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Messages - Quizer

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61
Feature Requests / Show UFO number in event log
« on: January 21, 2013, 03:42:34 am »
At the moment, it always says "Our radar detected a new UFO near [base]". I think it would be nice if the UFO number the game assigns to it was shown in brackets here, since UFOs that you have seen before do get their old number back. That way, you could check back and verify whether you've seen that particular UFO before or not.

Also, maybe it should say "Our radar reacquired a previously detected UFO near [base]" instead when you've already seen that UFO.

62
Often, I find myself requiring a time setting between the ones of '1 hour' and '12 hours'. I get impatient using the 1 hour setting, but at the 12 hour setting, the ticks are too far apart and game behavior such as UFO pathing and completion of construction, production and research becomes erratic, which I'd rather avoid. Also, there's not much call to have 12 hours and 1 day time settings both - the difference is only a factor of 2, while the previous jump is a factor of 12.

Long story short, I think the '12 hours' setting should be changed to 4 hours or 6 hours per second.

Failing that, I'd like to mod those time settings for my own use. Is this possible with scripts?

63
Feature Requests / "In Use" column in buy/sell and production screens
« on: January 21, 2013, 03:21:15 am »
I'd like if there was a way to see how many items (total AND available) of each there are in the base, including those currently equipped on soldiers or aircraft. I hate looking at the buy screen and wondering how many grenades I should buy because the screen lists some numbers, but doesn't tell me how many are currently equipped on my soldiers. So I need to go to the soldier equip screen and check, go back to the buy screen to stock up, then go back to the aircraft screen to see how much ammo I have left... *yawn*

All this running back and forth could be avoided if there was an additional column in the item screens (both buy/sell and production), labeled either 'available' or 'in use'. Please consider including something along those lines.


Quizer

64
When your soldier is killed by a shot from far away, he gurgles and keels over before the shot actually hits him. In this specific case, I've observed hovernet shots do this, but I'm pretty sure it could be any kind of shot.

Attached is a savegame with a Hydroelectric Dam mission, where this effect shouldn't be hard to reproduce - just line most of the soldiers up near the fence and wait for enemies at the far end to snipe them.

65
User modifications / Re: Unbuildable squares
« on: January 20, 2013, 10:23:49 pm »
Geever was making a different point, one that is overlooked in most feature requests (and there have been several lately). You want this feature (ability to build on all squares) because it will make the game easier for you. But that doesn't make the game more fun. It just makes it easier.

Players usually want things that will help them win -- better weapons, more base space, larger squads, etc -- but the fun of the game comes from overcoming challenges. Good game mechanics typically involve simple problems with more than one way to solve them. That's why the blocked squares are there. Every base is a new challenge. Since replayability is key for us, the constant variation is important.
Don't get me wrong, challenge is important to me. I don't cheat lightly or indiscriminately - things like infinite money or hacking my soldiers' stats to something ridiculous doesn't appeal to me. But I do like to get the most out of what the game lets me do. To me, reloading my game a bunch of times to get a different base layout isn't really any different from picking the best soldiers out of the recruit list to make up my team.

But in this case, having the freedom to build my base how I want is more important to me than the extra challenge of making do with less space. I would mind the blocky squares much less if there was a base building that is just a regular square which you could build on top of them, letting you spend some time and money to get rid of them. I mind having the total square limit for my new base decreased for no good reason much more than I'd mind, say, getting 3-5 unbuildable squares in each base and having to pay 50,000 and spend 1-2 weeks clearing those spaces, though the economic cost of the latter may actually be higher than what the squares are worth in terms of gameplay benefit.

I don't mind variation, either. I'm taking care to build each base differently this time, with the entrance in a different location, so I don't have to replay the same base assault a dozen times over. But (for me at least,) it's an effort vs. reward thing. Having more space to build is literally priceless, so I'm willing to go to quite a bit of effort to secure that space. On the other hand, it's not likely I'm going to replay a mission because I'm not satisfied with the number of plasma pistol drops.

