Caffeinated Xcom [Concept Only ATM]

[SuperCaffeineDude]

Cheers, I'm reworking the standard armor now, went for a special-forces take on the jumpsuit. This would be default, rather than a new armor class, with a heavier variant with a helmet and bulkier kevlar plates

Spoiler:

I was also testing out a flamethrower using the "shotgunPellets", it worked well shooting at the ground, but as some of you might know when shooting at an upright target the pellet spread is understandably a lot different, I've seen examples using explosions, but I didn't like the look of it, I'll probably give that a miss till I can find a nice way to feature it.

Spoiler:

I also want a worse gun than the vanilla-rifle, which I think should be researchable. And also I want some weapons for up-close. Not happy with the thermal-lance and flamer design just yet so that'll change.

Spoiler:

[ohartenstein23]

In general, it's a bad idea to do AoE damage with shotgun pellets; it can get pretty buggy.  Most other mods that include flamethrowers just give them a significant number of shots on auto fire to make up for the low initial incendiary damage.

I like the new sprites!

[SuperCaffeineDude]

I agree, I'm not really after coding my own scripts, just tweaking the rules, I'll come back to the flamethrower maybe. I just don't like how the auto fire feels atm, but it's a solid enough solution.

I've kind of finished my unarmoured uniform sprites

Spoiler:

I just need to sort out replacing the vanilla uniforms for the personal-armor and no-armor, which shouldn't take to long, then I'll move onto a heavy-variant.
Out of wonder does anyone prefer the mouth veiled or unveiled? In future I'll do personalised portraits but this is going to be the stock one.

And then that leaves the power-armor I guess, which I'll probably adapt from this old rendition...

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I also mocked up these a year or two ago...

Spoiler:

But I'm less sure I'll make those till way later.

[Mr. Quiet]

I really like those shields. I'm thinking it can tank 3-4 plasma rifle shots before hitting the unit.

Also love the two armors on the first photo of the front page. Agreeing they definitely should be default over the jumpsuit.

[SuperCaffeineDude]

I've not got anything complicated working on the shield, but currently it reliably protects against left-side body shots (thanks to Meridian), and head shots will KO on superhuman at least, it might not be balanced though, I guess I'll find out as I go.

Just as an update I'm working on body (sex & skin) variation, once that's done I'll look into adding more torsos and inv-portraits...


You can see how an early game force might look here...

Spoiler:

(Ignore the portraits they'll be changed)

Having an early ballistic shield seems a bit pointless, so I went for a semi-conventional armor that would maybe be on par with the alloy-per-armor, but lower stamina.
In game i'd also like to remove the backpack space from all xcom units to make them play more like a strike-force, rather than mary poppins, only with aliens, artifacts, and heavy munitions in their bags. I think it might help nerf the blaster-bomb and make securing aliens/wounded-allies a bit more easier to conceive of in your mind's eye.

Something else I thought might be interesting is making the blasterbomb ammo prone to explode when hit, that seems like it might be easy to implement and could extend to a flamethrower-armour.

Let me know your thoughts I guess, I'm still putting everything together in my mind atm.

[ohartenstein23]

Remembering your shielded power armor concept, I should tell you I have a script for the OXCE version of the engine that implements rechargeable energy shields on armors, complete with a nice flash effect when the unit is hit. If you'd like, I can link a copy of the script file and a ruleset mockup on how it works.

[Cerazor]

Wow, these are some fine cyberpunk troopers. Make my knees weak.

Arms spagetti?

But yeah, cripes these are super good. I like the beret and the... stunt driver outfit(?). They make the standard outfit look super cool. Reminds me of the Grunts from Half Life.

[SuperCaffeineDude]

Well remembered ohartenstein23 lol, yes please, sounds cool I'll take a look at it, I'm not sure I'll be create the assets for a while yet though (working whilst looking for work sadly lol), but I can test it out in the meantime.

Cheers Cerazor, I suppose he does look a little like a stunt driver, helmet reminds me of a rebel-alliance trooper, I'll probably pad the torso a tad to make him look a little bulkier, and get the female variant done, need to adjust the arms on the sprite-sheet clipping over the shoulderpads as well

I'll hopefully have a version put together soon though, like caffeinated_XcomOperatives or something

[Cerazor]

Just one question, but how do you create these? Also what program did you use?

