Messages

1

Discussion / Re: New autobattle

« on: June 04, 2012, 04:30:58 pm »

When you're depending largely on a volunteer community for testing, "it'll be not boring eventually" is a less than compelling line of argument—especially when alternatives are already in place.

But on the other hand — it'll be stupid to invest your time to some feature, which is there only as a temporary solution to the problem of the lack of content. I'd be more inclined to develop some actual content instead.

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Translating / Re: Russian translation

« on: June 04, 2012, 11:49:59 am »

Скажите на милость, это какой же гений русской словестности перевел "particle beam weapon" как "лучевое оружие"?

Лучевая пушка - это то, что у стоматолога в рентген-кабинете стоит, а particle beam - это "пучок частиц".

И хотя я согласен что "пучковая винтовка" звучит глупо, но ведь на то русский язык и богат, чтобы придумать адекватную замену, например

Оружие на ускоренных частицах
Ускорительная пушка
Ускорительная винтовка/пистолет/чтоугодно

Так же из отчета по авиапушке: сравним

we can't generate enough power to suit this weapon just from in-flight electricity. If we want to use the PBW in combat, we're going to have to run it off its own antimatter-powered electrical system.

мы не в состоянии генерировать достаточно энергии, чтобы снабжать орудие в полете. Если мы хотим использовать лучевое орудие в бою, нам придется овладеть их энергосистемой, работающей на антиматерии.

Из английского текста очевидно, что пушка будет работать и на "людском" самолете. По-русски звучит так, будто обычный самолет эту пушку не потянет в принципе.

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Discussion / Re: New autobattle

« on: June 03, 2012, 08:33:41 pm »

Looks like the controversy behind autoresolve feature just revealed itself: you just do not know why (or even if) do you want it in the first place. As soon as you answer to that question, it'll be much clearer what kind (if any) of autoresolve mechanism do you want.

I agree with geever on the matter that the geoscape is the crucial part of the game, so it'll be a really stupid idea to implement the autoresolve mechanism which will allow to skip ground missions completely.

The autoresolve as a fix for mission dullness can be addressed by other means: 1) make missions more difficult. Not as much as, for instance, in XCOM-1, as we do not have the ability to save during it, but twice as many aliens per mission as we have now won't hurt. Also, the situation when in the beginning of the mission soldiers and aliens are standing face-to-face at the distance of couple of squares should be avoided, IMHO. 2) make less missions. For now, every single downed UFO generate a mission (if not downed in water). If you introduce some early researchable air weapon which will disintegrate smaller UFOs, it'll reduce the number of "dull" missions much.

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Discussion / Re: New autobattle

« on: June 02, 2012, 11:41:18 pm »

Your general approach of using past success and failure to model automission outcomes has some potential for addressing this problem, but it really risks introducting autoresolve as a macro-strategic gameplay mechanism: the player will learn it is in his interest to play easy missions and autoresolve difficult missions.

Well, first of all - define "difficult mission". If we could express a "difficultiness" of the mission in a floating point value then it'll be really simple to make autobattle results really unsatisfactory for such missions. Or just disable this button completely, like: button is enabled only if expected autobattle result is very good. Also the results of "difficult" missions can go into the statistics with higher weight. This way it will be to player's advantage to play difficult missions manually (faster statistics improvement) and to not autoplay it (bad results which will ruin the statistics in no time, as auto results also go there, and this time even with higher weight).

So let's summarize: you likes the idea of using player's statistics to calculate the mission's outcome, but have concerns about player using it too much, so if I will come with some simple way of preventing player autoplaying too much missions - that'll do. Did I miss anything?

5

Discussion / New autobattle

« on: June 01, 2012, 04:33:57 pm »

Hi. This is the thread about my new autobattle proposal (http://ufoai.org/wiki/index.php/Proposals/New_autobattle)
For those of you who do not know, I'll describe how autobattle works right now: two teams stand against each other and fire at each other in turn, with the probability to hit calculated entirely from magic numbers and dice rolls. By saving just before the battle and reloading several times, you can as well win without a single casualty, or totally loose.
The system that I propose is of course not perfect, moreover, I myself already found a big flaw in it, which needs a bit of thinking. But I think that it's still better than what we have now in every way possible. For some reason the idea was fiercely rejected, with the reasons, which will much more apply to the current system than to the proposed.
Anyway, I was looking at the code, and I think I'm ready to do my bit in a noble task of making UFOAI better. The only question remains: how do you like the autobattle to be improved? I do not want to spent my time writing the code which won't be accepted, so we need to think of a system which will satisfy everyone. Or do you, seriously, think that what you have now is the best simulation possible?

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Discussion / Re: Alien propulsion won't work IRL

« on: May 30, 2012, 07:08:00 pm »

I guess my point is that fixing it is simply a matter of adding a reference to reaction mass, rather than fundamentally rethinking the mechanism.

I do not propose any fundamental rethinking. Additional mass is indeed the best choice possible. The best candidate in earth' atmosphere is of course air. That way we'll get a ramjet, just like I wrote in my first post. In the space... Well, I read somewhere in the ufopedia that liquid nitrogen is used to cool the engines, so the said liquid nitrogen is the first in line to go out. The UFO flies from space, replenish nitrogen reserve, and then flies back.

