[Total Conversion][WIP] oXc - War of Shadows v0.92

[BlackLibrary]

Jack...whatever insight you've gleaned, would be helpful to share.  You found a correlation with Space Marine artwork?

[jackstraw2323]

EDIT: Sprite attached

I basically dropped the snake man torso on a power suit and it looked pretty close to a warhammer 40k marine. Also the original creator of Xcom posted some of the old artwork when they were brainstorming, and there's a lot of licensed material there. Robocop, terminator, lobo, aliens. I'm sure they were aware of 40k game and probably were fans.

Looking at the art I wonder if the snake men were supposed to fly. It's pretty clearly a jet pack. After all their slithering might not be a particularly fast movement form. Probably removed for game balance.

[jackstraw2323]

Facings for Jaeger MK II proceeding well. Hope to have done by the end of the week and then I'll have all unit facings done, at least in draft form. Can revisit sprites I'm unhappy with later, or if someone decides to take a crack at one of them.

EDIT: ALL UNIT SPRITES DRAFT 1 COMPLETE!

[jackstraw2323]

Okay. I think I'm getting close to identifying all of the milestones I want to hit before releasing a pre-alpha version. Hopefully in the next week or two.

This should primarily be a testing release, as I should have my tech tiers set up and all of my aliens, so I can try to balance weapon/armor/deployments. Hopefully this will net me some feedback regarding my tech level balance issues.

[jackstraw2323]

Okay Pre-Alpha 1 attached. I decided to try and keep things narrow for this release, so here's what you can expect to find. There's a bunch of rules all prefixed with oXc-WOS you should enable all of them. Bear in mind they will probably conflict with lots of other mods as I've deleted races and items since I'm starting from the ground up in some aspects.

The actual campaign mode is unfinished at this point. I'm just starting research trees and game balance, so while the aliens are there and missions/deployments work, you really won't be able to progress up the research tree very far.

However you can test battles, and that would help me a lot to get a sense of just how out of line my tech tiers may be with their intended targets.

Tech tiers

• Sleepers vs. vanilla xcom gear / marsec equipment / upgraded pistols and rifles as well as alloy ammunition. Should be a bit of a cakewalk honestly
• Mechanoids vs. Upgraded Pistols and Rifles / Marsec Equipment / Storm Gun / Laser Rifle with Power+ or Storage+ clips / Alloy Armor
• Fungoids vs. MARSEC / Laser Rifle / TAC Rifle with DE Ammo and Mortars/Alloy Armor / Heavy Power Armor / Superheavy Railgun / JAEGER MK I
• CHIMERAS vs. TAC RIfle / HEAVY ARMOR / ORGANIC Armor / SMART LASER SNIPER RIFLE / COMPACT BLASTER LAUNCHER / JAEGER MK II / DISRUPTOR
• Cult of Cydonia vs. all of the above plus anti-psi armor and anti-grav armor

I've probably missed some recommendations but feeling like I'm going in ten different directions at the moment so I need to bring it down and focus on a sliver at a time. Right now that's working out the research tree so I can start looking at the campaign setting. I think once the campaign is at least playable with the research tree in place I can release something on the mod portal, but I want to be careful to not release something half baked.

[robin]

Great work man. I love the minotaur, looks a lot like the minotaurs in heretic-hexen:



Their death sound shouldn't be impossible to find; otherwise there's always the baron of hell (doom minotaur) death cry, if you haven't found some sound already.

[jackstraw2323]

I haven't really started on sound design yet as the lack of diversity will reveal, but that sounds like a great suggestion. I sort of thought it would be a good enemy that ties into all those mutilated cows the aliens keep leaving around....

[jackstraw2323]

Making fair progress on the research /manufacturing tree. Still it seems a bit convoluted. I've got two projects with the same parent and one isn't unlocking. Probably just a bug in my code that I'll see once I uncross my eyes.

[jackstraw2323]

research tree tier 1 skeleton in place, just needs some fleshing out and testing. got sidetracked onto crafts and ufos a bit so need to try to stay on task. Ufopedia art is going to take some time to produce, but i suppose that's lower priority ATM. Anybody working on custom crafts want to collaborate? I'm on osx and haven't yet tried to boot mcdedit with wine, though i suppose I'll get their eventually. I've got some clear thoughts about what I think makes sense in the context of the campaign, but it's going to take me a while before I even get to start looking at map files. Realistically I need to make two new transport maps to replace lightning and avenger, as well as a ufo map for a super dreadnaught that would fill the whole screen. Aiming to have research tree and manufacturing  skeleton in place for next pre-alpha. After that I think crafts/ufos.

