UFO:AI needs you. Yes, you.

[Jack Grey]

I can't post any of my stuff right now, I have 3 exams this week.  I looked at H-Hour's link, and I think I could do:

Small 1x1 robot to be used as a scout drone
Human-Alien Hybrid Missile

I already have a model for this future-y looking rocket around somewhere, I'll show it when I can.  I'm sorry I can't find anything I could do on the 2.4 to-do list. 

[xkuehn]

Hello everyone.

Before I get to the point, I must first apologise.  

The server has had some issues and downtime recently, due to an external link posted on a popular website,

I might have mentioned UFO:AI on Slashdot. I might have given the URL. I should have known what would happen. So sorry to everyone, including the UFO:TTS and OpenXcom guys, and NineX most of all, for the disruption. And thanks for the great game.

I'm a grad student, so I don't really have the time to put in a tremendous amount of work. I also don't enjoy programming. (The programming itself is in fact fine, it's learning poorly documented libraries with illegible source code that gets me.) I'm totally useless with art.

I do, however, have a B degree in mathematical statistics. I also have a little bit of knowledge of AI, but it's mostly neural networks and thus not very applicable to games.

If there is some area of the project where you can use my help, let me know.

EDIT: The AI doesn't seem too complicated. Who's currently working on it?

[Thia Halmades]

Good evening, y'all.

I'm Thia. You can find me on twitter (@thia_halmades) and of course on Google+ as David E McGuire. I'm a game designer, writer, and I wasted my early 20s playing X-COM: UFO Defense. I'm particularly keen on seeing the Android version of the game ramped up and polished, there are a lot of issues with it, even running on my ASUS tablet. I'm hoping to help point out where the errors are and even possibly learn some code along the way (I know none; game design? Yes! Code? No!)

So I'll be reading the boards and playing the game. Currently I can't even get into a fight on android with any functionality which really kills it. I did see that the original X-Com mapping is in place, which I loved (the 2x1 blocks were in place) but the menus were very kludgey, it was clearly set for a mouse interface, and not streamlined for a touch interface, which you need on the tablet devices. Also a lot of long, ugly pauses for loading.

I hope to be a meaningful contributor!

[427sohc]

Well, I knew Dr. Lincoln La Paz before he died and he was one of the first to visit the Roswell crash site, as he was head of Meteoritics at UNM. In fact, he was considered to be the best meteoriticist in the USA, and, of course, Dr. Krynov (from Moscow, Russia) was considered to be an excellent meteoriticist (having written three books on the subject), too. Both were the best in their field, at the time, which was a fairly unexplored scientific field (that is, meteoritics). In fact, there's probably no one alive today who is (as) an expert in the field as these two men were.

I bring this up, as the relevance of what Dr. La Paz shared with me, and what was actually found at Roswell, might help with your efforts here...

Anyway, as Dr. La Paz lived in Albuquerque, NM, and, again, was "the" meteoritics expert (who, BTW, helped on the Manhattan Project, and, as far as I can remember, spoke numerous languages, including English, French, German, and Russian), it was a no-brainer that he would be called to Roswell to investigate the crash scene, as this was right up his alley and he was already semi-famous for his investigation of the green ligh

[TrashMan]

Methinks this project needs more support.
More modelers. More texturers. More coders.

As great it is to see progress, I sometimes feel it is draging along.

Spread the word!

[GlenSkunk]

Whew, looks like quite a few contributors for this project already! Hard to find something that hasn't already been done in some fashion...but I imagine we'll be able to work it out.

When I saw this project on Desura, I was rather intrigued - a free XCOM-like game with high reviews? That sounded like something to take a look at! Dozens of hours later in just one game, and I was hooked. Quite a lot of neat things going on, a very nice XCOM vibe with a lot of tension - it's always tense when you find a UFO Fighter invading one of your ill-prepared bases, leaving you eight badly-equipped, hardly-trained rookies to face Ortnoks with Plasma Blasters...even on the easiest difficulty there's definitely some real challenge going on.

When I checked the website and found out folks can contribute, I thought, hey, maybe I could do something! But what?

Just glancing over the TODO stuff and proposals, it looked like a lot of what's still needed is either code-related, out of my experience, or already being taken care of! I'd originally thought of seeing what I could do on the modeling front, but I have to admit I'm sorta rusty with the ol' 3ds max, and it looked like a lot of the stuff to be modeled was already being taken care of. I never could figure out texturing very well either, so that seemed out. Then my eye got caught by the talk of cutscenes...

Now, a little background. My primary experience creatively is as an artist and animator - most recently focusing on experimental-style animation, but I've also done hand-drawn traditional stuff and some 3d-based work. I've actually made a couple of animated short subjects on my own, and assisted a friend with another, so as you can imagine when I saw the call for cutscene stuff - storyboards, designs, etc. - it definitely caught my eye. "Might be an interesting thing to try," I thought. A storyboard can be useful for whatever kind of cutscene style is used, whether it's the full 3d CGI treatment or the more "motion comic" style you see in Neverwinter Nights and Homeworld. What worries me is that I've no real idea if my work would be of a good enough quality to work for the project - seeing the amazing stuff the 3d guys have been coming up with is certainly rather humbling, particularly the updated armor models I saw floating around. (Best I ever managed on the 3d front as far as a game went was making models for use in a Spacebuild enhancement pack for a Spacebuild mod in Garry's Mod...)

