General > Discussion

New user, with a suggestion you've heard 100 times, and some feedback

<< < (2/7) > >>

damiac:
I get you, screenshots and specific examples would obviously be more helpful than general complaints. Fair enough.

Back to the subject of battlescape saves, I know it's contentious, and I'm not trying to pick fights, just present the reality that I (and I assume lots of other people) don't necessarily have big contiguous blocks of time to devote to a game, but nevertheless, we enjoy games that take more than 10 minutes to play.  So a roguelike system of saving seems to address the primary concern of creating a new tedious but optimal way to play, while also addressing the concern that not everyone can spend 3 hours on a big battle.

I'm aware there are ways to cheat that, but as it's a single player game, there's no getting around that, and who cares if someone cheats on their own anyway? By keeping that opportunity out of the game's interface, at least the game itself doesn't encourage it, which is the most you should really try to do anyway.  In nethack I can back up my character if I really want to, but there's no button in the game to do so, so most people don't.  And nobody can complain to the nethack devs that it's boring to keep reloading their save and trying a tough battle again, because they didn't offer that option in the first place.

I know implementing battlescape saving takes work, and that the dev team is plenty busy on other stuff, but I think if the team would just say "Patches welcome for battlescape save&quit function" it might encourage someone to do it, rather than the current dev line of "We don't want it and it would ruin the game because you'll play in a boring way".  In other words, I'm asking for a small change to the project philosophy, not a change to the game itself. I'm hoping the change in philosophy might allow someone else to take it upon themselves to actually do the work, knowing it'll get into the game, rather than being relegated to a "cheat mod".

Thanks for taking the time to read and respond to my comments.  And like I said, great work so far, this is a fun game even as is, which only makes me want to help in whatever small way I can to polish it and make it even better. 

ShipIt:

--- Quote from: damiac on October 28, 2015, 07:27:51 pm ---... if the team would just say "Patches welcome for battlescape save&quit function" ...

--- End quote ---

Actually, this is exactly how the team always thought about this.

damiac:
Oh, that's interesting.  I saw a post by Geever that pretty much said no, we don't want battlescape saving.  Perhaps that was just an old post or something.

Ok then, so it's resource scarcity thing rather than a design philosophy thing.  That's a big improvement in my mind!  The community can provide resources, but they can't go against the design philosophy.

hwoarangmy:

--- Quote from: anonymissimus on October 28, 2015, 05:29:12 pm ---Until recently the fact that UFO:AI could not be compiled with MSVC while I'm not quite used to developing on Linux. As of now, more the fact that I always lacked the hardware to compile big projects as fast as I want and probably the issue that I would need MSVC 2013 for UFO:AI, using hwoarangmy's recent work.
--- End quote ---
Note that it might also work with MSVS2012 as I don't think much c++11 features are used. There might be minor changes to do (for non standard microsoft functions) but I guess it would be pretty easy to setup.
Concerning compilation with MSVS2013, I recommand to use the bundle
https://sourceforge.net/projects/ufoai/files/UFO_AI%202.x/2.5/ufoai-deps.zip/download
You just have to unzip it somewhere and set UFOAI_DEPS environment variable (or use cmake to set UFOAI_DEPENDENCIES) to the path where you unzipped the bundle.

Back to the subject, I agree being allowed to save in the battlescape would be a great improvement. For having read some UFOAI documentation, the "excuse" of the taboo is almost official and I've already seen that they ask people interested to go for a patch (as ShipIt just did).
For having done that for another open source game (Open Dungeons if you want to know), it is not straightforward and pretty hard to maintain.

For my part, I've recently tried a game with 2.6 version (I had previously finished 2.5). I stopped a few weeks ago after a little bit more than 100 battles because I have a new fight in a big map (bunker if I remember well) with many corridors. I tried to play it but after more than 1 hour, I lost patience and started to send troops everywhere to see if I could find the last remaining bloodspiders. In fact, I faced at least 1 ortnok and 1 taman. I got tired of searching for them and stopped the game.
IMHO, the worst is the alien being so passive. In big maps with small rooms, you can loose ages searching fo that last alien staying in that room. And when you send your troops, you have no choice but to suicide at least 1 canon fodder to expose it a little. I know maps are currently getting bigger and that's not a good thing IMHO.

anonymissimus:
Geever has his own opinion.
None can ignore my points about battlescape bug reproduction and increasing map sizes however.
I wonder how much devs play the game still ? Naturally, developing a game time-conflicts with playing it - perhaps there was more interest in battlescape saves if devs had more time for playing ? When did you last play one of those 5+ hours attacks on an alien base ?

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page

[*] Previous page