Soldier Equipment: Here you can choose what weapons and equipment you want on each soldier. Having too much equiped or too heavy of items equiped can cause a soldier to do everything slower, resulting in less then their full amount of TUs being available at the start of a turn. Two handed weapons are more accurate when the other hand is empty. You can view a soldiers stats by clicking their rank insignia. Beware that once you click OK to proceed to the battlescape it will be much more difficult to change your loadout for the rest of the mission.


Tooltip Examples: I assume you can guess what was right clicked on.

• This is the total time it will currently take for your engineers to complete production of these items. The time is shown as hours/days. Items can be manufactured more quickly by assigning more engineers if available. Engineer hours to produce one unit X Total units to produce / Engineers assigned = Total hours to finish
• This is the weapon currently equipped to %STR_CRAFT_CLICKED%. You can find out more about individual craft weapons by looking at their individual pages in the UFOpedia. Craft weapons are used to shoot down UFOs.
• Energy is an unnecessary stat that is only meaningful to newblets that run their soldiers into the middle of the battlescape without reserving time units. Do yourself a favor and right-click on a different stat.  NOOOB!

I'd be willing to write individual messages, collect feedback, etc, if someone else wanted to actually code the messages in. It took me like 30 mins just to write these examples and they're pretty rough so I don't want to write all of them unless they're actually being included. Someone else would still need to write them for other languages too, I only know English.

168

Open Feedback / Re: Resolution settings 16:9

« on: December 29, 2012, 12:17:46 am »

corrected to reflect 16:10 as the correct native ratio.

I suppose it makes sense to limit fullscreen resolutions to those returned by the video driver, and I suppose it would be more trouble then necessary to do it differently for windowed mode. I didn't realize you could just click the numbers to change them.

169

Open Feedback / Resolution settings 16:10

« on: December 28, 2012, 02:49:23 am »

XCOM1 and TFTD graphics were made for 16:10 graphics. It is at 16:10 that the world in the geoscape is round. I have no idea what idiot at microprose thought that people used 16:10 on DOS machines in 1992, they were all 4:3 and as a result everyones globes looked vertically stretched.

At any rate in running OXC in a 16:10 resolution results in nice square pixels, cleaner fonts, a round globe, square base facility tiles, etc. However there are only 2 16:9 options in the options menu, and most people don't exactly know what the ratios of various resolutions off the top of their heads.

I recommend having a separate aspect ratio selection in the options and allowing the user to select from common resolutions in that aspect ratio. Also I assume that at some point we want users to be able to resize the window in windowed mode. If so there should be an option to maintain their selected aspect ratio.

An alternative would be to allow resolutions to be selected from a table. However in the mean time you can set the resolution in the cfg file.

Common resolutions in ratios:
 5:4
320x256
600x480
640x512
1280x1024
1800x1440

 4:3 standard TV/monitor
320x240
400x300
640x480
800x600
960x720
1024x768
1280x960
1440x1080
1600x1200
1920x1440

 16:9 standard widescreen
640x360
960x540
1024x576
1280x720 aka HD 720p
1600x900
1920x1080 aka HD 1080p

 16:10 or 8:5 Ideal for OpenXcom
320x200
640x400
768x480
1024x640
1152x720
1280x800
1440x900
1680x1050
1920x1200

170

Programming / Re: Battlescape Hotkeys

« on: December 09, 2012, 01:51:36 pm »

Any and all key-bindings should be rebind-able in any game. The whole point of OXC is to leave the bad parts of 1993 in 1993. In fact I think if we reach 1.0 and battlescape shortcuts aren't user rebind-able I'll have to tell The Cynical Brit on Daiky/SupSuper's ass's!

But seriously I think battlescape shortcuts should at least be in the rule-set/config, you may want to check with Daiky and see what his plans are for shortcuts.

171

Work In Progress / Re: Ideas to promote 1.+ cohesion and a universal OpenXcom Overhaul Mod

« on: November 04, 2012, 11:28:51 pm »

moriarty
At the moment no.  However there will need to be controls on what aliens can spawn with, used by the geoscape AI, which hasn't been coded yet. Beyond that IDK.

172

Fan-Stuff / Re: Soldier names

« on: November 04, 2012, 11:05:19 pm »

I'm a very weird kind of pervert and I decided a while back that I want all my soldiers to be valley girls. So here's my list of US chick names.

This is roughly just all the common girls names in the US, selected based on naming census data from California and it's pretty complete, I actually did more selecting against cali-specific names then for them. The only problem is that these names are more likely representative of the girls who will become legal to screw in a couple more years then likely soldiers in 1999.

I also have last names based on what's most common in the US. I updated these and I think the current differences in ethnic proportions from 1999 are probably way more then reversed by the very small number of very common Hispanic names in the US (they're all Garcia) although actually the worst is Smith, shared by whites and blacks and accounting for 1% of the US total population. Actually the biggest problem is probably just when you get mismatched names like Stephanie Miller and she's Asain or Evelyn Bradley and she's black. They were renamed by their adoptive parents...?

173

Work In Progress / Re: Ideas to promote 1.+ cohesion and a universal OpenXcom Overhaul Mod

« on: November 03, 2012, 07:28:23 am »

Actually if SupSuper and the core OpenXcom team were already planning on doing something like this after 1.0 comes out then I don't really see much point in worrying about it.

174

Work In Progress / Ideas to promote 1.+ cohesion and a universal OpenXcom Overhaul Mod

« on: November 03, 2012, 07:10:52 am »

I forsee a huge increase in the popularity and energy in OpenXcom modding, and in OpenXcom in general, once v0.5 or possibly 0.5.5 comes out. I'd like us to be prepared to take full advantage of that energy and talent.

