Nightly Builds Discussion for Modders/LPers/Players/etc.

[SupSuper]

Awesome! Nothing seems to be missing. Great feature.
....Ohhh yeah. How are the death sounds defined? One per armor, or is there some way to have 6 unique sounds per soldier type (3 male/3 female), like with default soldiers?
Oh and what about names?

Hmmm this will probably require more potential breaking changes... but you're used to those right.

This is a cool addition.

Although i am wondering what will happen if a muton defected to the xcom side decides to use it's default armor only to discover it's masters build in a safeguard against defecting mutons, eg:

Code: [Select]

soldiers:
  - type: STR_DEFECTED_TO_XCOM_MUTON
    armor: STR_PERSONAL_ARMOR_MUTON


Code: [Select]

  - type: STR_PERSONAL_ARMOR_MUTON
    units:
      - STR_ALIEN_MUTONS


The limitation is only for the player, the game doesn't really care.

[Dioxine]

Hmmm this will probably require more potential breaking changes... but you're used to those right.

Hey this was just a simple question, not a request So does the system use the same soldier/civvie random 6 death sounds (3 male, 3 female) for armors? Does forcing gender on an armor limit it to 3 sounds, like with the civvies? Is it possible to force a deathsound through unit definition (as in currently existing mechanic)? Would, say, an X-Com Muton be named based on normal soldier names? I just wanted to know. I think all we need to close that would be:
1. making deathsound a list, adding female deathsound to override if unit is 2-gendered - in unit definitions
2. making an option for a soldier-unit to use modded namefiles list (override for global list)

[SupSuper]

Units and Soldiers are completely different ruleset-wise, and I'd rather not get in the messy business of trying to combine them. So for now you'll just have to deal with apparently "duplicate" information.

Anyways, you can now have per-soldier-type death sounds and names. See the default rulesets for details: https://github.com/SupSuper/OpenXcom/commit/61c2601c628d99083669be613876b50b74e67a8e
Cons: There are no longer any "default human sounds", so if you have any custom civilians or whatever, you'll have to assign them a death sound (the "female" flag no longer does anything).
Pros: You can now have multiple death sounds per unit (variations).

[SupSuper]

You can now make medal mods! See the Soldier Diaries thread for an example.

And you're no longer restricted to the default UFOpaedia categories. Though you can only fit around 10 on the UI.

[Warboy1982]

general announcement to any modders:

 if you have a waypoint weapon in your mod, you need to update it for the nightly, "waypoint: true" just became "waypoints: n" (note the S) where n is the numerical limit, and -1 means no limit.
-1 would be preferable to using 100000, as it flags the AI to use a difficulty based formula instead: (6 + (difficultyCoefficient *2))

[Arthanor]

Nifty! Now XCom can start bending bullets with 1 waypoint rifles and pistols.

Sectoids won't know what hit them!

[Hobbes]

ICYMI - Warboy1982 has implemented armed civilians with the latest nightlies, allowing civvies to have weapons, defined through builtInWeaponSets and upgrading their AI

[Warboy1982]

to further explain: builtInWeaponSets work much like builtInWeapons, but multiple sets can be defined. one set will be picked at random according to the alien item levels table. effectively this means you can have terror units upgrade over time, just like everybody else, simply by defining 3 sets of weapons for them.

both builtInWeapons and builtInWeaponSets will work on civilians as well as xcom and alien units, but xcom units won't get a randomized weapon set.
this is by because the player upgrades their equipment via research, not random chance.

as for the AI, the civilians and aliens now use the same functions and routines, the only differences are the faction flag checks, and civilians can't take part in reaction fire.
again, this is by design, given that civilians never DRAW reaction fire, it seemed a little unbalanced to allow them to perform it.
if you want some sort of in-lore justification, keep in mind that xcom recruits are supposedly the best of the best that the world's military has to offer, so it stands to reason that the general populace may not have the conditioned reflexes or training required to perform such an action.

[robin]

megapol ON

[Solarius Scorch]

as for the AI, the civilians and aliens now use the same functions and routines, the only differences are the faction flag checks, and civilians can't take part in reaction fire.
again, this is by design, given that civilians never DRAW reaction fire, it seemed a little unbalanced to allow them to perform it.

Yes, it makes sense as a solution, and I understand why it was introduced. But I wonder if it shouldn't be tweakable. Being completely outside of the reaction fire mechanics makes the player question this mechanics' consistency. If I can reaction fire and be reaction fired at, and the aliens can reaction fire and reaction fired at, why can't Megapol agents Robin mentioned? What is the ontological difference between us and them? This is something the player will recognize very quickly through experience alone, as long as there are armed civilians to observe (which is the point of this feature).
The suggestion: perhaps the 'no reaction' rule should only apply to a civilians with no builtInWeaponSet defined? If you're a normal civilian, you're immune to reaction fire, since nobody thinks of you as a threat. If you're a policeman with a .38 revolver, you are treated as an enemy and draw reaction fire. This should keep the vanilla experience intact and also make the mechanics a bit more seamless.

Of course it's just an idea, I have no idea if it's as feasible as it appears to me.

[Meridian]

FWIW I vote against it.

[robin]

I guess that enabling reaction fire to/for civilians is also going to make the alien/civilian turns longer; not really nice to sit through longer AI turns.

if the game had a robust factions system in the geoscape, which translated in frequent battlescapes alongside the allied AI factions, then having them deprived of reaction fire would be more jarring. But this system isn't there.
I'm a fan of the 1:1 design, as in: "the AI should be able to do what the player can do". Though in this case I don't see the merit, all things considered (see my first point).

[Hobbes]

I'm a fan of the 1:1 design, as in: "the AI should be able to do what the player can do". Tough in this case I don't see the merit, all things considered (see my first point).

The 1:1 design still applies: the AI is unable to reaction fire Civilians, which the Civilians can't do as well to the Aliens

[Xtendo-com]

given that civilians never DRAW reaction fire, it seemed a little unbalanced to allow them to perform it.

I don't see any unbalanced change with enabled reaction fire. You can set reaction fire to very low value, allowing civilians rarely but perform a reaction fire. Also notice that civilians don't have a morale loss calculation and they very bravery (80) by default.

[Hobbes]

Thanks to Warboy1982 a few new features for modders were implemented on the last days

However, those will require a small update to the alienDeployment entries concerning Alien Base Assaults.

Specifically, genMissionType was replaced by genMission (and needs to be replaced on mods that use it). This was done so that instead of a single mission (on vanilla, Supply) alien bases can now generate weighted tables of alien missions.

So now an alien base can generate different types of missions. As an example, the red base on the image above generates either Retaliation/Supply missions, the orange one Infiltration/Supply, and the pink one just Supply. And the yellow base generates any of the previous 3 bases (red, orange, pink) or a Supply mission.

And the second new feature (no ruleset updates required) is that it is now possible to add new markerIcons for bases

PS - there's a caveat with MissionGen, it can be used to generate any alien mission, except objective 3 missions (Alien Terror). If you assign those missions to a base, it will generate the UFOs but they will land on the cities and never launch the terror mission.