Random variation, IMO, is best used in places where the difference it makes is minor enough that it's not worth trying to force a specific outcome, or where other factors complicate things so the player is forced to compromise. The blocked squares, on the other hand, seem like a lazy mechanic to me, a cheap way to add more difficulty, but no real complexity. Fake Difficulty, to use tvtropes lingo. I'd rather find my challenge elsewhere.

66
User modifications / Re: [MOD] Easy Radar Rangefinder
« on: January 20, 2013, 09:42:13 pm »
CheatMOD....
This is really just intended to make testing base locations more convenient, though of course it's possible to abuse it in all sorts of fun ways. For example, you could load up your regular save and pop bases down everywhere to find out where all the UFOs currently in the air are, if any... (Though for that, it might be more convenient to just set the range of the radar tower to something ridiculous... can the engine handle a radar range greater than half the circumference of the planet, or will that make the game crash?)

Checked, it works perfectly. The only way I could make it shut down is adding mandatory flag to advanced radar and missing it from initial base template, but it is a scripting error, should work this way.
Yeah, that would explain it. I didn't bother to add the advanced radar to the initial layout.

If I'm using different layouts for the various difficulty levels, I need to add it to all of them, right?

I don't see a good way for this. The whole system depends on research chain.
If it is autobuilt with the mandatory flag, does it check requirements, or would that work around it?

67
Newbie Coding / Text improvements
« on: January 20, 2013, 08:51:11 pm »
I'd like to help out by cleaning up typos, grammatical errors and possibly stylistic imperfections in the various texts in the game, such as UFOpaedia entries, research mails and tip of the day entries, and so on. I'm pretty good at detecting those things, so I thought this could be a good way to contribute to the project that is also convenient for me.

I'm pretty clear on where to find most of those texts, but how/where do I submit the changes? Should I just upload the 'fixed' files to a forum thread here and let someone else take care of getting it included in the game, or is there a better way? Please let me know.


Quizer

68
User modifications / Re: Unbuildable squares
« on: January 20, 2013, 08:15:17 pm »
I always wondered: why? It is a game element, like research tree or the fact your soldiers can't fly...
Build space is already at a premium as it is, what with workshops taking up so much room. Having more than two interceptors or a second general stores are already luxuries I can't afford, so I don't need unbuildable squares taking up more of my valuable real estate.

As the game stands, there is no possible way for soldiers to fly short of coding in jetpack armors or something like that. But having a base without rocky squares is possible, if unlikely, so I want it. I don't really mind reloading a bunch of times to get the best possible outcome, but not to the point of ridiculousness. After a solid half-hour of reload attempts didn't get me a base without rocks, I've started looking for ways to force the outcome I want.

(Don't worry too much about it - people have different playstyles and so on. My sense of perfectionism just doesn't like to have those ugly, useless squares there if they don't need to be there.)

Quote from: geever
Yeah, it is very low. As you see 1-4 blocked squares are placed. To have 0 you need to be very lucky as it is only possible if the location of the access lift and the only blocked square is the same, this case building overrides the block.
Yeah, I thought that might be the reason. If the distribution is equal, that means the chance to get a base is 1%. Pretty low, but it's nice that the chance exists (if this is by design).

69
User modifications / [MOD] Easy Radar Rangefinder
« on: January 20, 2013, 07:51:35 pm »
I made this mod to make it easier to see the radar range of a prospective base and optimize radar coverage. This mod lets you build a new base and immediately add either kind of radar (or both), without having to wait days for stuff to build while having to deal with UFOs.


This mod encompasses the following changes:

 - Radar and Advanced Radar base buildings no longer require the command center to work
 - Advanced Radar no longer requires Alien Detection to be researched to be built (it still requires its own tech, however, which is unlocked when you research Alien Detection)

 - Build time for Radar and Advanced Radar base buildings set to zero days
 - Build price for the above base buildings decreased by a factor of 100
 - Build price for a new base decreased by a factor of 100 (for all campaign difficulties)

 - Build time for Radar Tower installation set to zero days (the game only checks build progress at midnight, though)
 - Build price for Radar Tower installation decreased by a factor of 100

 - If you start a new game, you can build Advanced Radar immediately (Advanced Radar tech added to 'already researched at start of game' list - does not affect existing savegames)



Hopefully someone other than me will get some use out of this. Enjoy!



