Messages

1

Discussion / Re: JUST STATING THE OBVIOUS

« on: June 26, 2011, 11:14:57 am »

Well you might not want to offend, however i have worked with 100 south Africans  (whites) in the UK, before they closed the visas to them and english written grammar is definitely not  a "forte", understandable perhaps being second language etc, and probably much better spoken English that many other countries, but taking me to case because of capitalization or whatever is called seem absurd, i am not a kid, i am not a writer and there is nothing wrong  with my writing, i never said i was Shakespeare, and my point is not being taking seriously because of several possible reasons.

Then the South Africans you have worked with were too lazy to learn. Written English is held to an extremely high standard in South Africa. Perhaps more so than in England. And I never wanted to attack you. I also never said you are a kid, I said it makes you sound like one. It's genuinely friendly advice -- sort of like "your shoelaces are untied". Please don't take offense; ignore it if you want.

6 - we seriously considered and rejected it.

So I think your question has been answered. The devs don't want to do it, you don't want to do it, I don't want to do it, and no-one has chipped in to say they want to do it.

I'll do one thing, though. If someone in Southern Africa really can't get the game, you can PM me and we'll see if I can get it to you.

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Discussion / Re: JUST STATING THE OBVIOUS

« on: June 25, 2011, 06:35:46 pm »

if you guys are from south africa, (i remember the rand being 20 to 1pound)  you could make a lot of rands

That exchange rate was during financial turmoil, it's now somewhere around R10-R12 for a pound. Also, R1 won't buy in ZA what £1 will buy in the UK.

agree or dont agree.... dont really care but i know how life is in south africa, electric fences on the houses!!!!!!!!!!!, oh man.....  is mental!!!!!

I'm from South Africa. I might decide to dabble in the code a little, but I'm certainly not "you devs".

I don't have an electric fence.

Having said that, violent crime is a big problem. Haven't been robbed myself (just two attempted break-ins), but you hear about people being robbed/murdered/tortured (rape is also used to torture). To see if they or others present can come up with more money in the latter case, or sometimes out of sheer sadism.

It is the result of general lawlessness and "rights". If a man breaks into your house and shoots at you, YOU can get locked up for retaliating. Often, anyway. And they'll let literally anyone out on bail and parole.

Vigilante executions are -- sadly but predictably -- on the rise. Hopefully The Party will grow a spine (not likely) or someone else will take over (less likely).

oh yeah , about this game only be spread by word of mouth, that is total BS,  the numebr one magazine in US and UK is big on indy games, there was a 1 page spread on xenonauts,  thats is the reason i bought it on preorder.

I stand corrected. It is certainly not the case here. (From what I've seen of gaming magazines.)

Now I don't want to offend; this is genuinely friendly advice. Hold back on the exclamation marks and use proper capitalisation. People will assume you're some immature kid if you make no effort. Nothing wrong with being a kid, but you do want to be taken seriously either way.

3

Bugs in older version (2.3.1) / Geoscape issue

« on: June 24, 2011, 09:55:19 am »

UFO: Alien Invasion 2.3 IA-32 Oct 22 2010 Linux DEBUG

I don't think this is a known issue, my search has only found vaguely similar claims in old bug reports where the users did not cooperate with the devs...

I have encountered this bug numerous times before in this version. I remember some details, and will try to produce a save file.

It is a save/load bug. Save the game while your dropship is en route to a mission. When you load that save, you will rarely see this bug. I have never encountered the bug with no dropship en route to a mission -- but then I don't typically leave missions unattended, so it might appear regardless.

What happens:

This is an all-or-nothing bug. It applies to every mission, every nation and every dropship en route to a mission, or to none at all.
All dropships en route to missions change their orders to return to base.
Happiness decreases in nations due to all(?) unresolved missions.
If happiness decreases due to an old mission, without the game being save-loaded, nothing out of the ordinary happens. I'm going to try and see what happens if I save exactly when happiness is due to decrease. (EDIT: Nothing)
Terror missions disappear from the geoscape entirely.
If you let the clock run for a little while, terror missions will reappear. When this happens, the player is informed of a new mission.
I did not pay attention to whether notification for a new mission is also shown for crashed ufos. (Immediately upon loading, as they don't disappear.)
The bug is deterministic. It always appears when a particular save file is loaded, or it never does.
The bug does not seem to appear in a save file when the clock is stopped and the game repeatedly saved/loaded.
The bug does not seem to appear in a save file when the clock is set to 5s and the game saved/loaded in quick succession.
If you save the game and continue playing, nothing out of the ordinary happens even if that save file will manifest the bug.

EDIT: Looks like I'll have to play the game for some weeks to get the problem again. I just don't have any of the saves anymore. Hasn't anyone else seen this?

4

Coding / Re: [SUGGESTION] New accuracy system

« on: June 24, 2011, 09:31:50 am »

I can not comment on the realism, but I'd like to remind you that complicated hit probabilities make for complicated AI.

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Discussion / Re: JUST STATING THE OBVIOUS

« on: June 23, 2011, 02:11:26 pm »

I don't know how much it could cost to ship there but that could very well bring the costs up, assuming that the would-be seller can keep material costs low (may not be hard, IIRC a set of 10 CDs costs about 10 euros over here and letters don't cost even that).

You have it the wrong way around. Material costs are lower here. (Are those CDs gold plated?) The postal system in South Africa, well... let's just say that every package would have to be insured. And remember that "here" is not one place. I don't know if mailing from South Africa to, say, India would be cheaper than from the USA or Europe. I doubt it.

