Messages

1

Artwork / Re: Alien bestiary

« on: April 26, 2013, 01:05:47 am »

Continuing with the offtopic discussion of weapon balance...

If it's hit by a coilgun with 30AP and 20 damage, the effective DR is 0 (or you can even add bonus damage) so the shot does full 30 damage (or 40). Technicly you could model overpenetration.

Overpenetration is modeled by simply setting damage to 50 No need for special bonus damages or redundant code to check wild corner cases.

But I do think that an armor piercing value would be useful, and then armor can be drastically simplified as well.

@maackey: the main reason we have the damage weights (spray, light, medium, heavy, etc.) is to be able to model armour.

No, the main reason we have damage weights is because that was how they were first implemented, and noone has yet to change them to a better model I know that I'm coming into this from a fresh-slate perspective, while you are probably very used to the existing system and know its intricacies inside and out. I don't want to barge in and start telling everyone how to do things my way (the correct way ), but just give some fresh perspective from someone who isn't tied up in the existing system. I've tried a few times to go through the code and change stuff, but the documentation is incredibly sparse, and I wouldn't want to work on something that gets immediately rejected because it'd be too radical of a change (happened before, don't want to go through that again...) without some consensus first.

Having separate damage weights allows us to model the effectiveness of armour differently for different weapons.

This is 100% true. But its also 100% garbage. What is the **reason** for armor acting differently for different weapon types? I know the game has flavor text in regards to things like lasers and fire and explosions and stuff, but having the sniper rifle react completely independent of an assault rifle is flat out retarded. I'm sorry, that makes no sense to me from the perspective of a player or a developer, and doesn't contribute to realism in the slightest. There are LOADS of other ways to balance weapons irrespective of damage type! Reload time, ammo capacity, rate of fire, weight, size, accuracy... I could go on and on. What is the reason to have it but for added complexity and confusion (and the lazyness of the devs to change something already "done" )?

You mentioned re-writing the engine, but doesn't the engine already support armor piercing? If so, no engine work is needed and fixing the damages only requires editing the configs to get rid of the redundant armor categories and minor changes to weapon stats.

2

Offtopic / Re: Sample of girls remaking some game music intros

« on: January 17, 2013, 05:44:48 am »

Lindsey Stirling is amazing.
http://www.youtube.com/user/lindseystomp?feature=watch

She has made lots of music videos for other games and cool stuff such as a Legend of Zelda medley and Game of Thrones intro. And not only does she have great music herself, I found out about a ton of awesome bands via her Pandora radio station

3

Artwork / Re: Alien bestiary

« on: December 12, 2012, 09:54:35 pm »

Hooray, another wall of text from your bedsick fellow complaining about more stuff I do it because I love.
(should this be split to a separate thread? I don't really want to drive the thread off-topic)

It's not as difficult to properly balance the existing weapons as it appears at first. Once you dive into it, you will realise that a lot of damage weights have only one or two weapons associated with them, so you can have pretty fine control. Adding new weapon concepts is difficult, though, without adding new damage weights (this was done for the Encased Plasma Ammo).

Some damage weights make sense, and I'm pretty sure it would be fine to have a half dozen or more if it meant keeping fine control, but in the resistances graph you linked to there are types like normal light, spray, medium, heavy, fire light, medium, heavy, flamer etc. I can't imagine why there would be a difference in *TYPE* for a light/medium/heavy damagetype.

I have toyed with the idea of a new damage model as well. But I'm not yet convinced that it is actually simpler for the player -- what seems simpler from a conceptual point of view (ie - the developer) is not necessarily simpler for the player.

I suppose... do you have any specific examples though?

If I have to calculate damage by analysing an armour penetration rating, mass, velocity or other elements, that may just be more ambiguous than a simple damage number. I'm not yet sure about this, though, and my primary concern was to expand the ability to better model a weapon's interaction with armour.

I agree, there is a balance between realistic simulation and fun intuitive gameplay.

Lots of games have AP, its an easy enough concept to understand. Damage range falloff also makes sense: it realistically models projectile drag, laser light scattering, etc. I'm curious on what your thoughts are for weapon armor interaction. I've done a lot of searching on the wiki and forums and have only ever found really old out of date discussion on the topic (which frustrate me to no end*). In my view, armor is there to reduce damage. Either by subtracting a flat amount, or reduced by a fraction, or both. I dislike the general idea of minimum damage (eg. armor blocks 10000000 damage and pistol damage is 10 -- minimum 5 goes through) I'd rather have better reduction/damage values. (eg. armor blocks 15+50% and pistol damage is 20 -- 2.5 damage goes through) and I dislike* pistols,shotguns,rifles etc. having different damage reduction types (on top of different damage values) as it contributes to the confusion of how much damage does my weapon actually do?