Questions for more experienced coders / scripters:

 - I've tried using the 'mandatory' flag to cause the game to build the radar and its prerequisites automatically when building a new base, but the game crashed on me when I selected 'Campaign' in the main menu when I did this. Can 'mandatory' be true for one building only?

 - I'd like to make Advanced Radar available in the build list of any savegame that is loaded with this mod active, without messing with what is already researched and what is not. At the moment, a new game started with this mod has the tech unlocked, a change which persists even after the game is loaded without the mod.

70
User modifications / Re: Unbuildable squares
« on: January 20, 2013, 06:19:57 pm »
Ah, so it wouldn't be trivial to modify this stuff? Too bad... I only need any one solution that makes it possible / easier to get a clean base - I know it's possible to randomly roll up a base without any rocky squares, but the chance seems to be very, very low.

@geever: I have been looking in the .ufo files, as H-Hour assumed. So these things can't be changed via scripts yet?

Looking at that link, I see that MIN_BLOCKEDFIELDS is set to 1 - was this changed recently (as in, the last two weeks or so)? I remember getting a base without any rocky squares once or twice. I still have a savegame where I have a second clean base, and that was before I started tinkering with script files and stuff.


71
User modifications / Unbuildable squares
« on: January 20, 2013, 05:55:55 pm »
I've been looking for the parameters for those unbuildable squares, for example the ones that control their occurrence rate or their max number, or the function that creates them when you build a new base. Where are these things hidden?

72
Thanks! At the very least aircraft should be able to search for alien missions on the ground. Ground-based radar not being able to find alien bases may be intentional - maybe an alien base is too hard to see from the ground? But I agree these game mechanics should be investigated.

73
When you receive unopened mail (when finishing a research topic, for example), the "mail client" button on the geoscape screen starts blinking. However, sometimes when loading a game back to an earlier point of time where I have no mail I haven't already seen, that button is still blinking.

I've attached a savegame. Progress time until the current research project "UFO Theory" finishes, then load the game without looking at the new mails. When I do that, the "mail client" button still blinks, even though it shouldn't.


74
There was no way I missed the mission site due to random chance. I had 3 planes practically on top of that mission spot for 10+ hours, and I played through that timespan multiple times. The planes never found the site, but as soon as I popped down a base with radar or a tower, it found the site within 5 minutes. (The problem with radar towers is that even if you set the build time to zero days, it only checks at rollover (00:00) whether it's finished building.)

So this either has to be buggy behavior, or different sources of radar are intended to be unable to find different things. I'd like to know which it is.

75
During campaign play I suddenly found my approval rating in Asia drop at the end of day (00:00), which made me conclude I'd missed some terror mission or something in Asia, where I have no radar installations. So I load up my save from a day earlier and send my 2 interceptors and my dropship to scour the entire Asian continent for a ground-based mission. However, no matter how much I sweep the area, my ships never find anything.

In the meantime, I've created a small mod that makes it cheaper to build new bases and radar installations and causes them to build instantly, to let me experiment with base placement more easily and figure out the base locations that give me optimal coverage. So, by this point I'm wondering whether I'm just to dumb to search the right areas or whether the mission is somewhere else in the world and the approval rating for Asia is just collateral damage, so I load up my mod and drop a radar base on Asia.

And voila, it instantly discovers a ground mission at the extreme southern edge of the asian mainland. So I load up my regular, unmodded game again and send my planes over there. But for some reason, no matter how many hours they spend hovering or flying over that spot, they never find the mission. For some reason, only a ground-based radar installation (base or tower) is able to find the mission.

Is this intentional? I thought sending planes to sweep areas outside your radar range was to be a valid gameplay tactic. But if the aircraft can't discover missions on the ground, that puts a bit of a damper on that idea.

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