So to help any of you in charge decide whether I'd actually work on this project or not, I can offer a few samples of what I've done to give you an idea of what my talent level (real or imagined) is. To the Dropbox links! (And YouTube too!)

Experimental Animation: http://youtu.be/JcnsMrHbrts (pastels/charcoals on mylar sheets) - this may give you some idea of what I've done with animation, particularly with regards to story/pacing. Obviously, the style shown here isn't going to be used for this project!

Digital Painting (sorta): https://dl.dropbox.com/u/4376536/GD-Blood%20Star%20Rising%20v3.png - A little digital painting thing I did one time - not really great, but has some potential, may give others ideas too.

3D Props for Garry's Mod:
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/4376536/Armed%20Combat%20Corvette%20Front%20View.jpg
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/4376536/MilCock2%20and%20MilCock7%20Fighters.jpg
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/4376536/MilCock8%20Exterior%20Shot.jpg

^My one real experience in actually making 3d content for a game, albeit for a mod of a mod (confusing huh?). The modeling itself was actually the easy part, the tricky part was getting textures on (I had to do a sort of brute-force method because I had almost no experience with UV mapping/texturing whatsoever) and doing the collision models for the props based on sliced-n-diced models...to some degree anyway. I'm ashamed to admit that it's also been some years since I've actually done any significant 3d work, so I'd probably suggest exercising caution on this front.

So yeah, there's what I have (at least some of it). If anyone who happens to be in charge on this project feels I could make a contribution - and, of course, has a suggestion on where I could start and what needs to be done - then please, by all means let me know!

[Crystan]

Welcome! Well i like your 3D Props, good work. And yes, we totally need some 2D Art atleast for the campaign intro (burning buildings/city, ufos/aliens shooting marines/civs, goverment people sign phalanx contract - just the stuff the intro text is about). Iam sure even some 2d art of the tech pictures or alien/autopsy are very welcome.

[H-Hour]

Probably the place where we need 2d art most is our tech images. You'll notice in /base/pics/techs that each of our research techs also has an image -- except that we are still missing a lot. I'm not sure which ones so it would take some work on your part to investigate which ones are needed. The main issue is that our general style has been photo-manipulations rather than paintings. We tend to use text, symbols, rendered shots of models or photos to compile these images. This is not 100% necessary (look at antimatter) but in those cases where the tech involves things that can be represented visually, we usually won't use a painterly style.

Your animation style is cool, but I'm not sure we're ready to go in that direction for our intros. That said, if you want to explore an idea you have for a drawing style that could work or have some concept work you think would be great for the intro or other parts of the game, go ahead and post that. An open source project like this doesn't really "commission". No one will say: "yes, we approve, you should make this" based on your existing work. We're only really going to respond when you post something that makes us go: "oh yeah, that's pretty cool. That could work."

This is not meant to discourage you, but is more meant to say: make something we can comment on.

[Unisol]

Probably the place where we need 2d art most is our tech images.

Most(if not all) ufopaedia images for weapons techs' are rotating 3D models of weapons and their ammo - is that desired or subject for replacement as well?

[H-Hour]

Most(if not all) ufopaedia images for weapons techs' are rotating 3D models of weapons and their ammo - is that desired or subject for replacement as well?

Personally, I'm in favor of the idea of making proper images, because I think it will look better. But if I'm being realistic, I think we should stick to the 3D models for a couple reasons:

1. The models are likely to change at some point in the future so the tech images would have to be redone.

2. We should try to be consistent and it would be difficult to make tech images for every model and ammo.

For those reasons, I think we'll probably stick with the 3D models. If you're interested in doing other tech images, I can take a look and try to provide you with a list of needed images.

[Unisol]

If you're interested in doing other tech images, I can take a look and try to provide you with a list of needed images.

This would be great. I'm not an expirienced artist, but I'd love to give it a try. Anyway, if I fail, such list would be useful to the next guy, so I'd suggest putting it in the required artwork list.

[H-Hour]

Unisol, have a look at our Roadmap. I've flagged needed tech images under section 9: Storyline > Story Content. Keep in mind some of these research items involve story elements not yet implemented, but we'll still need tech images eventually.

In addition to this, there are three items that currently use models but I think they could be done using tech images, since the objects are not items equipped by an aircraft:

- Alien Astrogation
- Alien Propulsion
- Alien Detection

[Unisol]

Thanks, H-Hour. I'll do what I can.

[jffdougan]

I have no talent on the front of graphics/music/coding, but as I've played through part of version 2.4 (currently near the end of August 2084), I've encountered some UFOPaedia entries (especially in the research reports) that sound "off" given my background as a scientist-turned-educator. How would one go about volunteering to clean these up?

Also, although it's a touch meta-gamey, I'd like to see something like damage capacity ratings for the assorted aircraft.

[Gary Bonn]

I've found a way of helping..! I'm a writer of fiction. For the last few weeks - and now every Sunday - Bonzo and I have been getting you into the hearts and minds of pilots, researchers and others living and working on a PHALANX base. 
Do give us your comments   
http://writerlot.net/writerlot.htm