I play a lot of Zero-K and its motto is no special damage types -- and it works wonderfully. Armor is modeled by more HP, weapons and units are balanced according to the physical interactions and limitations, it is dead easy to determine how much damage a unit will do, and how well it will stand up to punishment. I'm not suggesting going to that extreme, just trying to give perspective.


*The one thing that bugs me the most and I would like to see changed is the light/medium/heavy damage types -- heavy plasma can be modeled by shots doing 100 damage, light plasma can have shots do 20 -- they are both plasma and it doesn't make sense to have them separate.

The real problem we face with the current implementation is that the player is not given information on the real damage weights protection/resistance for armour and aliens. So he's unable to make a simple addition/subtraction comparison with a weapon. Including this information as the result of an autopsy would be a nice incentive for completing autopsy research, and the same information should be made available upon researching alien armour.

With so many damage types I wouldn't want to compare values with every alien/armor/weapon combo even if I had them automagically pop up side by side. Having fewer damage types would mean it would be easier to naturally infer resistances/weaknesses, which could counteract the benefit of autopsy research, but that means that I don't need to make tons of addition/subtraction comparisons! To compensate for that we could give the player a small 5% increased damage buff vs that type of alien -- or some other fun little perk. Either way it would be nice to have that information in the autopsy, I wholeheartedly agree.

4

Artwork / Re: Some alien beasts (alien ghost + ... )

« on: December 12, 2012, 08:28:41 pm »

I'm not saying its impossible. I've even been quite startled in UFO:AI a few times. But its a lot different than say, playing Doom3 or Amnesia. I could not bring myself to finish the other two games because I was running out of clean pants

I think it can be worrying at least. Imagine for instance that you wanted to hide soldiers at some large buildings flanks. If an alien was able to fall from the skies it should be really more tricky than when you just had to wait them coming from the buildings corners.  More over due to the visibility of objects coming from the map z-levels, you would be really surprised. You probably would have to scan more regularily the z-levels than you do today at least.

Yeah this is what I meant. In turn based thinking games you can have tough decisions and tricky enemies that are "scarily tough" but I was just alluding to the fact that the feelings are quite different to being actually so scared you have to stop playing.

An invisible alien would really be a great problem. Your example reminds me the starcraft dark-templar, but the design I suggested for the jumping spider is also similar to the dragoon unit. Such an unit require some work anyway because I imagine we would be able to improve IR goggles in order to see them - as you have said yourself

heh, Starcraft steals a bunch of good ideas from other places too but yes there are similarities to the DT. I'm not sure IR goggles need "improving" so much, as is they are pretty powerful and it would be nice if they could perhaps be weakened slightly. eg. only display a red glow in the general area instead of displaying the unit model complete with what armor and weapons they are carrying. They would certainly need to be able to detect the unit, although I have no idea how they work currently. I can't imagine it would be more difficult than adding in jumping movement/pathfinding/AI

5

Artwork / Re: Some alien beasts (alien ghost + ... )

« on: December 12, 2012, 10:14:47 am »

I also like the jumping spider. I don't really think of it as scary though. It is very difficult to get "scared" properly in a turn based game.

Although I have thought about having a completely invisible alien. (bonus for the content devs, it doesn't require much work! ) I'm thinking of a melee psy-blade monster with no indication its there except for your dead soldiers (and civilians ofc) It would be naturally weak to ground area incendiaries, perhaps it can block out smoke clouds? And of course it'd be visible to IR goggles -- to prevent complete frustration.

6

Artwork / Re: Alien bestiary

« on: December 12, 2012, 09:38:52 am »

Frankly, I'd completely change the damage types for something that's imspler and more intuitive.

This. A thousand times this.

I've looked around at the weapon balance a few times before and was stopped dead in my tracks by the dauntless numbers of damage types and resistances. Not to mention the wiki weapon tables are woefully out of date. (I've been working on a little lua script to parse the data to better compare weapons/armor... I don't suppose anyone has a working program to do this already? or perhaps it isn't very convenient to use...)

