Re: [MAIN] XPiratez - N7 16-Dec-2023 Flying Tiger, Hidden Tentacle

[Arthanor]

I don't think Piratez is intended to be played by using only one style. Melee is strong, but in open terrain where you can get shot up, shooting wins back. Similarly, when fighting certain factions (with high reactions to shoot your melee gals on the way in, or high melee dodge, or high melee capabilities themselves) melee will be a very risky endeavour. Fighting chryssalids is indeed on of those cases.

OXCE actually has the capability of making "chryssalid proof" armor (I think it entirely negates the possibility of being zombified? It would be nice to have a "zombified only if damage was dealt" option, I very much agree). I don't know if such armors exist in Piratez however.

[Hazard]

I do agree that melee shouldn't trump guns in most situations, it's just that a strong melee component kinda highlights the whole "armor = wet tissue paper against chryssalids" thing. But I'll stop my bitching here. If we ever get an armor that the lids can't ignore, I'll be happy, but if not, well, cowering in a corner should still work well enough.

Edit: By the way, I like the 30 tile vision range. I'm not sure why exactly, but it feels better than the normal 20 tiles in X-com/unmodified OpenXcom.

[Arthanor]

I had to reduce my vision range to 25 and even still, the gals move quite slowly.. but I have a crappy computer.

I certainly agree that increased sight distance makes the game more interesting. It is a soft nerf for melee in open terrain since the enemy can see you even further out. It helps some midranged weapons because you can spot the enemy earlier and go to a good location to engage instead of spotting later and being in a worse position. And it is a change to reaction fire in that they can happen earlier (good?) But since they happen over longer range (up to 25-30 tiles away) the snapshot accuracy drop matters more (for a snap range of 15, that's 10-15 tiles short, which means -20 or -30% accuracy) so long range reaction shots are much less deadly. Now you get a likely miss at 25 tiles and another shot at 20 tiles if you keep pushing, instead of 2 shots at 20 tiles without being able to do anything. This "advanced warning misd" makes the player feel less powerless to enemy reaction fire and that's great. Stumbling onto the sight limit of an enemy and getting multiple shots (at only -10 accuracy for a typical snap range) is no fun.

It also makes weapons with increased snap range more meaningful for reaction fire, since they suffer less from the increased sight range.

I quite like it, and would play with 30 if my computer could. You get into more "long ranged firefights" since you spot enemies further and those are fun. Brutal close ranged is fun too, but that still happens in dense terrains and crafts. Now there's more variety and even some sort of suppression fire (the enemy is likely to stay in cover if they see you and you certainly stay in cover if you see them) and flanking mechanics (approaching from a side out of LoS to bring melee or short/mid-range gals into play) all growing organically out of the situation instead of being forced like in NuCom. And it makes bombardment/cover destruction all the more relevant).

The only thing is that it makes "infinite range heavy weapons" even better since you spot enemies further (so your scouts are less in danger) and can completely overpower the  (now more common) long range firefight with them. I'm thinking giving things like the HMG a max range 30-35 with a 1% drop after or something like that might be better than infinite. (Then it encourages hover armor mobility instead of just sitting on top o the Bonny). It becomes more reliable than a sniper rifle (which should keep infinite range!) otherwise as the weight of fire more than compensates for the lower accuracy and they are otherwise similar in needing a stationary soldier for lots of TUs.

[Meridian]

I have done a lot more testing yesterday and 20 is really the limit where we can go; without affecting performance on average PC.

I just hardcoded the maxViewRange to 20 again, I don't want to be responsible for people having these issues.

Who likes bigger range and can live with the performance penalty, will have to compile their own version.
Just uncomment what I commented here: https://github.com/MeridianOXC/OpenXcom/commit/295cd465ddbe81917d4f35a3a0a31d6f43cbfe6f

[Arthanor]

Really? I have a crappy tiny acer notebook, dual core "only" and 1Gb ram, no GPU to speak of and I'm ok at 25. It's not as smooth as before but SO worth it imho. Would it be possible to make is a battlescape advanced option with a default of 20?

I agree it shouldn't be a mod thing, since it affects performance and depends on the machine and user. But I love having the option!

[Meridian]

Really? I have a crappy tiny acer notebook, dual core "only" and 1Gb ram, no GPU to speak of and I'm ok at 25. It's not as smooth as before but SO worth it imho. Would it be possible to make is a battlescape advanced option with a default of 20?

I agree it shouldn't be a mod thing, since it affects performance and depends on the machine and user. But I love having the option!

If I make it a user option, I may/will make modders unhappy.
If I make it a ruleset setting, I will definitely make some users unhappy.

But I guess, I can make it a hidden user setting... it would be in options.cfg... but not visible in advanced options, so you'd have to edit it manually.

[legionof1]

Manual edit makes sense to me. I frankly don't think i would have been as successful in my current play through without the longer range. My initial rounds of gals came up almost all high accuracy low str. Parrots allowed scouting in relative safety and high accuracy let me mass fire at long range. If i had been forced into a more mid range game i would have been shafted by limited carry weight for ammo and heavy weapon options.     

