Author Topic: A thread for little questions  (Read 1274393 times)

Offline username

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Re: A thread for little questions
« Reply #2820 on: February 22, 2021, 10:52:00 pm »
Zoom, 88 miles per hour, time travel.
Why does it do this streaking pattern and doesn't hit everything in the radius necessarily?
This streaking pattern tends to be caused by having obstacles between ground zero and your target, creating a kind of shadow zone. With many small obstacles, you can get this kind of streaky look in the blast.

Re: shotguns.  Honestly they're only uberpowered early game anyways.  Plenty of things deal large amounts of damage to softies later by back to school or with high experience gals (ninja stars, e-pulse, slayer (although who even makes slayer bullets) etc).  Also what would peasants even use if the shotgun required aiming? XD  Besides:  The mod follows anime rules more than IRL rules :P
Well, in vanilla, rookies that can't aim get bazookas. Either they hit their targets or die trying. In Piratez, I tend to avoid this kind of behavior because I want them alive, no disintegrations, etc. I do find that peasants tend to be pretty accurate with the Reticulan Electrogun because it aims by voodoo, but this is a more mid-to-late option. Space Ranger Jaeger Carbine is a pretty decent weapon to issue them also, because it's internally accurate to the point where even the most cack-handed peasant can hit > 100% snap. Early on, I issue them pointy sticks, another infernally accurate weapon.

Offline BlorkTheOrk

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Re: A thread for little questions
« Reply #2821 on: February 22, 2021, 11:35:54 pm »
 After moving my save between versions my inventory has no amulet, body and head inventory options. Help!

Offline legionof1

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Re: A thread for little questions
« Reply #2822 on: February 23, 2021, 04:35:16 pm »
After moving my save between versions my inventory has no amulet, body and head inventory options. Help!
Did you overwrite the files or did you install them clean? The former frequently leads to file corruption and errors. also not all armors have all slots, and these slots are not immune to balance changes.

This streaking pattern tends to be caused by having obstacles between ground zero and your target, creating a kind of shadow zone. With many small obstacles, you can get this kind of streaky look in the blast.
snip
This is part of it, the other is the way aoes are created. Aoes are in truth an arbitrarily large number of bullet traces to find out what the aoe encounters and the correct actions to do. The issue is that because of voxel based tracing very wide aoes cease to have full uniform coverage because of dithering along diagonal paths.  tiny aoe only needs maybe 40 traces for ideal coverage but the really big one needs many magnitudes more for optimal tracing. As yet there is no engine end solution, because most mods don't play around with massive radius bombs lke XPZ does.

Offline BlorkTheOrk

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Re: A thread for little questions
« Reply #2823 on: February 23, 2021, 06:02:50 pm »
Did you overwrite the files or did you install them clean? The former frequently leads to file corruption and errors. also not all armors have all slots, and these slots are not immune to balance changes.

I just put my .sav files into my other game install save folder. I made some checks - all my armors has no non-vanilla slots. Also my amulets turned from 1x1 to 2x1.

I made it all because the version I played(the one with working slots) had no Conqueror for research. The other version had it. So at this point I just finished the game without amulets and called it a day. At this point I am not sure which version is newer(I have .1a1l and .k2)

By the way, thank you, legionof1, for helping all this year with the game.

Offline legionof1

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Re: A thread for little questions
« Reply #2824 on: February 23, 2021, 08:34:41 pm »
ah that would do it, 1a1 is a relic from before the additional slots where possible in OXCE. So assuming the 2 installs had the OXCE bundled with that version of the mod the feature wouldn't exists.

Offline RSSwizard

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Re: A thread for little questions
« Reply #2825 on: February 23, 2021, 10:37:10 pm »
Are you asking about nerfing them or buff them.
Well its both a nerf and a buff at the same time.
Dynamic pretty much would follow:
Only 3 shotgun pellets, each represents 1/3 of what the shotgun can do. The armor multiplier is increased, and it adds a little bit of stun damage because its painful. In Exchange the Spread is narrowed so it doesn't make it improbable. And in exchange for a tighter spread... Snap Shot accuracy is decreased (to about 90-110%).

The nerfy parts of it is the total damage output is reduced by about 1/4 to 1/3 so at point blank range itll be slightly less effective against zombies, etc. Also made it 50-150% damage so it stayed reliable, but because of the armor buff that means its still less likely to blow through armor.

Example:  Birdshot (23x3, +40% armor)
One benefit would be it can blast walls and doors better, like you'd expect it to.

I did something like this for the Shotgun Sergeants in GZDoom, made them fire the same spread as the player's shotgun but they randomly swiveled around just before firing so that the whole blast might veer off and miss you completely, or hit another monster for good damage (I gave the player a 30% damage resistance to it since they only do about 20ish normally).

Basically, imagine 3 musket shots in a sorta tight group, for a good shotgun like the sawed off. Im not really bothering with techy-shotguns like the scatter lasers and flechettes, figure they're not really shotguns but shot-hoses that intentionally sputter off in random directions.

@legionof1
Thats what I figured. Reminds me of the BFG Spray ray-traces.
I thought it did things differently, guess not
(as in, target every tile within radius, now draw a line from that tile back to origin, check what is in the path, etc. Starting with the closest first).
For years I thought there were also advanced blast mechanics in OG game too, for blast reflection and echoing off of walls and around corners.

Offline legionof1

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Re: A thread for little questions
« Reply #2826 on: February 24, 2021, 02:55:49 am »
there are more steps then what i described so it will edge around corners at shorter distances but like most of the engine, is the shortest code to a reasonable facsimile of reality. Corners got cut, but they got cut by professionals so its hard as fuck to tell until you pull the whole thing apart.

