I intended to give this a timeley follow-up, but I haven't been active on the forums the last few days.
Let me explain using a gross exaggeration. Please don't take it as a mockery, I am just trying to illustrate something[...]
So, to summarize: from a technical point of view it would be quite easy to separate this part of the mod and move it outside. Easier than most such things anyway. But from a design perspective, it's simply ridiculous. This is not how you make games, even as an amateur. The reasons are so painfully obvious that I won't even describe them.
Point taken, though the same could be said about the geoscape palette
and I only asked you if you would consider it. Would you instead consider putting the whole commendation-stuff in a separate rul-file or at least add comment lines so it's easy to find? Because this is going to be a pain to sort out otherwise.
As for
OK, now we're straight into bullshit territory. X-Com is and has always been precisely about not having much control. If anything, XCF has been too predictable and too controllable, especially for a game about goddamn world conspiracies. I tried to mix things up by randomizing everything, but many such decisions only served to annoy the player (Syndicate hunting anyone?). Now we have way better tools to achieve that[...etc.]
Okay, first off: I can make my soldiers hunt down and kill every civilian on a terror site. I can send a pilot to his doom by going up against a battleship in a helicopter. I let my agents engage alien monstrosities in suits and baseball bats. I have total control over the direction x-com goes in regarding bases, production, research and missions - including when (or if) humanity should be rid of the alien threat for good.
We might have very different definitions of what the word "control" means.
I'm not sure you understand what I was trying to point out. This was about basic game design choices. I explicitely said that random events can be a good addition if they are handled the right way. Telling the player that he lost x points due to a totally random event that he has absolutely no influence on
is a bad design choice and is in and of itself not a meaningful gameplay element. You might as well make the notification read "you lost x points because the developer hates your guts". Unless you give the player a reason why they should care that they just lost points the notification/random event is just a distraction from actual gameplay (aka "press okay to continue the game").
Correct me if I'm wrong, but right now every interruption on the geoscape that pop ups is connected to player interaction, direct or indirect: finished research/production, detected UFOs, completed item transfers, training etc.
Random events that do nothing but "punish" the player without a prior action or a way to avoid that negative outcome lack any connection to player interactivety and (as pointed out above and in my prior post) don't add meaningful gameplay.
Gosh, now you're such a drama queen. "Waaah, I lost 50 points, now the game is unplayable!"
You'll notice that this isn't what I said. The point is that you're confronting the player with a meaningless box which that they have to close to continue playing. It doesn't matter if it's 50 points, 150 points or no points - if the player has no influence at all concerning this event you're interrupting gameplay for no good reason. Compare this to how the game doesn't inform you every time you lose points due to alien actions either - just a the end of the month. And those events are actually preventable.
Feedback is great. Good feedback is priceless. Your feedback is and has always been very good. But in this case I think you've built some sort of a model of how the game will look like which is not supported by much evidence and likely off. Why not give it a try first? Lots of people play the GitHub (unreleased) version - it's buggy, but perfectly playable. (Will require the latest OXCE, also unreleased but available from Meridian.)
Again, I'm not stating that introducing random events is bad. I'm telling you to refrain from introducing meaningless interruptions to the game, judging by what you've posted in this thread concerning upcoming gameplay elements. I'd be more than happy to be wrong on this one.