[greattuna]

I'm indifferent about it, my gamestyle hasn't changed that much when I moved from maxdistance 20 to 25. Although it's still nice to have as a option.

Questions of the day: can I bring ghost\seductress outfits to an infiltration mission, can I just kill 'em all, and do I get all the loot if I can.

[Dioxine]

I just hardcoded the maxViewRange to 20 again, I don't want to be responsible for people having these issues.

I agree that you can't go above 20 on a normal computer (at least on a big map), because the game engine is crappy. I have scaled it back to 20 in the ruleset. But wtf have you done Meridian? Do you think so little about other people to force them to follow your whims? Have you joined the Thought Police? Unhardcode it back once you sober up

@Chryssalids: nah they're still very strong but there are armors that can take several Chryssalid hits. In OXC, the Chryssalid has to actually kill you to zombify you.

@Infiltration: yep these kinds of armor are allowed. And what can I do to stop you from killing them all and getting all the loot? This is always the default option. However the map is so nightmarish that most players probably won't want to do that

[Meridian]

I don't know what a whim is, but I am not forcing anyone to follow anything.
All my work is public, feel free to do whatever you want with it...

It took me almost 2 weeks (and 10+ hours of testing) to make that decision, and I was sober at a time.
I'm not a 13yr old teenager anymore, I think before I act and I stand by my decisions.
I honestly don't see any good reason of unhardcoding it right now, but as always, I am listening...

[Dioxine]

I'm sorry if it sounded too serious, I know you're not like that. I just tried to convey my indignance in a not-100%-serious manner. I'm very grateful for your work, I just cannot agree with the policy of elitism in any form, yours or otherwise, purely on principle. Sure, anyone can unhardcode your stuff back, except that anyone is maybe 5% of users because everyone else lacks the skills to compile code (and/or the incentive to learn). Also nobody will use a distro made by mr./mrs. someone, they will use yours since it is you (and Yankes) who had earned yourself a name in this.

So, in short, yes, your decision was hard, but there's no need to make such decisions at all IMO. If you put your time and effort into unharcoding a setting, why later remove such an option from your exec distribution? I simply see no reason to do so. Sure, a modder can f*ck up game's performance by setting this too high, but why should you care about it? It's modder's personal business. You're in no way obliged to protect modders, who are adults too, you know. Unless there were technical reasons (eg. your code was causing some unitended bugs to prop up, and you decided there's no point in wasting time to resolve these issues, which is understandable), I see no slightiest reason for removing that setting from the ruleset.

I don't intend to use that option in my mod, since it's a killer on huge maps (like Mansion, incidentally). But I still think that taking such an option away is going backwards instead of progressing. Taking any ruleset option away is going backwards, unless that option is badly written. Well I have yet to find any OXCE+ upgrade that is badly written Do you think it would somehow tarnish your name if a mod using your build gets unplayable because someone set max view to 100? I think that's silly, you should be above such concerns. It's not your fault how the engine is written. Give people freedom to make bad choices and let them learn from them.

I actually think unhardcoding that setting was a huge thing, and one of the most momentous changes you've made. Why? Because it exposed how bad the gfx engine is, in all its misery. This might stir further progress. Conversely, hiding stuff away and pretending everything is cool and fine is a road to nowhere.

(too bad Volutar was dumped... he was someone who could've repaired that...)

[Rince Wind]

Military Police give negative points when killed, correct?
It is always so annoying to have them in a pogrom.

[Hazard]

For what it's worth, here's another player who would be extremely grateful if vision range remained easily changeable.

[legionof1]

Military Police give negative points when killed, correct?
It is always so annoying to have them in a pogrom.

In program just kill them anyway the net score should still be in your favor

[Arthanor]

I am surprised (and disappointed) by this turn of events on the vision thing. I agree that putting the maximum vision range as a moddable value is not the right place (because then everyone would have to go in the Piratez ruleset every time they update and rechange it from whatever Dioxine decides to put in), but I don't see what is wrong with it as a battlescape advanced option? What could modders not like about that?

There are already plenty of options that screw up balance in mods (ex.: UFO/TftD damage types, instant grenades, psi LOS, psi strength training) and modders just list what the recommended options are. If the users want to use something else, they do and it's their choice and if they don't like the result they can just change it back, all within the game.

Saying that "you can change the code back" works for me, because I already compile my own version, but it doesn't for most people. Having it in "options.cfg" sort of works because it's easy enough for anyone to edit a text file, but then what's the point of adding the extra inconvenience for changing it? Trying to prevent people from doing it? It would be much better to have it as an advanced option with a disclaimer that it will affect performance.

Also, the map size shouldn't have an impact on the performance drop from vision range. If you see at 25 tile, the game scans a 25 tiles radius, regardless of if the map has 100 or 10000 tiles, no? It's still scanning ~2000 tiles per level (pi*25^2 tiles per level, approximating the sphere of vision as a cylinder). Number of levels should have an impact though, since that directly adds to the number of tiles to consider.