Regarding

Well it doesn't matter to me one way or the other but if you do decide to go the commercial route might I suggest Matrix Games?

Another company to talk to if going commercial would be Shrapnel Games.

I wouldn't go that route. Remember that the GPL forbids additional restrictions. So there's no way that one could give a GPLed program to a company and guarantee that they won't just sell it without giving anything back. Assuming it would be profitable for them to do so. Also, I googled the companies and their games are expensive. Remember the prices I talked about above? $40 ~= R270.

If one were to sell games such as UFO:AI, there'd be two ways to go about it.

1) Just burn disks at home. This is the only viable option if the demand is very low.
2) Have disks made by a company. This is cheaper if one were going to make a few hundred identical disks. The disks also look much better and don't degrade in 5-15 years like CD-Rs do.

In either case, marketing would be the big problem. A game like UFO:AI spreads largely by word of mouth. If you don't have anyone who can give you the game, you probably don't know about it. Unless you came across it on the internet and don't have a good enough connection to download it, which is why I said that the First World would not be the main target.

There is more. If you are going to sell UFO:AI, it would have to include a manual. Not a link to the wiki, but a manual that is current for the version sold. It might be printed or on the disk. It would have to be typeset and edited. You would also have to fix the most glaring mistakes and omissions in the game before publishing. For example, 2.3.1 is currently stable. But I get "<TODO>" for a lot of in-game text, and that's not funny if you paid for the game and can't look it up on the net. You're not going to sell a nightly build, are you? It's better to have features removed than to include partly-functioning features. You'd also have to include source code. (You'd be on shaky legal ground with the GPL if you specifically sold a game to people who can't download it and then told them they can get the source on the net.)

Of course, there might be vanity purchases from the First World. People might like the idea of a printed manual and a pretty CD, especially those who've been indoctrinated that sharing is stealing.

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Discussion / Re: JUST STATING THE OBVIOUS

« on: June 22, 2011, 09:43:14 pm »

Geever is absolutely correct. Moreover, markets for the same game with a nonzero price can exist in parallel with a free download.

Let me give you some numbers and you'll understand. All costs are in South African rand. (Currently, R6-R7=$1. The exchange rate is less stable than between the really major currencies.)

NB: Note I'm saying KB, not Kb.

When I first came across UFO:AI, I didn't have an internet connection at a reasonable price. That wasn't even long ago, it was back when 2.1 was current. Big name computer games were going for two or three hundred in stores. (Depending on whether it was old or new stock.)

If I had downloaded the game at home, I would have paid a lot more than I would for any game at a store. It was something like R0.60/min with a download rate of 7.5KB/s. I.e., R>500. It would also take a LOT of time. The horrors of dial-up.   (South Africans may chip in here and tell you that you can cap your calls at R7 each after hours. This is true, but you'll get disconnected every so often and have to dial again. You'll also have a much lower download speed -- only analog lines were eligible.)

I downloaded it at the university. IIRC, it cost R0.30/MB and the tarballs were around 400MB. So that's around R120. Provided you're at a university. Provided also you can find a way to justify downloading source code as "academic purposes". (Or don't get caught, if source code has nothing to do with your studies.) Once again, the university connection can be used more cheaply -- but your connection grinds to a halt at these times. I've been in the computer rooms at 00:00 (when it's free) and you couldn't so much as open a web page with all the scripts downloading simultaneously.

I can't give you a price for internet cafés at the time. Current prices are not much different from what I gave for the university. It's something like R0.25/MB + ?/hour at a place near here. The download speed beats anything else on this list, though.

Currently, I'm on ADSL for free. I get to use it simply because it's cheaper than dial-up for my father's time-consuming work, even though he doesn't need need to pump lots data. R85/month for a 1GB cap, R140/month for a 5GB cap, R60/GB to temporarily increase the cap. Both at an effective download rate of about 40KB/s. Line rental is excluded -- but presumably you'd use it for phone calls too. There are larger caps with a lower per gigabyte cost. (Uncapped connections are exorbitant; R~600 IIRC. And I hope you like being throttled.) All contracts are 2-year contracts.

The latest I've hear on wireless prices works out quite similar to ADSL, assuming you buy a large (for us) monthly data bundle. Also on 2-year contract.

"Cable" does not exist.

So I'm lucky enough that I can download UFO:AI. Most people around here are not. Hell, most people are dirt poor.

Many people do own a computer, even if they have no internet access. True, I can give the game to my friends. How big is my social sphere?

Now, most big-name computer games sell for a little over R300. Incredible Corruption (nickname, so as not to spam) sells "classics" for anything from R50-R130. (StarCraft still gets shelf space at R130!?) Another store sells various indie titles for around R80 -- the two I've tried weren't nearly as well-made as UFO:AI.

If someone sold UFO:AI or Battle for Wesnoth by mail for, say, R40-R50, it'd be the only way many people could get these games. And totally worth the money. Offer to split the money with NineX for hosting, and I'm sure the community would support it rather than raising hell as Nutter predicted. You could have the disks professionally pressed and still turn a profit, just don't sell it to the First World!

P.S. Business is not easy. Don't say I didn't warn you.

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Discussion / Re: UFO:AI needs you. Yes, you.

« on: June 22, 2011, 12:14:21 pm »

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?