Messages

1

Feature Requests / Re: Game Mechanics and Improvements Discusion

« on: August 23, 2013, 11:01:34 pm »

Hi Xeryx and H-Hour,
I'll answer to a couple of the (minor) comments, leaving the major ones to the devs.

I would also like to see the initial stats of the soldiers upped by 10-20 for all stats.  These are trained soldiers, and even though it is new to them to fight aliens, tactics are fundamental, but evolve for different foes. 

Very recently there has been a change on the experience points and stats growth, see here http://ufoai.org/forum/index.php/topic,7845.0.html. Now the soldiers experience a rapid growth in the first missions, and my veterans are well past the 40-es in their key stats after 20 missions or so. A good side effect is that you can hire a soldier and "retrain" it to a different type of weapon, if you need it, and get reasonable statistics in just a few missions.

Since I am on the topic of TU's. Reaction fire should not cost 8 pts (I read somewhere) 4 would suffice and it could be built into the first shot??

The TU's required for reaction fire are exactly those needed for shooting, nothing more. So a shotgun requires 8 TUs, an assault rifle requires 9 8 TUs for the snapshot, a sniper rifle requires 15. If you search on the forum you'll find long discussions on this topic.

A final comment on point (2). As I understood, one of the reasons behind having the cost of production the same as the price for buying is that the workshop should not be a mean to get significant amounts of money. But like this, if you have a lot of workers and anything to build you are just paying the salary for nothing. It may be reasonable, it all comes down to what the workers are doing during the campaign. Right now, my 40 workers are starting to produce laser weapons, and after that they'll probably start to produce advanced interceptors. But for a couple of weeks they just played poker in the workshop, since plasma weapons are for free, UFOs to dismantle are more scarce, and you can buy anything else on-line and get it delivered in a blink of an eye. I'm still in beginning-mid game, so I cannot judge on this, but I'll report for sure when (if) I finish the campaign.

Enjoy the game!

2

Discussion / Re: Disruptive changes to stat calculation in latest 2.5-dev

« on: August 21, 2013, 10:26:21 pm »

Here you are the stats of my soldiers, at August 5th.

In contrast with Telok I'm using at the moment a single team on the first base, with rotation of the wounded soldiers. So, the number of missions performed is reported for each of them.
I'm literally in love with my Senior Warrant Officer. She likes to move in the battlefield without armor, and can perform two aimed shots in a single turn with 70%-90% accuracy at medium distance! Also the increased mobility of the close-quarter gunners is awesome, and the possibility of the assault solders to do a full auto, move and keep a snap shot for reaction fire.

Code: [Select]

Date: 2048 Ago 05

Alien interest: 157
Missions:       23

Soldier            Missions Kills Rank                   Str Spd Acc Mnd Cls Ass Snp Exp HP
------------------ -------- ----- ---------------------- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- ---
Badieh Martin      22       20    Senior Warrant Officer 42  41  53  57  21  19  54  27  127
Tyler Valdez       19       17    Warrant Officer        43  30  40  60  25  16  17  61  124
Giulio Al Ghadban  22       15    Warrant Officer        43  34  40  55  20  63  18  18  125
Tiago Dubey        23       10    Corporal               45  37  38  46  53  19  16  21  125
Goncalo Avitabile  17       9     Corporal               43  34  40  46  21  21  48  18  121
Mikhail Finet      12       8     Corporal               40  33  35  47  20  53  24  19  115
Christophe Mohanta 15       7     Corporal               44  36  32  49  17  43  15  24  122
Emil Herring       11       6     Lance-Corporal         42  33  36  44  20  47  22  18  113
Stephane Coelho    3        5     Lance-Corporal         34  30  33  33  20  40  20  16  109
Luis Nakamura      22       4     Lance-Corporal         45  35  27  42  37  15  15  22  120
Thierry Herring    4        3     Lance-Corporal         41  31  36  32  19  22  16  45  110
Teresa Campos      12       2     Rifleman               42  27  30  38  31  24  21  19  110
Xavier Heikkinen   3        1     Rifleman               40  28  30  32  21  24  23  15  112

On the bad side, with this change the green bars used to represent the experience can very easily overlap with the labels. For example Giulio Al Ghadban has 63 in the assault skill with only 22 missions. In italian "Highly Proficient" has been translated into "Espertissimo" that hides the bar for a great part. I vote for removing the labels, considering also that having "mediocre" soldiers is one of the frequent complaints from new players on the forum.

3

Linux / Re: black screen with Intel and latest Mesa

« on: August 09, 2013, 12:41:56 pm »

I tried again with the latest commit, the library libtxc_dxtn NOT installed and after moving away the configuration file to simulate a clean installation. Now I see the intro video, the menu and I could even enter a skirmish. So, at least for my configuration, the new defaults are much better than before.

But in the bug trucker v4hn says that he cannot play on he's netbook with texture compression disabled, so the last word on the topic is on him.

4

Linux / black screen with Intel and latest Mesa

« on: August 07, 2013, 11:43:23 am »

Hello,
I'm writing to report a very bad problem that involves UFOAI in Linux with the latest Mesa.

The bug: the game is just a completely black screen, apart from the green bar during the first loading screen. The buttons in the main menu work, if you remember their position, but the screen is simply a black rectangle.

The cause: with the release of version 9.1 of the Mesa OpenGL at the beginning of the year there have been changes in order to extend the support for textures compression with the algorithm S3TC. Unfortunately none of the distributions out there support on-line compression and decompression out of the box because of patent issues in the US, so it is required to manually install an external, optional, library that implement the algorithm.

The solution: I can play again after executing one of these two actions:
a. set to "0" the entries r_intel_hack and r_ext_s3tc_compression in config.cfg
b. install the libtxc_dxtn library

Notice that libtxc_dxtn is available in Fedora and in Ubuntu, while Debian provides a (somewhat) compatible patent-free implementation called S2TC with the library libtxc-dxtn-s2tc. I'm currently running Fedora 18, and UFOAI v2.5-dev from git, but since the cause is external to the game the bug probably happens with version 2.4 too.

I'm attaching as reference the logs from a buggy execution, with compression disabled (playable) and with s3tc enabled (playable). You can imagine for sure how a black screen appears .