X-com Apocalypse

[Solarius Scorch]

I'd love to see a revival of Apoc with all of the features it was supposed to have (like multiplayer) and you can see vestigial parts of the UI designed for such features, but the game's so old and unloved now that I think even with the resources it wouldn't be worth undertaking a serious project for.

How could you. D:

[Angelus_EV]

I think it is best to do a full conversion as the Piratez mod, with new background screens, metallic interface and soldiers and aliens sprites. can even use the Battlescape tilesers from Apoc.

[LouisdeFuines]

I vote for OpenApoc :-)

[Solarius Scorch]

I vote for OpenApoc :-)

If there's a voting system, I vote twice.

I don't really care about TFTD, it always gave me the impression of a poor man's UFO: Enemy Unknown. Apocalypse, on the other hand, is an ambitious and deep project that demands love.

[SupSuper]

OpenApoc would be better suited for a separate project.

[Solarius Scorch]

OpenApoc would be better suited for a separate project.

Of course.
And?

[SenniTrebor]

Y

I also love the original X-Com: Enemy Unknown, but X-Com 3: Apocalypse was great ! As said previously, you just have to turn on the realtime combat and play. For me it qualifies as a full X-Com game.

What do you all think of the UFO After-series? I hated Afterlight for two reasons:
1) The entire game is on a time limit
2) Cartoony graphics (compared to Aftershock)
I take Aftermath as a average game, due the biomass crap and also the game going from extremely easy in the first half, to almost unplayable in the second (rather slowly, starting with special story missions)
Hovewer, there has been a mod (I've played it like before 4 years) that changed Aftermath into X-Com: Enemy Unknown (no, I do not mean UFO: Extraterrestrials or any other game ..), with fully 3D rendered Etherals (with capes, wohooo) and stuff with superhuman difficulty (lets say you are a band of survivors with several pistols,rifles and steel pipes, and an army of sectoids, floaters etc with plasma guns and blaster launchers is standing against you ..... let's just say you will have alot of casualties). I will maybe post a link to this mod if is somebody interested (and if I can find it)

And the best UFO strategic game in my opinion? UFO AFTERSHOCK WITH TONS OF MODS.
Seriously, the graphics are great, everything is allright, paced right ... used mods to add alot of real-life weapons and many sci-fi ones etc .... the only thing that bothered me was psionics (useless in Aftershock) and the guy doing Weapon Rebalance mod (that rebalanced absolutely everything including making better wargots and solving some bugs and glitches) stopped doing it, and the next thing in his list to do in his new version was to make better psionics, psionics weapons, etc. Dammit. The Shock game didn't have as many patches (Math had 1.4 ; Light had 1.5 + 1.6 official fanbased but Shock has only 1.2) as the original creators wanted to make it really like UFO:Defense, having sooo much things in it, but they got bankrupt :-(  because of that.

So my favorite UFO games:
1) UFO: Aftershock
2) UFO: Defense (X-Com: Enemy Unknown)
3) X-Com: Apocalypse
4) UFO: Aftermath and Afterlight (both had their faults)
[I haven't played Extraterrestrials or any of the spin off games like Interceptor and Alliance]

And now the main reason Afterlight sucked - NO CUSTOM NAMES WHATSOEVER !
Among other things like fairly limited soldier pool etc, etc.
The main reason why Aftershock sucked for most people - Extremely glitchy and crashy, could crash anytime, even the most up-to-date version had bugs that could randomly prevent finishing the game (the mothership bug, the starghost bug, the acces item by raiding a cultist temple bug) ...

Yes please give me the mods names so I can find them. For all three games that is.


[EDIT] found the combo mod for aftermath.

[pmprog]

I might just leave this here as a teaser... 

[Warboy1982]

you crazy S.O.B.
i love you.

[Muukalainen]

This game had so much potential. But I think they ran out of resources and had to scrap a lot of what they designed and rush it.

Number one reason why it failed was: Tim White and the aliens he designed. The art style was horrible and bland.

This is his site. His style is very far away from X-Com or Laser Squad.
https://www.tim-white.co.uk

I think the best part was playing with real time and fighting against the other organizations. Remake would be very nice as with mods it could be what they wanted it to be.

Here is something from wikipedia about the problems they had:

During the creation of Apocalypse, Mythos Games created the game but MicroProse wanted to create the graphics.[1] Julian Gollop called the relationship "disastrous", and said of the game "It was a disaster area. Apocalypse was quite a sophisticated and ambitious game, but it was a big mistake from our point of view. In retrospect, we should have originally agreed to do a sequel in six months, and spent a year doing it, like they did! It would've been a lot better."[1] Gollop recollected:

"After completing this game I know how Francis Coppola felt after filming Apocalypse Now. Just about everything that could go wrong did go wrong, and the amount of effort required to pull it into shape was immense. After three years of hard work and five different producers X-Com: Apocalypse finally hit the streets. The initial game design was definitely too ambitious and too complex. The aim was to recreate in some detail the events, organisations and personalities within a futuristic megalopolis. Each corporation had a leader who could be tailed, arrested, interrogated or assassinated. Organisations could buy and sell buildings as their financial fortunes changed. X-Com agents could spy on other organisations to gain valuable information. A sophisticated diplomacy display allowed the player to instigate aggressive or defensive alliances with other organisations. There were multiple alien dimensions, generated pseudo-randomly, and the aliens gradually expanded their empire as the game progressed. The game also featured a scenario generator and multiplayer options using a hotseat turn based system or a real time LAN option. Most of these features were implemented to some degree, but were finally stripped out due to the horrendous amount of work involved in QA and debugging."[2]

"On XCOM: Apocalypse the team size for that actually was 5 of us at Mythos Games working on it and there was a team of artists at MicroProse working on it as well. Again, it’s a similar arrangement to the first game where we were doing the programming and MicroProse were doing the artwork. But it was a disastrous project, even from the beginning, because one thing that happened is that the MicroProse art team were trying to change the design of the game. Then they were failing to actually deliver anything that they promised. They just couldn’t get the isometric graphic system sorted out in their heads. They did things which just didn’t work, like they hired a guy whose name I forget to design the aliens, and this is a well known science fiction artist and he built these big models of the aliens and the idea was that they were going to scan them and put them into a 3D modelling software. It just didn’t work. He had all this fine detail in these models and this scanning system just wasn’t good enough. Then they had to recreate them basically in a 3D software they were using at the time. Yeah, they were awful, blobby things. They were nasty. Terrible graphics. It was very difficult."[3]

[Arcalane]

Half the fun in Apoc was the pseudophysics on the battlescape/cityscape, let's face it.

[robin]

I might just leave this here as a teaser... 

holyyy shiiiittt

[Sturm]

I gave up on apoc long time ago. While stuff like weak weapons can be fixed by modders, other stuff like horribly bad AI, unfinished cityscape with unbankruptable, unsurrenderable, invincilble, forever farmable organizations are just too much for me.

[Solarius Scorch]

I might just leave this here as a teaser... 

I feel... teased. Very efficiently.

(trying to contain screams of anticipation)

[pmprog]

I wouldn't get too excited yet, I don't have an abundance of time anymore, and at the minute I'm just writing loaders for all the different Apoc resources. Currently I can load sounds, fonts, and the PCXs (which I didn't even have to write any code for).

One of the problems I've got, is that I can't find any information what-so-ever on any of the formats. PCKs don't seem to load in the UFO tools, so I'm assuming the format has changed.

Somebody must know how the PCKs are formatted, because there have been graphic mods (unless I just have a bugged version of PCKview?)