Him and I are talking about a 2 part base defense while on the PMs.
Also, i recommend MapVIEW II for good reasons.
How do you get Mapview2 to work? Any special folder or installation instructions?
Edit: I posted a screenshot of what im talking about over in the help:
https://openxcom.org/forum/index.php/topic,1321.msg92533.html#msg92533So I've kind of hit a wall on what I want to mod. So come at me.
Im actually making a Hack of X-Piratez to tweak a bunch of stuff in it and upchange some of the multimedia aspects of it. Im calling it a hack because its something you drop into the piratez folder rather than selecting from the mod menu - mainly because I have to reuse the same resources and items from in the mod.
But thats just an example of "things that one can do".
I had this unrelated Radical Idea about changing base defense maps so that every map block for a 1x1 facility is actually 15x15 map size instead of 10x10, And likewise the 2x2 facilities like hangars would now be 30x30 (you could even go 20x20 per facility block, with a massive halo-esque 40x40 for a hangar).
You can have a small facility connected by a longer tunnel inbetween, or you could expand the amount of floor space a facility takes up. You could also change Hangars to be 1x1 facilities now, alter craft sprites to be smaller so they fit, and have them take up the entire 15x15 size map block in the base.
(this can remain balanced by setting a base limit of 4 Hangars, which is actually kinda a nerf since technically you could probably plop 8 hangars in a base under vanilla)Also you could make base defense maps 8 floors high with the primary action taking place on floor 4 or so. That way you can stack a bunch more crap in each facility, have action going on multiple levels (ie in order to get up to the Lab you have to ascend 2 floors, in order to get down to the alien containment you must go to the bottom floor)... or have different levels of a facility separated by ladders and elevators. X-Piratez does this a tiny bit when it comes to the air shafts and the sludge tunnels, but most of the action remains on the same floor.
Some serious Stargate SG-1 style base defense mechanics could be implemented here.
A trick I used with mapview1 to cut down on performance overhead with tall maps... since its a REAL pain in TFTD to have a large 4 story map of any kind... Change the "empty" map spaces so that the Solid Stone areas are just a 1 tile shell all around.
Empty map blocks thus are a big hollow cube of solid stone. Since you cant see through, or destroy the first outer layer of stone tiles you don't need to see what is behind them. Neither do you have to worry about anyone getting in there and falling to the bottom. This lowers performance overhead because the game does not have to render or keep track of all of those tiles, they're just empty spaces.
