Messages

1

Bugs in stable version (2.5) / Re: Weight penalties

« on: November 10, 2012, 03:14:09 am »

I would say that came out of sudden and pretty hard -  my soldiers are not heavy loaded (  sniper rifle - 2 grenades , 2 clips and medpack with nano armour ) and time units went from 30+ to under 20 (so no aimed shot at all, even if there is no movement involved).  Paired with random crashes and freezes it is pretty frustrating.

Sniper can't really have medikit, try to remove weight so that load stays green and you have all TU's again. Which brings to my finding, if I add combat knife to loaded soldier I get half of TU's vs without adding combat knife, so current system is kind of on/off, maybe plan is to develop system to be so that it gradually takes TU's away more you add weight? That way penalty would appear more natural, but I have no idea how complex such is or what it would break.

Overall I like the change, brings up importance of tactical planning as one can't have whole armory with him, so one has to change items per mission.

2

Tactics / Re: 2.5 dev combat

« on: November 10, 2012, 03:06:46 am »

Minor opinion here: Bleeding soldiers need to stabilise after the last alien is killed.

I just lost my best sniper because someone reaction killed the last alien when I'd only gotten one of the two wounds healed.

One solution would be to have battlescape end only after one is ready and hits the leave button, kind of how in JA2 it had, you collected stuff and patched up guys after the battle and then left the area.

Certainly it is good to have guy to bleed death if not patched and travelling for 10 hours, also brings up point of having enough medical supplies to be able to patch guys, maybe landing craft should house medikit or two though?

I think my soldiers need a gym, started new campaign and flamer guy can't carry more than flamer, armor and one grenade, probably need to swap for another soldier as that one is bit weak for heavy weapon guy, despite of his skills.

Can't now put medikit for every dude, also for grenade launcher guys have to do without 2nd gun to be able to carry spare grenades, so quite big change to tactics is in order, to work with weight penalties imo. Not sure if gradual penalty would be something to aim at some point, adding combat knife can now half the TU's.

3

Bugs in stable version (2.5) / Re: Weight penalties

« on: November 08, 2012, 05:22:58 pm »

Shouldn't a weight penalty just increase movement TU cost rather than reducing overall TUs available?  I suppose that might not provide enough room for fine tuning, unless the base TUs were increased or fractional TUs were used.  I'm just thinking for example about someone with a heavy MG.  They are slow to get into position, but once there they can fire normally.  The time to shoot shouldn't change but the time to move should and the total time available to a unit should be fairly consistent.

But if one swings that MG 90 degrees or even 60 degrees to right, guy with pistol still can do it faster, also if walking with the MG and one need to shoot all of sudden, it will take longer to make first shot with MG than with pistol.

Also everything you carry increases your inertia, making movements indeed slower.

I think reducing available TUs can work just fine as it really reduces events you can do for given time, which is what slower movements will do, must test with new game, good to know that it renders savegames bit useless.

If one has gun trained to target already, there lower TU usage to shoot might be of course something to look into, or maybe there already is such, but I haven't just found that?

4

Tactics / Re: 2.5 dev combat

« on: November 08, 2012, 02:33:27 pm »

Plasma rifle is a lot dependent on soldier's skill. Picking the right squad is important, I always choose to recruit only troops with 30+ mind, 20+ speed, accuracy and one weapon skill. Filtering them every month is annoying, but it's important. In my game, december 2084, plasma rifle is main killing weapon. I have two in squad, and in the last mission they accounted for all 6 aliens from crashed fighter, 5 of them in first turn. I found full auto capable of reliably hitting alien without any cover at least once over half of small map.

I found secondary weapons to be quite useful on some troops. While guys with assault rifles won't use them much, maybe never, snipers, flamers, GL and RL troops will need them. Essentially everything with either slow action or limited range needs complementary secondary weapon.

I think my game is at November 2084 currently, I use mainly laser rifles now.

Not sure how those weight penalties will change things, it might be that fast small weapons become more useful now, plasma rifle was using less TU's than assault rifle if I remember correctly. Electromagnetic gun is such that I can shoot it at the moment, have to wait a bit so that hard working guys get things balanced again, but certainly this new weight penalty system will change our tactics and even it will mean lot of changes how I play, they are probably eventually going to be again one great improvement.

Before you rush to update to have that feature, I suggest looking my post from bug reports section.