Do we have any space dogfight planned for the later stages of the campaign? If not, then we do not really need the ability to make manoeuvres in space, just to get to the mothership.

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Discussion / Re: Alien propulsion won't work IRL

« on: May 30, 2012, 04:37:32 pm »

Edit: actually, reviewing morse's post, it looks like there's an assumption that the mass of the original matter+antimatter is still around somehow, which means his objection is wrong. Your objection is still wrong, though

Don't quite get it. In the description of antimatter storage you say that it can store 10 grams. In game mechanics it stores 1000 points, so you can easily calculate the mass of 1 point. But even if we increase that number, we'll need to increase it drastically, up to 1000 times at least, to make it look anywhere close to reality in respect to the linear momentum. But after that there will be a question: how can we miss something like this on our radars. The amount of energy released will be more than enough to boil the oceans, and should be seen by every single radar on earth surface.

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Discussion / Re: Alien propulsion won't work IRL

« on: May 30, 2012, 10:48:59 am »

>we do not want agrav

Well, sorry to disappoint you guys, but with this

In the simplest terms, it's a gravity sensor, scanning for minute changes in a background gravitational field. Everything travelling through a gravity field disturbs the field to some degree based on its size, mass and composition.

in "alien detection" you already gave the aliens the ability to play with gravitational field so advanced, that simple agrav looks child's play.

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Discussion / Re: Alien propulsion won't work IRL

« on: May 29, 2012, 10:00:10 pm »

The annoying thing about this is that it's bloody hard to find a propulsion method that properly illustrates their technological advantage without resorting to some sort of agrav or something of the sort.

Oh, it actually is very simple. Try this: "we do not understand the underlying physics completely. whatever it is, it lies well beyond every modern theory"
And yes, I understand the difference between sci-fi and boring reality, but even sci-fi must be self-consistent and go in accordance with the current science. So if you want to provide an explanation on some tech, let it be correct. If you can't - just provide nothing, like you do with antimatter.

About FTL I also have a complain. In "alien origins" you say "FTL violates relativity", which is, of course, true, but what you actually meant was "the way the ship pops in violates relativity", which is not exactly true, as we do not know how the ship pops in.
The theory of relativity is too well-established to just say "this ship violates it" and pretend that you are still a "hard sci-fi". But the thing is, that no theory can be "the theory of everything", every theory has it's scope, and you just need to go outside this scope, and limitations of this theory won't apply anymore. Modern human science doesn't go outside relativity theory, alien's - obviously does.

Long story short: when you need to describe something beyond modern physics, do not try to apply modern theories to that, because in that case you'll be bound to the restrictions of that theories. Just say "we do not have theoretical basis for what we see".

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Discussion / Alien propulsion won't work IRL

« on: May 29, 2012, 07:36:24 pm »

Since you want to be a "hard sci-fi", you should change your alien propulsion ideas.

It uses direct matter-antimatter annihilation to generate thrust by injecting protons and antiprotons into the reaction chamber, then channeling this explosive force out the back of the engine.

Well, sorry, but this just won't work this way. The linear momentum preservation law tells us, that in order to move forward, we need to throw something backward, easy as that. Suppose the antimatter itself is this "something". 1000 points of AM is 10 grams, while a full tank is ~50 points, means, 0.5 grams + 0.5 grams of matter = 1.0 gram. Assume the engine efficiency is 100%, and this gram goes out at the speed of light. The mass of the ship is... well let's say 30 tons (the mass of MiG-29). 3*10^9 / 30*1000*1000 = 100 m/s. The full tank provides one-time acceleration to the speed of 100 m/s in the absence of friction. Happy journey!
In the air, this engine can still work as a ramjet (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramjet), although ramjet is working only on high speeds, and you have to think of some other propulsion system to give the ship initial acceleration.
But anyway, in space - you're out of luck.

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Feature Requests / Re: Sniper rifle buff?

« on: February 17, 2011, 11:20:27 pm »

You can use self-propelling sniper rifle ammo with AM engine.

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Translating / Re: Russian translation

« on: January 01, 2011, 07:16:56 pm »

I meant constant "?" instead of letters. Looks like fixed now.

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Translating / Re: Russian translation

« on: December 31, 2010, 05:52:17 pm »

is it just me, or does this thread become quite unreadable after update?

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Discussion / Re: Alien language -- one for all you geeks

« on: November 17, 2010, 07:06:28 pm »

Am I stepping on any known sci-fi cliches I should avoid?

Hardly. Most of the people won't be surprised even if all alien captions would be in english, so they don't pay much attention to what alphabet it's written in.
On the other hand, if you want this to be "hard scifi", you should thing about poor aliens who will be forced to read these symbols. I mean, before making pictograms just as creepy as possible, remember that their main purposes is to be distinguishable from each other and to be easy to draw by hand (or whatever limbs these aliens have).
We, of cause, have some hard-to-draw alphabets ourself (chinese for example), but the most common is a way more simple latin. And if at some point our spaceships will fly into space to conquer other planets, it's captions will be undoubtedly in latin.

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Linux / Re: Gentoo overlay

« on: September 29, 2010, 07:59:50 pm »

no, that's not exactly it. of course this ebuild will do it much easier for a gentoo user to compile and install dev version, but it would still be outside portage.

But, may be i try it when i'll have nothing else to do

And if it'll work, do you mind if i propose it to be added to official portage tree?