Feedback from me

[MXcom]

Hi, I recently stumbled across your project and i gave it a try cause i liked the old X-Com games

So i installed the current beta and tried it, i liked it very much already! Although there are still lots of unfinished stuff it already captures the mood of the good ol' X-Com games imo

Since i have neither time nor skill to contribute to this with artwork or models i'd like to at least give some feedback (bugs/feature requests) i thought of when playing. So i hope this is the right place for it.


Bugs:
- ufopedia not working properly
- research not working(NYI?)
- statistics not showing anything (NYI?)
ok here comes the fun part:
- when starting a mission, lots of items disappear, possibly all that i purchased and are not of the starting gear. Console message: "Item 'xy' not allowed, removing from inventory. In the third mission i played, all i was left with were soldiers 1-3 with dual pistols, a flamethrower and a rocket launcher while 4-8 had completely empty inventories.
Well i was kinda amused about that ^^
For testing reasons i just aborted that mission and fast forwarded until the next mission popped, accepted it only to see that now i had soldier 1 with one pistol left while 2-8 were unarmed but at least got their ammunition back this time ^^
note: console stated a lot of "no inventory space" errors on the last 2 missions.

other than that, only some minor bugs like spotting a hostile unit through a wall, flirring cursor or a pink object appearing on the tactical map (placeholder for missing model i guess).
Oh yes and in one mission, one of my soldiers was placed far off from the ship and his companions.


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feature requests:

tactical map:
- clear indication whether hostile/neutral unit is in sight of currently selected unit (e.g. grey out units that are not in LoS)
- clickable buttons to select hostile units in sight of currently selected units ([1] [2] and so on, known from X-Com games)
- possibility to turn units without moving (maybe i just didn't figure out how to)

base view:
- When hovering over a room, with the mouse display the type of the room (either text line at the bottom or tooltip-like)


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All in all i can say that i'm pretty impressed with this project and i hope it won't be abandoned! If i find some time i may think of some more and write it here. Good luck with further development!

PS: I've posted some of this in the feature requests.

[BTAxis]

Welcome to the forums, MXcom. You should know that the beta you played is getting old. A lot has changed/improved since it was released (notably, the equipment issues have been resolved). If you're interested in playing a more recent version, you can take a look at this thread.

You can already cycle through all the aliens in sight. Just click on the little indicator that shows how many aliens are in sight.

You can turn units by pressing control. The unit will face towards the cursor. If you don't like this button mapping, you can remap it by editing keys.cfg.

[Hoehrer]

Hi MXcom,

thanks for your feedback.

Bugs
A lot of the things you mentioned are either fixed or WIP in the most recent code. The rest of the bugs you mentioned already been reported in the bug-tracker, so we do not forget them Especially the inventory needs some work (i.e. bug-fixing) before the next release.

If you know how to compile a game from source you could try the most recent SVN-code? Under linux it's _very_ simple. Under Windows it takes some more steps.

Feature requests
A new "alien-spotted" bahaviour has been started by the old developer-team, but has not been continued since then (AFAIK). But it'll be implemented for sure.
In combination whith that the old dev-team has started a new HUD-gui (Options->Game->HUD) where this should be embedded already.
EDIT: See also BTAxis answer above.

Turning without moving:
Just press "Middle/3rd mouse button" or "CTRL" while pointing at the direction hte soldier should look. (see ./base/keys.cfg for more)

Werner

[BTAxis]

Just press "Middle/3rd mouse button" or "CTRL" while pointing at the direction hte soldier should look.

Heh. I keep forgetting about the MMB, because my trackball doesn't have one.

[MXcom]

Hi,

You should know that the beta you played is getting old. A lot has changed/improved since it was released (notably, the equipment issues have been resolved).

heh :oops: better remove the already resolved feature requests from sf.
Are the newest files avaliable on sf.net? The latest i can find there are dated 2006-03-30 (win32-svn-binaries).
Unfortunately i'm not really familiar with compiling, but i may give it a try with help of the posts in the faq section.

You can already cycle through all the aliens in sight. Just click on the little indicator that shows how many aliens are in sight.

Hmm i believe this cycles through the hostile units seen by any unit of the squad (or am i wrong?). I was thinking of a possibility to cycle just through the targets visible for the currently selected soldier, to make clear what exactly he can actually see (and thus hit) without aiming at it to notice if the hit % is 0% or more.

You know, its sometimes hard to say if a target is in sight or not, say, when my unit is outside and the target is in a building on the second floor, behind a window.

So when i try to snipe that alien from outside, i have to move my sniper in a position where i guess he could see it, change to the second floor, aim at it, see if it's 0% to hit and, if so, repeat from step one. With an extra indicator for enemies seen by _only_ the selected unit, i could just move on step by step until that indicator shows up and then aim.

I'm pretty sure you know what i mean if you've played some of the old X-Com games ^^ I think its an important feature to show what exactly is in line of sight and what isn't, because LoS is an important aspect of turn based strategy..

(if it already works like this selecting only the ones in LoS of the selected unit, forget all i said :oops: )

PS: alternatively I can just wait until the next demo is released ^^

However, i hope you guys are making a good progress and never lose the spirit to go on with it because it's really really nice from what i've seen! All my three thumbs up!

[BTAxis]

Yeah, I think you're right about the alien cycling thing. It's worked for me so far, but maybe a per-soldier cycling mechanism would make gameplay that much smoother.

Also, I have here Windows binaries for revision 1113. If you download the SVN trunk, I can give you the binaries and you can check that out.

Also, you can press 'v' to enter first-person mode for the selected soldier, maybe that will help you decide whether an alien is in the LoS or not.

[MXcom]

I found the readme file now which explains how exactly to compile this, it pretty much clarifies everything, so i think i can handle it, i'll try it tomorrow or the like -

thx for your answers and help

[MXcom]

once more i've looked at the (old) version i got; while fast forwarding i noticed the effort that was put into the day/night cycle - pretty nice with the different angles in north summer/south winter and vice versa! Although, the changes of day and night scenarios are off set because of that; this change is always determined regardless of the north-south position of the site, as if it was spring/fall.
(eh, i hope it's clear what i mean :?)

If this is not already fixed in the current version, might be worth a look