Messages

1

Offtopic / Re: Birthday game

« on: April 24, 2010, 05:25:21 pm »

My birthday is the day after the Queen's real birthday, the day before st George's day, two days after Hitler's birthday and it is Earth day. Two Popes have died on my birthday and one Roman Emperor all within the first millennium. I also share a birthday with the man who said "I am become death, destroyer of worlds": Robert Oppenheimer, of A-Bomb fame.

I don't want to play any more...

2

Artwork / Re: New Feature: "Glow" textures

« on: April 22, 2010, 02:53:46 pm »

A glowing gun ought to increase the chances of being hit from a distance. They look very nice, I just don't think anyone would ever build a tactical weapon like that. The army does whatever it can to eliminate muzzle-flash, for instance. Being aliens though, maybe they haven't read Sun Tsu's Art Of War and all the old tricks are new again. Maybe that's the way to beat them, we could build a giant wooden rabbit...

3

Bugs prior to release 2.3 / Re: Rooftop dancers

« on: April 20, 2010, 04:36:50 pm »

Code: [Select]

/home/[i]username[/i]/.ufoai/2.3-dev/base/

4

Discussion / Re: Forking tech trees - some ideas

« on: April 19, 2010, 02:05:15 pm »

2. Upon meeting certain in game requirements, a strange email comes in from a hacker, known as ______ who nonchalantly lets you know that he/she is "the best human mind ever to ever lay hands a digital interface"

hackers wont like that... but it is just a matter of scripting it.

I've been thinking of a possible surprise ending; it was all a misunderstanding and the alien overlords, who are never seen, were just testing humanities tenacity. They're very sorry for all the trouble caused and would like to buy everyone a ham.

5

Windows / Re: Win32 Development Binary Installer Links

« on: April 19, 2010, 01:45:28 pm »

Try downloading with a download manager instead of a browser. I had the same problem with firefox downloading too fast, there is nothing wrong with the file.

6

Linux / Re: Linux Repositories (Ubuntu)

« on: April 16, 2010, 12:48:45 pm »

There is one thing I would suggest adding to the wiki. Installing the build-essential package, most linux users have it as a matter of course but newbies tend to be unaware of it. It just sets up a system to allow compilation.

7

Discussion / Re: UFO:AI Online

« on: April 14, 2010, 09:03:28 pm »

Sounds like you want XNA, it'll cost you about 1000 pounds a year to do anything serious with it. Plus extra licensing costs if you release anything, and it's entirely .NET, so Windows/XBOX only.

Just to annoy you, I get it for free but I've never used it...

Learning to program isn't as hard as it looks, ANSI C has about 30 keywords to learn for example. If you expect to read about programming and then understand it you are making some false assumptions. Like anything worth doing it takes practice and discipline, there are no shortage of tutorials out there; nobody was born knowing how to code. That isn't even the end of the story; if you don't know about vertices and matrix calculations you have some very basic reading to do.
 

As for game studio software, well if you get a good one it's worth its weight in gold and so you pay through the nose for it. Maybe one day the open source alternatives will overtake but it's an odd market as far as games are concerned.

Btw, i taught myself to code and I've been to uni to learn it... You are better off teaching yourself.

8

Bugs prior to release 2.3 / Line Of Sight, Duplicate Aliens?

« on: April 14, 2010, 02:37:05 pm »

I have searched the forums, I'm not sure if this has been raised on sourceforge, I don't think so. I wouldn't usually leave a bug report like this so I'll apologise in advance but I think this may be the kind of thing that could go unnoticed for a long time.

It appears that when an alien on the battlescape leaves one soldiers LOS and moves *directly* into another LOS the alien is duplicated in both places. This has occured in the latest development windows build, I have yet to see it on Linux. Unfortunately, trying to reproduce this is a matter of random chance which is why I am putting it here. Sorry, no BT or debug info. I doubt my system specs or graphics hardware has anything to do with it, it rings of a logic bug but:

Intel 965 integrated
3GB RAM
Intel Mobile 4 Series
Windows Vista

I've only seen it once, on the small farmhouse map, I'll try to gather more info but as I said, it's random so others should look for it incidentally.

9

Discussion / Re: Question,

« on: April 12, 2010, 04:55:26 pm »

Its called replay on higher difficulty. (At own risk) Or go to 2.3 wich you might want to do and the very easy difficulty is like the normal difficulty on 2.2.1

Thats why I cant get anywhere... I've been playing on insanely hard. LOL.. oh well, I wont give up until they harvest my organs.

10

Discussion / Re: UFO: Female Invasion?

« on: April 12, 2010, 04:53:55 pm »

The extra endorphins make women more sensitive to pain, cold and shock in everyday situations.

There are some very good reasons why women aren't front line troops, at least in the UK. I'm not sure about US policy anymore.

11

Discussion / Re: Ok, no saving - How about hibernate?