[SuperCaffeineDude]

Best bet is to download a small armor mod and install it, then give it an edit it without changing any file names till you have something unique.
I use GIMP, but make sure you restrict your color pallet, I feel like most of the time you can do this by just editing the original sprites (you shouldn't be able to use any advanced tools(gradients/color-change/etc)), but keep a saved game ready to check how everything looks.

http://openxcommods.weebly.com/

I'd avoid playing with the legs and arms for a while, just play around with the torso.

I'm unsure what else to say really, just keep tweaking it till you're happy dude, I was put off modding for years and haven't finished anything yet, so best just to get stuck in with a simple concept.

[Cerazor]

This looks super handy. I wonder who wrote it?

http://openxcommods.weebly.com/xcom-soldier-sprites.html

[Dr.Crowley]

Wow, these uniforms are making X-Com operatives look more like GDI soldiers from C&C or ever Imperial Guard from WH40K I also like cyberpunk-ish guys, despite they would fit much better for Apocalypse story-wise rather than for UFO.
Anyway, great work!

[SuperCaffeineDude]

Cheers Dr.Crowley, I agree there's a contrast between the ballistic and alloy armor, I kind of feel like that was still the case with the vanilla assets when you go from ghostbusters to space-warriors to steam-knights lol
I tried to tame down the alloy-armor to a navy-seals look, I'll play around with the look some more though.

I've started to get my head around overriding the vanilla assets, I need to do the 3 other "races" now, hopefully I'll also find a way to expand the "racial" backgrounds so I can expand the inv-portraits.
I'd like to have some nods to the mix of nationalities by having some, Oriental, Arabic, Indian elements present. I'm kind of thinking of having the hijab (Arab-Female) and Sikh turban (Indian-Male), but ideally I'll need to have individualized torsos for that which I don't have a grasp on right now.

Ideally I'd also like to later add some funner elements like punk, emo, goth, neo-jap, afro, biker, etc.

[ohartenstein23]

Here's the script and ruleset example I promised for the energy-shielded armor.  This one file contains all the scripts and ruleset definitions necessary to enable this new feature with OXCE/OXCE+, you can just copy/paste it all into your ruleset for armor definitions or keep it as a standalone file in your mod.  The important variables for setting the parameters on the armor are the extended tags:

• ARMOR_ENERGY_SHIELD_CAPACITY: Defines the 'HP' of the shield
• ARMOR_ENERGY_SHIELD_PER_TURN: Defines regeneration rate per half-turn (i.e. your turn+enemy turn = 2 half-turns), can be negative if you want it to degenerate over time
• ARMOR_ENERGY_SHIELD_TYPE: Defines what 'type' of shield this is for picking resistances, defined later in the script if you want to edit them
• ARMOR_ENERGY_SHIELD_FLASH_COLOR: Defines what color group to use as a flash indicator when a unit with a shield is hit, defaults to a nice blue

To enable these features on an armor, you only need to add the tags to its definition, as long as those tags are defined in the same ruleset file as the armor; a good way of doing this is to define the armor regularly in your own ruleset file, then add a second definition for the armor only for the tags in the same file as this script.  The following gives power armor a 50 HP shield that regenerates 2 HP per half-turn, using the resists for shield type 1:

Code: [Select]

armors:
  - type: STR_POWER_ARMOR_UC # Adding a shield to power armor
    tags:
      ARMOR_ENERGY_SHIELD_CAPACITY: 50
      ARMOR_ENERGY_SHIELD_PER_TURN: 2
      # color group 8 is default blue flash
      #ARMOR_ENERGY_SHIELD_FLASH_COLOR: 8
      ARMOR_ENERGY_SHIELD_TYPE: 1
The resistances are more complicated since that requires editing the script directly, but I've given 3 copies of an example shield type that takes only 35% damage from lasers, 60% damage from plasma, and 100% from everything else while not being effective against smoke or damage type 0.  Let me know if you want some help testing this out!

[SuperCaffeineDude]

Cheers Oharten, looks cool, I'll look into it sometime later this week.