The convoluted amount of damage types are detrimental for both developers and players. On the developer side, with so many variables it is practically impossible to properly balance weapons, armor, aliens, etc. On the player side, it is incredibly confusing when your weapons one shot ultra powerful brutes in one mission, and are completely ineffective against fragile twig-men the next. Not to mention the disconnect in expectations (ever play a point and click adventure with those "simple" puzzles that you needed a manual for?) "... what do you mean bloodspiders are resistant to shock!? they are completely electro-mechanical! No amount of electrical shielding can stop yadda yadda"

It would be really nice if we had something like the taylor knockout formula for ballistic projectiles. It is roughly:  damage = mass * velocity * diameter of bullet
There are other factors for sure, such as bullet shape and composition,but its a good guideline.

I dunno if I should post here or somewhere else, but some initial thoughts for a proposed change:

ballistic (physical)
 - physical projectiles
 - cut/stab/bludgeon
 - blast (concussion)
energy
 - electric
 - plasma
 - laser
 - fire
 - blast (eg. from plasma grenade)
hazmat
 - stun gas
 - poisons
 - blinding flash (from stun grenades?)
 - mind controlling spores

Three damage types may be a pretty extreme change from the current 30 (hush... its hyperbole), but look at it this way: damage isn't the only variable we have to play with. It makes no sense to have sniper bullets have a different damage type to pistol bullets. Anything that a .22LR can hit a .50 BMG will hit harder. No exceptions. But that just means that 22s can have less recoil (less TU), cheaper ammo, more capacity, etc.

The example is a bit weaker for energy & "hazmat" but the principle is the same: KISS. Reduce the extraneous variables and only work with ones that give meaningful results. I can probably think up counter examples and reasons not do put flash/poisons together but is it really worth it to have them separate? How many weapons use the mechanics of the flash grenade? or stun gas? Is there a vital reason why an alien would be weak to stun gas but not flash grenades (other than *arbitrary* story fluff)?

I would also love to have more varied ammo types, so for example there would be your standard ball, but also armor penetrating, AP incendiary, AP plasma etc. AP rounds would get a bonus vs ballistic armor, incendiary would apply energy damage over time, plasma applies large instant energy damage. I dislike using stock alien weapons. I would much rather take their technology and turn it into something human. I know there were a few threads discussing franken-weapons: alien weapon models with human modification on them which would be awesome. (If I ever get into modeling again I might have a go at some)

heh, thats a lot of text. I've got to stop making these giant walls...

7

Discussion / Re: The FanFic project news and feedback thread: Now updating every Sunday!

« on: December 10, 2012, 06:32:08 am »

These are pretty fantasfic. (hah, get it, fan-tas-fic?)

Terrible puns aside, I'm really looking forward to the upcoming chapters.

8

Design / Re: What is the general "2084 life on earth" model under UFOAI?

« on: December 07, 2012, 07:50:00 pm »

There are still tribes in Africa who have never seen electricity, which was discovered a hundred years ago. It is quite plausible that remote locations will still be relatively primitive. How phalanx gets alerted to these situations however...

The citizen clothing, wind generators, solar panels, etc. need to be modeled, textured, and integrated with the game engine. Since this is an open source project, there are lots of people with their own vision of how 2084 should look, and so a consistent style is difficult to achieve. Are you willing to do the work to integrate the models and textures for all the objects you want into the maps?

Nature is pretty resilient, it would take a massive concentrated effort orchestrated with the utmost efficiency and priority to change the geography of the planet. But before all that there is the question of economic viability. What would be the benefit of terraforming the landscape?

Even if general society strongly favors privacy, there will still be security cameras. You can't violate your own privacy by video recording your own home, and it grants you vision of the aliens walking around above your base (or it better, eventually) so you can get into an advantageous tactical position... or just have the cameras automate the target acquisition of your base defense turrets.

9

Bugs in stable version (2.5) / game crashes after enabling ui2 mod

« on: December 07, 2012, 06:20:47 am »

with the message "Error: Recieved signal 11." game crashes right when main menu should pop up, although not always. I get signal 8 if the crash is not instant.

Sometimes I get into the main menu, but then after loading a game I crash (not instantly, a couple times I was able to click on a base and see the new base UI)

The process is always the same:
run ./ufo -> game loads into basic UI
click options, click ui2, click activate mod
some times -> game restarts, loading text in different font, game crashes
other times -> game restarts, loading text in different font, main menu appears
click through to load game, game crashes some random short while afterwards

1st crashdump is from insta-crash game, second is when game crashed after loaded game

10

Discussion / Re: Changes for 2.5

« on: December 04, 2012, 05:59:11 am »

Basically if you take damage you may take one or more wounds. The more damage the more and more severe the wounds.

Wounds cause bleeding and stat penalties. The penalties reduce slightly once treated.

You can apply first aid to a soldier who has been hit once or until bleeding is stopped, whichever is greater.