« on: April 12, 2010, 04:48:05 pm »

The 'retry' feature is much nicer anyway, if you have to leave then hibernate. On the Amiga I used to run it from a Ram Drive and save it like that, it should be possible to do that today but dont ask me how, I have trouble finding my way around vista's control panel on my lappy.  Lord knows how big a savefile would be for a big map but if you really want the feature I'd suggest you read up on RAM dumping, which is how emulators save their state. I suppose you could run it in a virtual machine or on a JIT emulator and it would be possible.

12

Discussion / Re: UFO:AI Online

« on: April 12, 2010, 04:22:48 pm »

Making a two player version would be relatively simple. An interface for controlling the alien side and then getting rid of all AI code (basically just different buttons). Games without AI are much.. much simpler. As for MMP, well that would be a whole different story... Probably just end up as deathmatches, may as well make a different game, IMO.

The beauty of this game is its engaging story, the bells and whistles of graphical eye-candy tend to get in the way of gameplay like this which is why we dont see three billion clones of it being released every two months by big software houses.

UFO EU is probably the last game I enjoyed playing (except the civ franchise), otherwise all games are doom or command and conquer. If anyone remembers the heyday of gaming, on the Amiga, the amount of innovative games which were invented is astonishing. Then the MS windows lot moved in and everything was about the latest greatest hardware, playability and innovation have been sacrificed. If you dont own the latest hardware, you cant play the latest games, and people continue to fall for it.

You know what, thats fine by me. Ill fire up UAE or dosbox and Ill play something which entertains me, and has done for decades rather than something you play through once and never touch again. If I want to look at pretty pictures I'll go to an art gallery or I'll play Myst.

13

Linux / Re: Linux Repositories (Ubuntu)

« on: April 12, 2010, 03:57:43 pm »

That is strange. Could you post the output of configure? Plus the output of :

Code: [Select]

locate libsdl
locate libopenal

14

Linux / Re: Linux Repositories (Ubuntu)

« on: April 12, 2010, 04:36:27 am »

Code: [Select]

sudo apt-get install make gcc subversion build-essential\
   libglib2.0-dev libgtk2.0-dev libgtkglext1-dev libgtksourceview2.0-dev\
   libsdl1.2-dev libsdl-ttf2.0-dev libsdl-image1.2-dev libvorbis-dev zlib1g-dev gettext libtheora-dev \
   libjpeg62-dev libpng12-dev libncurses5-dev libcurl3-dev libsdl-mixer1.2-dev \
   libxml2-dev libopenal-dev
will install the dependencies, libraries and software. Just copy and paste the whole lot into a terminal it will only install what isn't already on your system. ./configure should then work.

Follow the instructions here to make and install it (it'd probably be quicker to download the maps):

http://ufoai.ninex.info/wiki/index.php/Debian

After its finished, it wont take long to keep it updated. I cd into the build directory and I use this line:

Code: [Select]

svn up && make && make lang && make maps && make pk3 && make uforadiant && sudo make install && sudo make install_data
Which downloads modified source code and compiles only what's changed, if you've already done a full compile before. Modify the line for a lesser compile or you might be there for some time. Make sure you run it with the ./ufo script in the build directory ('./ufo' on command line in build)  rather than the executable in your path ('ufo' on a command line from anywhere). Hope this helps.

15

Tactics / Re: Your Tactics

« on: April 12, 2010, 04:08:57 am »

laser rifle, power armour and a couple of grenades for everyone is the strategy I used in the old XCOM game, saving that e-115. The lasers were light so movement range was increased, cheap, profitable and they were good for RF too. Laser Rifles in the hands of veterans were deadly from great distances. Once lots of spare stores and soldier stats were built up I might switch to heavy plasmas which weighed about the same as an AR, IIRC and were fairly necessary for the endgame or leaders.

In UFOAI, I'm not sure yet, i think the grenade launchers are good but I really like the flame throwers. tbh, I haven't been able to play through yet, it seems much harder than XCOM, which is a good thing as XCOM got a bit tedious when you were forced to defend or attack a base every 2 minutes toward the endgame or else lose support. Going through the motions, clearing the huge maps and looking for the last hider which could take hours if done properly. For those who don't remember the game, it was scary to lose soldiers and the battlescape no save bug made it even more so. Its a shame there wont be any attacking the commander from a newly created hole in his wall though. You just had to love firing that blaster around corners and then dumping as much HE as you could through the hole and waiting for the screams.

The best tactic I've found is to keep covered. Dont get into a shoot-out with ET, sneak up on him, snipe him or explode him but don't be standing in his sight, or near him at the end of your turn without proper RF cover. I like to jump in to a building, take a shot at ET and run out. His turn, he comes out to shoot back and 2 others, with flame throwers are waiting against the wall with full TU and already facing the door (at a right-angle of fire to avoid the embarrassment of melting your comrade) resulting in a well done alien and any friends standing behind him.

I do like the auto battle feature but I think there should be a trade between the outcome odds and the value of goods recovered. Perhaps making you fight for earning money or allowing the skipping of battles relatively safely;  precision airstrikes to kill the menace with no ufo or item recovery for example. This would alleviate some of the aforementioned tedium, IMO leaving the balance up to the player.

There used to be some decent strategy guides about for XCOM which would be largely applicable here.