Money: "Patch" included, but tester needed.

[Bandobras]

I just checked the coding guidelines, and I don't see what you're talking about.

I guess it falls under the "Use K&R style of coding". But, frankly, I just learned C a week ago (on UFO:AI), so better ask on IRC.

So it's committed, right now?

Sure! Look at http://cia.navi.cx/stats/project/ufoai
I've left some of the code in a state not conforming with the coding guidelines, with a comment that this should be fixed when the code is enabled. I thought when you get SVN access you may want to correct that, in the process becoming accustomed with the style. But Mattn is so quick to censor anything not in accord with the guidlines, that he corrected the things 5 minutes after I commited them, before I had a chance to stop him. You can verify that I tell the truth by the logs.

The current tech tree has *very* few "intermediary research steps" -- one on lasers, one on "ufo tech", etc.  I think there are only four or five; the rest are all research on specific objects.

Worth a discussion, sure. What about making some "intermediary research steps" from the damage types? Like, you can use tachyon weapons after researching Tachyon Control, but cannot produce ammo nor reload weapon until you subsequently research Tachyon Damage. Of course names and descriptions then need a lot of work to make it immersing instead of game-mechanics-technical spoilers.

...small, extremely intense axial magnetic fields and an extremely high power density power source.  

So after collecting  Plasma Rifle you research one or another. OK. What game effects do each of them have? I'm not fond of things with no game-effect. I quickly loose interest in them. I think I would quickly mentally merge your two plasma research topics into one and research one after another without noticing...

Of course, those technologies have applications elsewhere.  A halbach array of crazy-powerful magnets (say, millions of gauss) could get you enough repulsion off of earth's magfield to hover -- say, Phoenix.  Incredibly dense power supplies (for example, stimulated hafnium isomer decay with gammavoltaics) could provide a vehicle with enough power to, say, develop a shield when combined with a shield-generating tech.

Oh, here you are. Good. I like that. Though if the separate uses of the techs you get from splitting are much in the future, it does not help a lot...

[...lots of scientific mumbo-jumbo...] Anyways, it's something I'm toying with, but not something that I expect to see included soon.

If so, please develop this on the wiki. This is the perfect place, really.

Whoops!  My bad.  I'll get that up today.

Thanks! Got it.

[Rei]

I'll start up the discussion on the wiki.    That's exactly the idea -- chained discoveries.

[Bandobras]

That said, while I dislike K&R from a stylistic standpoint, if it's your standard, it's obviously what I'll use.  

I guess this is what Id people use and this is how all this started...

I'll actually probably just use the suggested "indent" command in the future to take care of it for me.

I you code under emacs I can tell you which three variables to set to indent in that style. It took me some time (and costed mattn some gray hair fighting whitespace in my code) to figure out.

At such a time, could we get discussion of what effect killed civilians and surviving aliens should have on country pay so I can code that?  Is there a time when this discussion can happen, or should I randomly check into IRC every day and hope that enough people will be there to discuss it?

IRC is full almost every day. The problem is you don't like those hours... I now think the "soldiers" and "scientists" fields will probably be used for deciding how many of those any happy country will grant Phalanx every quarter or so. The fact that nobody voiced their oppinions on this thread for the last few days and that nobody protested the commits already counts as a weak approval of the general concept. I think if you ask on the IRC if anybody has strong feelings or pending ideas about alienFriendly and nobody responds, you will be free to do with this stuff as you wish.

About capitals vs. borders vs. additional script flags there will be one person that will answer your call and the fight will begin, until someone older steps in and decides. My oppinions about alienFriendly you already know, but they are not strong and I have no intensions of coding it myself, so my oppinion does not count a lot.

After seeing your patch I'm confident you don't need guidance, so just post a clean patch to be applied as a whole, or when you have SVN access, just commit things in small chunks that can be easily reversed. I invite you to IRC once more, regardless of the need to announce taking over of alienFriendly, because recent commits are often discussed on IRC. At least you should be there a short time after you commit things, to catch people asking you to revert your commit, because it breaks something for them (one my today's commits was reversed, and indeed it was erroneous, I then did it in completely diffrerent way).

So, I'll commit the rest of your huge patch, and then you can cope on your own, unless you come over to the IRC, when many friendly persons dwell. Good luck!

[Bandobras]

Karen, about your nations patch. After some balance testing I've come to the conclusion that nations react too much to mission results with the current frequency of missions. Could you look at it?

Moreover I don't understand why the alienFriendly factor seems to increase happiness, instead of decreasing it.

I also think that  an asymptotic reaction to mission results near 1.0 (say from 0.9 to 1.0) would be nice, so that a good player still has something to do in this respect after two or three succesfull months (even if plot-events will zero happiness every half a year).

[Rei]

Sure.  I don't have time to touch the code right now, but changing things is pretty easy.  There's one section of code, in cl_campaign.c, that has the equations that adjust how they react. I think the function is called something like "handleNations".  

To reverse the effect of alienFriendly, just replace it with its inverse (1.0 - alienFriendlyConvertedToPercentage).

 To cause an asymptotic curve on the top-end of the spectrum like we see on the lower end of the spectrum, and reduce how much nations react to a given battle at the same time, calculate what you'd normally set the new happiness value to, put it through all of the bounds checks, then average it out with the old value (possibly a weighted average).  Thus, if it would normally bring them to 1.0 happiness from 0.8 happiness, the algorithm actually sets happiness to (0.8 * 0.5 + 1.0*0.5) = 0.9, or even (if using a weighted average) something like (0.8 * 0.75 + 1.0 * 0.25) = 0.85.

It should be a very easy change to make.

[Bandobras]

Thank you for you help. The weighted average was a great idea. Now I balanced it a lot, so RC5 should have some nice happiness action going on.