I would like to see a large portion of the mods getting made into a cohesive overall expansion instead of lots of various upgrades where some work together and some don't. Something that doesn't require trial and error to find a selection of Mods that actually vastly improves the experience.

The Plan:

• Collect a list/database of potentially compatible mods, mod sets, mod plans, proposed features etc that would improve on the existing game while still preserving the original feel and gameplay, as well as enhancements that could easily be turned on and off in an ingame menu or selected at the creation of a new game.
• Document the core changes that will be made and how included mods will need to be modified to fit any new requirements.
• Set up a quality assurance system of some type to determine which mods will actually be used.
• Set up a database of needed assets to fulfill the core changes decided upon, like new textures, sounds or tilesets.
• We will also need modders to go through selected  high quality mods that don't match the new requirements and have become inactive or been left.

Right now I'm mostly just looking for input/ideas/criticism on how we could get all this organized. Putting an overall direction plan together will take time, probably more time then there will take time. I want to be prepared to start making that plan as the early crowd shows up, so that when the 1.0 flood comes we can take full advantage of the energy it brings.

Otherwise we will probably have the same mess as the TESV:Skyrim modding fiasco, and I doubt OpenXcom will have Nexus Mod Manager support.

175

Programming / Re: Another look at Geoscape AI.

« on: October 30, 2012, 09:03:13 pm »

Disclaimer:I probably don't understand what you're doing very well but if I understand this correctly.

that said

In the immediate (near) future I will implement events and keep current behaviour for the following:

• Detect total destruction of UFOs.
• Detect crash landing of UFOs.
• Detect expiration of mission sites.
• Detect XCOM winning / losing a mission.
• Detect arrival of UFOs to destination.

I think modders wanting an event based AI would want events for things like xcom bases being built, ufo's being detected by xcom, ufo's being engaged by xcom craft, bases being detected (x-com or alien), research/manufacture completion, funding changes, etc.

examples:

• Mod adds a type of artifact site mission for the aliens that the aliens only launch after x-com researches a pre-requisite.
• Mod causes supply missions to spawn from north pole instead of south pole when an x-com base is created in Antarctica and x-com has less then 4 bases.
• Mod causes battleships on 'alien research' missions to land next too an x-com base for 48 hours every time x-coms balance goes negative at the beginning of the month.
• Mod causes a new terror mission to be launched every other time X-COMs funding increases at the end of a month, but with a battle-ship instead of a terrorship.
• Mod causes all infiltration missions to take place in regions where x-com has a base (xcom has built more bases then x-com has lost).

I'm not saying anyone would actually do those exact things with a mod, but I would expect modders to want to use geoscape events other then attacks on aliens, even though a true alien AI would only need to react to things that the aliens should know about.

176

Open Feedback / Re: 0.5 in 2012?

« on: October 20, 2012, 09:49:44 am »

I would really like to see a fully playable 0.5 by the end of 2012. Personally I'm not really doing much to spread the word about openxcom because it's not yet playable.

Geoscape AI Discussion: I think the current focus should only be to reproduce the original geoscape progression and externalize the 'AI' charts into an editable file, preferably something more appropriate to long tables then YAML.

AI is just a bunch of rules you make, so agents appear to have intelligence, because they make decisions based on these rules, their state and the state of the world around them.
I don't see what you mean with "real AI". There is no such thing: real <> artificial. Even modern games uses tricks to make people think the AI is more advanced, but it just uses the same old "tricks". ...

If it doesn't react to outside influences or other inputs and use some sort of decision making process then I don't see how it could be an AI. In MOOII if you move your fleet towards an AI empires system, that AI will 'evaluate' a few factors before 'deciding' whether or not to move his fleet to the same system to deter any potential attack. X-COMs battlescape AI likewise assesses the situation in pre-calculated ways and moves accordingly. The X-Com Geoscape 'AI' is not an actual AI because it doesn't attempt to imitate an intelligent response, and doesn't evaluate any conditions, it just launches UFOs. This could create a problem for modders who want to add more divisive AI's. Currently I don't think the geosccape does anything in reaction except have a chance to start a retaliation mission in a region when UFOs are shot down there.

177

Open Feedback / Re: Member Map

« on: October 20, 2012, 08:57:35 am »

done

I didn't realize how much X-COM is a European phenomena. There's still just 3 of us from the US when I would have expected at least 1/4th.

178

Programming / Re: soldier gen

« on: October 04, 2012, 10:13:22 am »

I think MFive is only asking for stat caps to be included in the rulesets, although that's an interesting idea Volutar.

Lets clarify our terminology. The smallest amount of TUs that soldier can have when you buy them is the TU spawn min and the most they can have is the TU spawn max, because when you buy a soldier she "spawns" with some amount of TUs in that range. When she kicks ass on lots of missions and gets her TUs up as high as she ever can, the maximum amount of TUs she can ever achieve (without cheating/hacking) is the TU cap.

Currently in the ruleset each stat has a min and max spawn value that is used for all soldiers. In MFives idea (and common sense, it's probably in the works) each stat will have a min spawn, max spawn, and a cap specified in the ruleset. Basically, the caps are missing from the rulesets because SupSuper hasn't moved them yet.

In Volutars idea, which will likely have to wait for 1.0, the ruleset would have min-max spawn and min-max caps for each stat and each soldier would have their own caps, rolled at purchase, which determine the caps used for that soldier.

In my idea she would probably roll 45 TUs from the spawn min-max and 58 TUs from the cap min-max, because she has a vagina and I'm sexist.