Cut nuff corners of a cube over and over and you approach a sphere. even if its made of legos. 

Offline Alex the KatanaCutlass

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Re: A thread for little questions
« Reply #2827 on: February 25, 2021, 12:40:40 pm »
What do you recommend for killing Mercs? Heavy Particle Accelerator, 3Shot Plasma Rifle, Heavy Plasma, Auto Harpoon w/ poison ammo, Autolaser w/AP ammo..? Thanks in advance.

Offline Nilex

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Re: A thread for little questions
« Reply #2828 on: February 25, 2021, 01:17:13 pm »
Heavy Particle Accelerator with its expensive ammo (mind the power drop-off over distance), until you can use Plasma Rifle/Heavy. Heavy Plasma is universally excels at killing stuff at distance, only topped by Scorcher for 2x2 shielded targets. Before I discovered early effectiveness of HPA I resorted to classic Laser stuff against them, even trusty Scoped/Super Magnums for a short while. Mercs are the toughest opponents imo solely for their grenade abuse, but also great overall stats and armament, not to mention Hovertanks.

In b4 Blood Ax serial slayer.

Offline RSSwizard

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Re: A thread for little questions
« Reply #2829 on: February 26, 2021, 03:17:03 am »
why am I losing a mission if I kill everything, then the debuff sprayers go off, everyone drops but it was in mission-end mode?
I mean I triggered mission-end by killing everything, presumably somebody would wake back up and start the collection process

Offline legionof1

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Re: A thread for little questions
« Reply #2830 on: February 26, 2021, 03:24:05 am »
that does sound strange, which mission?

Offline Nilex

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Re: A thread for little questions
« Reply #2831 on: February 26, 2021, 09:30:16 am »
He probably talks about either 'pink desert' terrain or ones with smoke substance that trigger at end of each player's turn.

As to why you lose:
Some time ago I came across a pretty extensive list of everything that happens when you do end turn in vanilla UFO:EU. A long list of things being sequentially calculated I'd never think of, so long and detailed it put a new perspective on complexity I didn't knew was there. It is simply likely that your units' status is being checked before the enemy's (despite you triggering a win condition) and game makes you lose the battle on the spot. As vanilla didn't have complex post-win triggers it never become a problem. So I reckon X-PirateZ may have overlooked an odd inheritance of ancient engine code. Or more simply even, the spraying action is still considered player's turn so when you die, you lose.
You could reload the final turn as the 'spray' is randomized so it will probably not catch all of your solders every time.

UPDATE: Found the list - Turn Order. Just noone ask me to be the troubleshoot guy :-X
« Last Edit: February 26, 2021, 09:35:14 am by Nilex »

Offline RSSwizard

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Re: A thread for little questions
« Reply #2832 on: February 26, 2021, 08:13:49 pm »
Haunted Forest
had 3 gals and one was already down, I found the last zombie and blasted it. Turn is auto-ended because no more enemies but then the fog sprayers go off... and both the remaining gals (who were in the purple) drop.
mission end shows total loss but points for all enemies dead

Offline Alex the KatanaCutlass

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Re: A thread for little questions
« Reply #2833 on: February 27, 2021, 11:58:02 am »
I had a successful base defense yesterday, but one thing I don't understand. There were these kinda violet skull explosions that I didn't trigger and no damage from those. ???

Offline Gals

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Re: A thread for little questions
« Reply #2834 on: February 27, 2021, 12:57:34 pm »
Not sure about mars lander without more info, screenshots or just the save would help.

As to cacodeamons, 2 of the imperial probes landed missions have them, also B rank wiz biz bounty has them too. Probably some others i can't recall, but those for sure

Well I got the Mars Lander/Zubrin (turns out I needed to capture a Belter - by the time I had completed those huge spaceship missions maybe they'd all died in the past? But this time I captured one and carried it back and aborted. Took ages because there are so many units on the ship taking their go during the computer's turn!)

I also needed a Study. The description hadn't made it seem like it did anything special, but it turns out the Robo Parrot I'd had for years and the Imp Corpse could ONLY be researched if I had a study, unlike 99% of the stuff in the game. Once I built one that research opened up (which is why I thought I'd done the Imp Corpse, because I'd taken loads back to my base in the past but not had any extra research options).

Here's my remaining issue: it looks like all I need is a Cacodemon corpse. However, in the 11 years of in-game time, I have never seen a Cacodemon (despite doing a number of Imperial Probes, Dark One terror missions, Doomed Farms etc). Since your comment above I have played another 18 months in game, taking days in real time, where all I do is shoot down enemy ships and do terror missions while waiting for Imperial Probes. In that time I have had five. Three were Deep One missions, two were Dark One. They had different names (one was Atrium, I can't remember the other). However, there was still no Cacodemon! Just the usual humanoid soldiers, Imps and Pinkies. As such, I'm wondering whether the version I'm playing has a bug that stops Cacodemons from appearing? After nearly one and a half years real time playing a single game, I assume one would have appeared by now if it could! So I don't feel like playing another week/two weeks/month if it turns out I can't find a Cacodemon.

Therefore, my request: is there a cheat to either create a Cacodemon, or or complete the Cacodemon research? If not, is there a cheat to get the research for the Conqueror ship so I can sidestep the Cacodemon and just build one? Many thanks!

PS I have also attached my latest save, from today (after just completing another Probe/Dark One mission; I also have saves from just before it, and maybe an autosave from during it).