First person view

[SenaC]

I was playing now that I finally got it to work. (Woo!) And noticed that First person screenshot: F10.

First person? In /my/ X-com? So with my curiosity curiousitied I went in to battle and took a shot from the skyranger. Interesting. Obviously very basic, but very interesting.

So my question is this, since I didn't see it answered elsewhere: Is this planned to be expanded upon? I can visualize actual X-com-like textures on this, with possibly very basic use of the in-game sprites ala Doom 1. Seems like LPers could get mileage out of that. And the idea of being able to watch after action from a unit's eyes makes me all tingly. Not that something of that degree is likely to happen, although if you saved /gameplay data,/ and just played back the moves and actions each turn... You could just ask it to save before you started, and hypothetically you /could/ watch from any unit. Unless I have a gross misunderstanding of how the renderer works in this case.

But of course if this is just a debug or a tech thing to look at, that's cool too.

(The image is kinda lousy, but I don't have the time to /really/ spend on making it pretty and accurate.)

[SupSuper]

It's mostly a debug thing for finding collision bugs. The 3D world you see are the collision boxes the Battlescape internally uses, mapped out to a first-person view. They're not really accurate enough for a full 3D rendition, plus we don't use 3D rendering, though you can find some experiments with it here: https://daikybe.blogspot.be/2010/09/2d-3d-x-comufo25d.html

[SenaC]

Fair Enough^TM

Now I know, in any case. It's still an interesting glance from a game designer's perspective.

[alienfood]

Thanks for the link. I had missed that. There is some great work going on in this community.

[Qpoter]

Wow, this is some really cool stuff... I suppose a 3D OpenXcom is not such a pipe dream after all.

[luke83]

I would love to see a 3D Pixeled world.... Maybe oneday.

[Angelus_EV]

please if you do the 3d mod or experiment or whatever do it as a separate exe file, please stay close to the original.

[Tarvis]

I really don't think a transition for 3D would be that bad for X-Com. Every tile sprite could just get its own model. The only problem is it might be hardware-intensive to render hundreds and hundreds of models at once.

Otherwise though, I think just having models that stick to X-Com's fairly simplistic object shapes and textures should look fine. For example, the textures for the soldier models could be based off of their inventory paperdoll.

[yrizoud]

Personally, the only reason I'd like a first-person "shot" is to get a preview before shooting, in order to see how the target is covered, and my risks of friendly fire. For this, even a raycaster system with billboard sprites would be enough.

[Solarius Scorch]

Personally, the only reason I'd like a first-person "shot" is to get a preview before shooting, in order to see how the target is covered, and my risks of friendly fire. For this, even a raycaster system with billboard sprites would be enough.

Perhaps a mesh-like display, with black background and green "wires"?

[sidav]

Where I can find that rendering in the code? It looks quite interesting!

[Warboy1982]

BattlescapeState::saveVoxelView()

[Dioxine]

I really don't think a transition for 3D would be that bad for X-Com. Every tile sprite could just get its own model. The only problem is it might be hardware-intensive to render hundreds and hundreds of models at once.

...And finding enough slave-workers to make the 3d meshes and textures for all that I wouldn't mind a real-time rendition like Daiky did, to make realistic lighting, for example, but... I prefer nice pixel over ugly 3d any day of the week. I still cringe remembering that XCom clone done on Quake 2 engine... Plus moving to 3d would increase workload needed to add any item/unit into the game by a factor of 10.

[Vakrug]

First Person View is definitely an awesome feature, but with one notable drawback. There is a quite few clicks to be done in order to actually see the resulting .png file. Even when it is a good time to check line of fire, often I am too lazy to press F10, navigate to save folder and open the .png file. But I recently found a solution that I want to share with others!

With IrfanView Graphic Viewer (https://www.irfanview.net/) it is possible to set your hotfolder to your save folder (Options -> Hotfolder (watch folder) ) and press start. After that each time a new picture is generated in this folder will be immediately seen in IrfanView. No additional clicks required.

[Stoddard]

It can be made to show the view in-game, so none of this dance with external image viewers. It isn't even hard to.

Question is - who is bored enough to code this?