First aid heals a few hit points and reduces rate of bleeding. It typically takes 1-3 applications to stop bleeding entirely. After that they won't take more damage unless they are hit again.

Since bleed is per round and healing attempts are limited, it's best to heal as quickly as possible, using multiple medics if you can. This gives you more hit points back and stops bleeding faster.

... wow. What is the point of not stopping bleeding in one application? Especially when you don't get any health out of the deal either. I can't see having medikits on every soldier be viable with the new weight system (which I found out btw that it gives a flat -13 TU penalty for *any* weight over 50% and flat +12 TU bonus for *any* weight under 20% strangely. I thought the bonus/malus would be incremental -- guess I can dig in and try my hand at tinkering)

Thank you tremendously for explaining how medikits/wounds work, it makes much more sense now. I read somewhere that medikits stopped bleeding and lost a few soldiers because they weren't healed "all the way"

More late game and more ammo options is what I'll say.
...
@maackey, feedback is appreciated, so I don't mean to blow you off, but if you're only 12 missions in you've still got a long way to go. Regarding some of your points:

Yeah I understand I'm not very far in, that is fine I expect people to take my comments with a grain of salt (which is why I mentioned my progress in the first place) however, my question of how many missions does it take to get to the late-game still remains... (rough estimate will do)  I never got past midway through the previous versions (tried my heart out to get further though) because I was inundated with missions and never had the time to sit down and grind through it.

Is there perhaps a console command where I can see the alien interest level /manually increase it? Are there any actions in game I can do to increase my interest level? I'll definitely try out the harder difficulties as well.

[Spoiler]

11

Discussion / Re: Changes for 2.5

« on: December 03, 2012, 07:56:34 am »

Campaign Pace
The schedule of UFOs, aliens, research and disassembly, as well as the tech tree itself, has been changed significantly. Over the course of the campaign, the player will face fewer UFOs and this will be most apparent at the start of the game. It may lead to the start feeling "empty" of UFOs for those who are used to the excessive UFOs seen in 2.4. The pace will increase before long. There should be no large chunks of time with nothing to do like 2.4, and you had better get moving quickly on research and development.

While I greatly enjoy the new slower rate of encounters (perhaps I can actually get to the later stages of the game now!), the beginning is a bit too barren. I was able to research all techs by the end of the first month or so, and waited a whole 'nother month before any new research items became available. Similarly I have nothing to fight, and I cannot make any money (because there are no alien ships/weapons to sell) All my soldiers, scientists and workers were idle for almost a whole month. After that however the game picked up nicely, I am still in the first year so we'll see how it ends up later on.

Air Combat
The aircraft vs. UFO balance has been adjusted quite a bit. Be careful making assumptions based on your previous experience.

I haven't noticed any significant change to the air combat. My fighters still take out alien fighters and scouts, and not even two simultaneous fighters can take on a harvester.

Laser Weapons
Handheld laser weapons are no longer available as soon as you research CWS at the start of the game. They will come later. This may be particularly disorienting for our long-term players.

I never went for the early laser weapons (gl/sniper/flamer worked for any occasion typically) but sometimes went for the rail gun. I don't mind so much that laser weapons were moved, but so were the rail guns. As I mentioned before in the beginning months there is nothing to do -- there should be some sort of weapon upgrade that I can research early on because I'm still stuck at the basic weapons many months in to the campaign.

Ground Combat Difficulty
Expect to face more aliens who are more difficult to kill. In general, you will likely find your soldiers dying more. You will also receive more recruits throughout the game to allow you to suffer more casualties. Do not expect to be able to play a zero-casualties game as easily as before.

Bwahaha, this is spot on.

Spoiler:

Although a little more variety would be nice. So far in a few dozen missions I've only killed hoverdiscs, Taman and Shevar and the latter typically are armed only with plasma blasters/rifles.

Weapons
The weapons have been comprehensively re-balanced and have undergone significant changes. In general, weapons have been adjusted to better serve specific tactical purposes. That means the trade-offs between different weapons and different firemodes within weapons are more significant now. Without getting into specifics, I'll just say that you should pay special attention to all of a weapon's attributes and think about which tactical situations it might be most effective.

I never really liked the balance of weapons in UFO:AI for various reasons, but some of the weapons seem to be completely redundant or useless, especially with the new RF system. Is there a wiki page or something that shows each weapon's tactical purpose? I should probably gather my thoughts and put these in a new thread...

