TFTD depth

[Nord]

As it seems, depth mechanic in TFTD does not work. Airborne USO not get status "airborne", downed or landed at seabottom gets status "touched down" and maxdepth rules for xcom crafts just ignored. Am i right?

[Hobbes]

As it seems, depth mechanic in TFTD does not work. Airborne USO not get status "airborne", downed or landed at seabottom gets status "touched down" and maxdepth rules for xcom crafts just ignored. Am i right?

Depth is used to determine the palette/sound during tactical missions. As for interceptions and the 'site is too deep' message I just asked Warboy and he told me to ask SupSuper.

[Warboy1982]

it's not "ignored" it's "vestigial"
the values ARE compared, but all the vanilla craft have a max depth of 3, so the check is moot, because nothing really goes below that.

mods, on the other hand...

[Nord]

Always thinked, that barracuda originally has max depth 2?
Anyway, values compared and what after? I mean, i manually changed maxdepth of triton to 1 and spot no difference.

[Hobbes]

Always thinked, that barracuda originally has max depth 2?
Anyway, values compared and what after? I mean, i manually changed maxdepth of triton to 1 and spot no difference.

Me and Warboy have been discussing this issue on the irc channel today since I'm also curious about if and when this feature works. You can read the discussion here: https://colabti.org/irclogger/irclogger_log/openxcom?date=2016-11-18, although the person to ask is SupSuper since he was the one who implemented it.

[Nord]

Ok, i am close to understand how it all works, and, well, a bit sad about it. Of course,  i  can write how i want to see this, but i'm not coder, so you pretty sure knows better. Hope SupSuper will answer something encouraging.

[AMX]

ISTR the only time the "too deep" message came up in the original was when a Barracuda tried to engage a Very Small USO that was moving at max speed.

[Nord]

By the way, max hight in xcom1 may be also useful for aircraft mods.

[SupSuper]

The only "craft depth" restriction in the original TFTD was that Barracudas couldn't dogfight USOs at Very Deep depth (which is rare). That's it. There were no Battlescape limitations, no transport craft limitations, no site limitations, no polygon limitations, or whatever else you imagined. It's all just flavour, depth is just altitude with a different name.

Therefore, all that "maxDepth" "maxAltitude" does in OpenXcom crafts is:
- Flag the craft as "underwater" (can only dogfight USOs over polygons)
- Can't dogfight USOs with depth (altitude) higher than the value.

So you can theoretically use it in X-COM 1 but it will likely not work as you expect.

[Nord]

- Can't dogfight USOs with depth (altitude) higher than the value.

Exactly that part do not work, as i can see. And that is a problem for me.

[SupSuper]

Well joke's on me, turns out the code only pretended to work when it actually didn't. It was mixing site depths and UFO altitudes (which are entirely different things), that's what happens when you overload terms...
I've rewritten the whole dogfight checks to mimic TFTD and renamed the property to "maxAltitude" to avoid confusion.

[Nord]

Sorry, it is late evening and i am not native english speaker, so i did not understand nothing. You found a bug? Or you explain how this feature works?

[SupSuper]

You were correct, it was a bug, I fixed it. Now it works same as TFTD.

[Nord]

Oh, and i see new downloadable build. Thank you very much.