5

Bugs in stable version (2.5) / Weight penalties

« on: November 08, 2012, 09:23:10 am »

I did compile new version from source few hours ago and noticed that there are now weights reported on inventory screen, also my soldiers have only around 16TU's while before they had nearly 30.

If I understand correctly weight penalties have been implemented, at least can't remember seeing weights before this in my short trip to UFO:AI world.

One of my soldier has 16.7kg/25kg load and it shows up as red which probably means weight penalties being in effect.

Soldier has following equipments:
Laser rifle
2x DF-L cartridges
Frag. grenade
Flashbang
Medikit

Soldier has also Nano armor.

With bit of testing I found out that it is not possible to wear nano armor without weight penalty which in practice means that can't use medikit at all because only 16TU's is maximum.

Probably balancing of feature is still under way as feature is very new one?

Thought to let you know about what I found out, but might be planned?

What I think is that maybe there is bug making weight penalty so early before reaching that 25kg, but as I'm so new I can only guess and be probably wrong in many aspect, don't hit the face

6

Tactics / Re: 2.5 dev combat

« on: November 08, 2012, 01:02:30 am »

I find assault rifle with full auto to be best with bloodspiders, actually I find myself preferring assault rifle over plasma rifle because with assault rifle enemy is still killable with full auto mode from typical range where I spot enemy, while with plasma rifle soldiers are not hitting the target in any other mode than snap shot it seems, surely if enemy is around 3-4 squares away, then plasma rifle is better, but 10 squares or more is range where I mostly need to shoot at.

Of course I must note that I play at very easy and find that level to match my skills (that are none) perfectly, enough challenge to keep troops alive but not frustrating murdering challenge like most games I find. I play to enjoy not to work

Also I have found out that sometimes those lizzard guys retreat and run around a building in attempt to flank me or surprise from behind, also they seem to attempt to get better shot by going to building from backdoor and then approach without being detected to closer to my troops. Maybe I just imagine things, but if it is so, then I find AI being much better than I have seen anywhere else.

Sometimes they get however bit foolish, having 8 guns pointed at one AI he still runs to open in attempt to get those civilians, or maybe he just was getting mad rage as I had bombarded him with grenades of all sorts from cover.

I guess moving and trying to maintain being covered despite enemy movements and still have several guns pointed with reflection fire on would be way to go, my attempts at that have been somewhat successful, 3 guys shooting 3 round burst with assault rifles as reflection fire has had good effect to lessen deaths among my troops.

I recently acquired lasers and things got quite bit easier with those, because of range and sheer power, now only two guys need to shoot lizard and it goes down.

However I think that with more difficult setting it will become quickly frustrating at least for me, surely it is superior enemy that one has to fight and at normal level I would think that it should be quite a struggle to fight off that enemy, playing very hard level probably should be nearly impossible with only perfect tactics leading victory. I'm too scared to even try of such.

Oh yes, plasma grenades seem to work quite nicely, but one needs to have them stop right next to enemy's feet to them to be working well.

I keep medikits at holster, along with grenades that I have also at belt, spare clip at belt, haven't really used Secondary weapons as rifles work so well even from close range. I try to get them come close instead of me going close also, that way they I get less reaction fire damage.

Flamethrower is nice inside of buildings, but outside I really can't find much use for it because of limited range, but it has great amount of power and it is really good against bloodspiders if used in reaction fire mode, candle light to blood spider and then it is easy to kill with lesser firepower.

Inside houses, I use group of three usually, keeping those corners covered and remembering that I can usually get glimpse what is around corner and come back without enemy firing at me, then throw grenades by bouncing them off from wall to make them go around the corner, evens things a bit when reaction fire ensues as I wait behind a corner for enemy to run into gunfire.

Probably I make lot of errors, so I like to play my first campaign at very easy and I must say that I enjoy a lot of it.

7

Windows / Re: Missing update tool + gpu usage

« on: November 06, 2012, 06:20:43 am »

Official installers don't have any update tool, you might be talking about Muton's tool which does have an updater, but looking at the last posts, you might want to wait until he provides a new full installer, also you might be able to use the binaries-only nightly, but be warned that things will break if there are changes to the data files.

