[MERGED] Soldier Diaries 1.0

[Shoes]

I started a new game with Commendations too And I was loving it! No mod enabled except commendations and statstrings.

But I also decided that for the medals to mean something, I had to play true: No reloads -> Ironman. And I promptly got a crash in my 2nd terror 

I'm not 100% sure what happened.. One of my soldier got shot, then MC'd, then the game crashed. I tried an ethereal terror to check and I can't play past first turn. Presumably because of psi-stuff.

Another comment on the mod: Is there any order in the medals section? It's really hard to find anything since they are not in alphabetical order, and I can't figure out any meaningful grouping.

Damn, it's a shame about the crashes. Since your soldier was shot, it might be the same problem as I just fixed and pushed to github. I am doing my own playthrough so I hope to catch lingering bugs. I'll boot up an ethereal terror mission and see if I can get a crash.

The medals themselves don't really have an order to them; the order they're in is the order they're created. For your soldiers, it may be the other in which they're awarded.

[Arthanor]

Yeah, I was thinking it might be that the dude bled out after being MC'd, but with the ethereal terror, I had crashes even with no soldier bleeding (but lots of MC, of course).

Would you be interested in an update to the ruleset which sorts the commendations by alphabetical order?

[ivandogovich]

Is the UFOpedia section working for you Arthanor? (Just Curious)

[Shoes]

Yeah, I was thinking it might be that the dude bled out after being MC'd, but with the ethereal terror, I had crashes even with no soldier bleeding (but lots of MC, of course).

Would you be interested in an update to the ruleset which sorts the commendations by alphabetical order?

I would be very interested in that! Also, the crash was me making (for the second time) the mistake of assuming soldiers had a race. They don't. So when an enemy MCs your soldier, it tries to track his race and fails.

edit: pushed the MC fix to github.

[Arthanor]

Is the UFOpedia section working for you Arthanor? (Just Curious)

The UFOpedia looks awesome But it was a bit tedious to try to find a specific medal in it. I'd do a mission, my soldiers got something and then finding the article took more time than I liked to spend looking. (I did find all of them though, at the search was worth it!). That's why I suggested I could do a listOrder fix where medals are put in alphabetical order.

I would be very interested in that! Also, the crash was me making (for the second time) the mistake of assuming soldiers had a race. They don't. So when an enemy MCs your soldier, it tries to track his race and fails.

edit: pushed the MC fix to github.

haha! We learn from our mistakes, but sometimes it takes a few tries I bet the fix was faster this time though!

Thanks for fixing it! I'll recompile tonight or this weekend and work on the ordering as well

Awesome work, you two, btw. This mod adds a much appreciated layer to XCom, that finally motivated me to play properly.

[Shoes]

Awesome work, you two, btw. This mod adds a much appreciated layer to XCom, that finally motivated me to play properly.

Always great to hear if ever you have suggestions for commendations that you'd like to see, post 'em! I am thinking about adding a commendation for killing an alien that you were not aiming for. I've landed a fair amount of kills like that in this playthrough..

[DracoGriffin]

Killing civilians might be a ... "bad" commendation, lol.

Another suggestion would be integration with X-Piratez!

I wouldn't mind coming up with some titles for piratey medals.

[Arthanor]

Actually, the civilian stuff has potential:

Order of Control: Stun 2/5/10/15 civilians
Mark of the Ruthless: Kill 1+ alien and 1+ civilian from the same action (autoshot or explosives). Higher levels could be either for repeats, or for increasing number of alien and/or civilians
Brand of Brutality: Kill 1/2/5/10 civilians
Wreath of the Angel: Complete a terror mission with 60/70/80/90/100% of civilians still alive.

[Shoes]

I love the idea of a commendation that gets a higher decoration based on % of completion!

[Arthanor]

I just looked quickly through the ruleset for inspirations of names, and actually you do have a similar medal:
Valiant Crux: "Given to a soldier who protected all civilians during a terror mission."

So maybe downgrade the 60 to 90% ones to citations? (A citation is sort of a "low level" reward, right?) And 100% would give the Crux?