Wounds and Healing
The game now includes a proper wounding and healing mechanism. Soldiers will get wounded and bleed out each turn based on how wounded they are. A medikit is able to heal wounds, which will stop bleeding, but it will only be able to give a soldier back a very small amount of health. Soldiers are expected to recover in Hospital. Medikits are for keeping them alive until the battle ends.

The medkit now has three options: antipsychotics, stimulants, and first aid. I kinda guessed that antipsychotics cured morale (never tried it though, as morale never got low enough) and first aid healed somehow??? but there is no information regarding what does what. I have no idea what stimulants do and my soldiers still bleed out and die even if I give them first aid. Do I have to continually give first aid during the duration of the battle? I'm not sure I like that. I think its great that medkits have been made more realistic (there were times when I wouldn't kill the last alien because I had to heal up my wounded soldiers before flying home) but medkits may need a small buff, especially in conjunction with the tougher aliens.

Weight and Encumbrance
All soldier items now include a weight and soldiers can only carry as much as their Strength ability allows them. A soldier will be "encumbered" and will lose TUs when they are carrying more than 50% of their max weight. A soldier will be "light" and gain extra TUs when they are carrying less than 20% of their max weight.

This makes the backpack storage completely useless. TU's are penalized *way* too heavily (how does weight affect TU's anyhow? it would be nice to have a bar showing troop TU next to their weight) Heavy weapons should be heavier (and appropriately more powerful) to compensate for a TU penalty buff. I personally would also loosen the thresholds to 60% heavy, 30% light on top of TU penalty buff (or even 66/33 to make it nice and symmetric)

Anyway, its a good first start

Soldiers Stay Equipped
Soldiers will now stay equipped when they are not assigned to a dropship and can be equipped through the employees menu.

WOoO! Love that I can finally equip my guys off the plane. This is a huge awesome change.

More Soldiers
You can now have up to 12 soldiers on the battlescape. The starting dropship, the Firebird, still only supports 8 soldiers, but base defense missions and later dropships will support more.

I haven't gotten to the point when I can ship out 12 soldiers at once, but I like it nonetheless. I have had a few base defense missions, but I never have more than 8 guys in a base at one time. Something that struck me as odd though was small hangers no longer let baddies in, but workshops now do. Why was this changed? To shake up veteran UFO:AI players? After the first go around players will just optimize their bases differently to increase the alien funneling. Perhaps the entrances should be randomized so not all the time workshops or hangers etc. will be open to alien invasions. I also noticed cameras, but they didn't grant me vision And I still don't have base auto-turrets... but I'm a little off topic now.

New Weapons
New weapons and equipment have been introduced for soldiers and aircraft. Most of these become available late in the game.

Haven't noticed anything yet. Heck, my selection of weapons and equipment has been severely limited thus far, but the game is still fun. How far in (eg. how many missions will I have to fight through) to get to the late game goodies?

12

Discussion / Re: Again on reaction fire

« on: December 01, 2012, 11:36:16 pm »

I want to add something to nanomage's comment about automatic RF.

Fallout Tactics had a system where your units would automatically shoot only if you had a certain percent chance to hit (eg. 33%, 66%, 90%, never) numbers may be off but that isn't important. Instead of manually setting RF each turn I want the ability to set a percentage to hit threshold where my units would use leftover TUs to fire at enemies above the threshold. This system allows so much more control and on top of that it reduces tedious micromanagement because your troops only have to be set once. And then if you really feel like you don't want to shoot the alien for whatever reason, you can simply change the mode to "never" when the situation pops up, instead of changing the mode *every* *single* *turn* you *do* want RF.

13

Discussion / Re: 2.5-dev play through

« on: May 31, 2012, 06:16:56 pm »

Wow I'm one butt-uggly monkey faced gorilla... All I need now is a mini fez to go with my mini shotgun

14

Bugs in older version (2.4) / Re: Slow battle between ships problem

« on: May 26, 2012, 11:53:04 pm »

Yes, the game slows to a screeching halt. When next frame updates, my fps drops to 0.1 frames per second (much less than that in reality) and every few moments some attack sound will play.

I saved a game just before I sent one of my dropships to attack the fighter. Both the "Hammer" and "Scythe" (loadouts of all miniguns and 2 missiles w/ minigun nose respectively) will cause the game to slow if either/or/both happen to come into close dogfighting.

15

Discussion / Re: 2.5-dev play through

« on: May 24, 2012, 02:00:26 am »

yeah, firing three rounds in less time than it takes to quickly snap off two? not to mention the assurance that the target won't be firing back on his next turn...

ShipIt: Either one is fine. (aka I am undergoing choice paralysis atm)