Oh yeah, upon closer inspection I see it is Muton's tool that I got impression of there being updater:
http://ufoai.org/forum/index.php/topic,6302.0.html

I did go ahead and download + compile source, bit over 24 hours as my internet is so slow, did not take very long to compile actually, using this information was helpful there:
http://ufoai.org/wiki/index.php/MinGW_Win32_(guided_with_GUI)

Download size around 6GB total

With O2 and SSE3s optimizations (and rest for Core2Duo) I find UFO:AI has bit more fps, but CPU and GPU usage are still not much higher, even performance is bit better/more constant, either taskman is showing cpu usage wrong and cpu is limiting factor or then from some unknown reason UFO:AI is not using full computing power, I need to do some more tests to find out how it is.

edit: After quite bit of testing, it seems that now with self compiled version I get constantly good performance without fps dropping to 20's or below, actually fps seems to be capped 43 or 47 (varies a bit for some reason) so that is why cpu and gpu usage is less. What I find out also is that CPU usage seem to be tad lower now with compiled version than what it was with standard nightly and gpu usage is tad higher, but difference is really small and can easily fit to margin of error too, but performance is completely different, I guess that is efficiency in works then.

8

Windows / Re: Crash on geoscape enemy encounter

« on: November 05, 2012, 11:40:39 pm »

Thanks for the reply.
 I'm using the 2.4 version and I am more asking for help than reporting a bug.
The laptop isn't really for games, but it's a Celeron 1.6G, with an Intel HD graphics card, as it says. As I mentioned, nothing hinders the game in anyway apart from this thing, so I presume it's not a performance issue.

I remember reading about Intel graphics being very sensitive to drivers used, now I can't remember if it was regards to UFO:AI or other game, but what I remember is that not having most recent driver caused crashing/not starting issues, also I remember someone saying Intel's drivers being bit of bad. Anyway check most current driver from Intel's site and see if you have same or older version and update if needed.

I have not tested 2.4, so I don't know much about it, there might be something specific to 2.4 too, but maybe someone else can tell more of typical reasons for described issues with 2.4 version of UFO:AI.

For bug reporting or problems in general, lot of the same applies, much easier to work when one knows basics of specific setup, conditions, versions etc. So it is good practice that will yield better results sooner, hopefully easy graphics driver update would be a solution, if not that, then it might require bit more work, or even be unsolvable, always so many options

9

Windows / Re: Crash on geoscape enemy encounter

« on: November 05, 2012, 09:30:18 pm »

I'm total UFO:AI newbie, but have you read this and related articles?
http://ufoai.org/forum/index.php/topic,3130.0.html
I'm asking this as there is not much information to work with from your post, so it is bit difficult to provide appropriate help.

Anyway, one of the basic things is do you use 2.4 or 2.5-dev version and if dev version what is date of your dev version?

I had 1st Nov version that did crash a lot, then I downloaded only latest.zip (4th Nov) and put that into my UFO:AI program folder, now it crashes very rarely and I see there is already newer versions up, guys are working very hard with code it seems, so worth to download zip and install that as it can already cure your issue or make new ones as is usual with development.

Place where I got that zip (ufoai-latest-win32.zip for 2.5-dev version):
http://ufoai.org/snapshots/

Then it is your hardware and driver versions, what model processor (cpu), what model graphics card (gpu), you can use cpu-z and gpu-z free programs to find out hardware of your system if not currently 100% certain, even cpu-z might be enough in your case as it does show what is your gpu also. After knowing that, making sure you have latest drivers might also provide some help.

For example, with my laptop, there is Core 2 Duo P8600 cpu and Radeon HD 4320 gpu, but instead of using mobility catalyst or HP manufacturer's driver, I put catalyst meant for 4 series of cards, version 12.6, works so much better from some odd reason.

10

Windows / Missing update tool + gpu usage

« on: November 04, 2012, 11:05:20 pm »

First, thank you from this magnificent project, truly amazing that you offer this huge game for free

Now I did read that there should be a way to update 2.5 dev version that I downloaded to latest nightly by startmenu option, however I have not seen that option and I could not find any update utility from UFO program folder either, this I found to be the case in two machines that I installed it.

I think my version is Nov 1st, has update tool removed or is there error on my end?

Second thing I did notice was that I'm getting bit lower performance of what I would except, CPU Core 1 at 90% and Core 2 at 20-30%, GPU usage around 50-60%, it seems not to go above those numbers but changing graphics settings does affect how well battlescape runs.

Very old hardware with WinXP:
Core 2 Duo E6750
Nvidia Geforce 8800GTS 512 with 304.79 beta driver (need this driver to one another project to run flawlessly)

With search I did found many interesting things, but not quite answer to these questions, however I suspect there been some discussion about these, but I failed to find any of such, so, sorry if things are often brought up.