[jackstraw2323]

Ugh. Totally fell down the rabbit hole on mcdeit and map view. fleshed out research/manufacture/ufopedia more and reworked some stats/deployments based on terror mission failure. Also refined craft ideas.

Assuming my trees are working I might be at an alpha 2 stage which would be playable, though maybe not finishable, and there's definitely content holes in the ufopedia.

[jackstraw2323]

Playtesting alpha 2 to see how my research tree is going and getting crushed, so trying to ramp down the difficulty level by giving the player some tier 1 equipment that they were having to purchase at high cost, and lowering enemy stats for sleepers. Also ran into the baked in bug for sectoids as the first encounter. I'm assuming that will be corrected for a future OpenXCom release as TFTD would have it's own strings, unless they settle for the workaround I used which is to use the STR_SECTOID as the race for my new aliens.

[jackstraw2323]

The good news is I've figured out PCK/Mapview/RMP for the most part. The bad news is now I've got a whole new toybox. I haven't had a chance to continue my alpha test for a bit so my game is currently stuck in the transition to the next tier. Craft ideas are starting to solidify, and I should be able to get the placeholder stuff in for at least two crafts in the next release, which should have the research/progression tiers in it, but I can't 100% guarantee that the game can be completed at the moment.

Current plan is for 4 custom ship maps to replace all xcom crafts. I'm trying to do some things to pull them in different directions to make deploying them more useful or interesting. Current working on

Dragonfly Dropship - Basically the updated skyranger. Not yet sure if I'm changing the floor plan much for the hold.
Mantis Interdictor - Similar stats to lightning as far as # of units, but planned to have a very different deploy/floorplan.
Rapier Strike Transport - Basically a mini avenger with excellent deployments and a small crew.
Broadsword Strike Transport - More or less the Avenger replacement. Different deployments/floor plan. Plan is still solidifying on this one, as well as the artwork.

Need to set up 3 different interceptors, but that's not nearly as artwork intensive.

[jackstraw2323]

Dragonfly is partially done, need to finish MCP settings, but pretty happy with how this has come out.

[jackstraw2323]

Pre alpha 2 update attached.

I wasn't as disciplined as I'd hoped on this, as my 2 and 3 goals got a bit mixed. 

Bugs may exist in the research and manufacturing trees. There's also some question about alien missions and races and if I've been able to remove the xcom 1 races completely. I've only played about the first 4 months, and the base has extra scientists to boost research for testing. Shotgun added and sniper alloy ammo added to try and smooth out the difficulty curve until you get into experimental weapons.

I don't think cydonia or mars can be finished at this time as I've still got to tweak the rules. Still testing tier 0-1-2 progression and just general troubleshooting.

CRAFTS!

• Graphics done, coding in progress. all three can be tested in the battle simulator
• Dragonfly is in, and partially MCD coded. Might have walls with holes in them at the moment, and the wings aren't quite right yet to stand on.
• Rapier and Mantis are similarly partially complete. Both of them are different enough tactically to make them interesting. Needs holes plugged and maps built, but soldier deployments work like I want them to.

[jackstraw2323]

I've been play testing and I think I've set some targets too high, so need to reduce some research requirements and lower some times. I've already moved into tier 3 of encounters and still don't have a viable air game for large ships. Normally in vanilla I'd have plasma beams and that would hold me until later, but I've restructured the air weapons so that the progression of damage is more gentle, but the larger ships also deal more damage so there's real threat of losing even alloy interceptors.

Also encountering more research bugs, and finding that some of my original ideas (Project code names, long transfer time on marsec items)  just aren't fun so going to edit those out.

Ultimate craft is taking shape but not wild about the look of it at the moment. I think as much as I liked the nose i kitbashed it just makes the layout a bit odd so the lines aren't what I want. Rapier looks better with new weapon pods and some position fixes, as well as the jaeger bay gfx.

Maps/missions are getting restructured anyhow so should wait on some portions for later release.