I was going to suggest something similar for stunned aliens, from 60% to 100% (and medium sized UFOs or more), but the Mercy Cross already does more than that, as it rewards a soldier who stuns all the aliens all by himself. Maybe, again, a citation issued for 60% to 90%?

Also, is there something for successfully recovering cyberdiscs by stunning them instead of making them blow up?

[Shoes]

Good point on the Valiant Crux. I think I'll add the Wreath of the Angel anyway, because of the low likelihood of saving 100% of the civilians. To distinguish the "betterness" of the Crux, the Wreath would have one gold star while the Crux would have three.

As for stunning cyberdiscs, I was under the impression that those guys couldn't be captured; however, the commendation can be made in the ruleset without additional code!

Something along the lines of:

Code: [Select]

  - type: STR_MEDAL_TERRORISTSTUN_NAME
    description: STR_MEDAL_TERRORISTSTUN_DESCRIPTION
    sprite: 00
    criteria:
      killsWithCriteriaCareer: [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10]
    killCriteria:
      -
        1: ["STR_LIVE_TERRORIST", "STATUS_STUNNED"]

Replace the STR_LIVE_TERRORIST with STR_CYBERDISC_TERRORIST and your commendation is specific to that unit instead of Reapers, Sectopods and the rest.

If you're still alphabetizing the commendations, feel free to throw in some custom ones too. As long as the player doesn't get flooded with commendations every mission, it's all good!

[Arthanor]

Ah! Good to know. I'll have to look into how to define commendations too

You indeed can't capture cyberdiscs, but you can kill them in such a way as to preserve the corpse instead of having it blow up. In certain mods that's hugely beneficial (in mine you can disassemble it, in others you can then use it). So I was thinking of a "Order of Preservation" or something, for soldiers who manage to kill a number of discs without having them blow up.

Saving all civilians is indeed pretty unlikely, that's why I was thinking of a % based commendation where higher "levels" would be saving a larger %.

Another one: Brand of the Wrecker, for causing large amount of property (building) damage.

[Shoes]

Tracking if a cyberdisc blew up or not would require new code, but I think it would be straight forward enough: take a look at what was looted from a mission, and track it. Destroying tiles opens interesting possibilities, but I have no experience in that part of the source code. I have a feeling it might be either too restricting if done properly, as the engine doesn't differentiate between a meaningful tile and simply grass; I would have to make a list of "tracks" and "don't tracks". Doing something like "has destroyed 1000 tiles in his lust for xenocide" is appealing though!

I'll add these to my list of things to think about.

[Arthanor]

Good! I'm just throwing ideas around. There's already a lot so I have to come up with weird ones

[Arthanor]

So.. I started working on the ordering, but I am getting confused now. Thinking of the bigger picture, the names will be all jumbled in other languages (which I guess is not different from now..) and it looks a bit all over the place with orders/ribbons/stars/crosses/etc. all mixed up.

Is there an order that would be sensible to use for the different types of commendations? I was first thinking of something like:

Code: [Select]

- Titles (ex.: Man of Steel)
- Stars
- Crosses
- Orders
- Medal
- Ribbon
- Citations
Sort of in order of prestige? (from my perception of the name, I have no idea if that's actually the case!) Then they would be ordered alphabetically within a type. That way, in other languages, there would be a small amount of order which would make things a bit easier to find.

Edit: I've got another possibility, which is "simply" sorted by commendation type alphabetically first, then by full name. That way you get:

Code: [Select]

- Badges
- Citations
- Commendations
- Crosses
- Hearts
- Medals
- Orders
- Ribbons
- Star
- Titles
- Misc/Others
It makes the UFOPaedia listing feel sort of like a book in which each chapter is a commendation type, which I find appealing. It's also relatively easy to look through: Quickly go through types, then slowly through names of that type. And it's easier to go through types alphabetically since that's an ordering scheme your brain is used to.

I've made a google spreadsheet with all the names and types here so you can see what ordering by names and types alpabetically look like. I didn't do "types by prestige" since I don't really know what the order would be

What do you think? Type by prestige, type alphabetically or straight up names alphabetically?