Topics

1

Bugs in older version (2.3.1) / UFOPaedia: Bolter discrepancy, burst rate and magazine size

« on: December 13, 2010, 10:08:16 am »

Description in UFOpaedia for the Electromagnetic Rifle specifies semi-automatic and 4-round burst capability.  The latter does not exist; it fires three-round bursts.

The description also claims a 4-round capacity per preloaded barrel, while the 2.3.1 data files give 8 rounds per reload.

2

Bugs in older version (2.3.1) / UFOPaedia: Machine Pistol & ambidexterity

« on: December 13, 2010, 10:02:10 am »

(obs. in 2.3.1, on Gentoo)

Description has a blurb suggesting that "Ambidexterous soldiers may consider using two pistols at the same time, though this will negatively impact accuracy and reduce the soldier's already minimal effective range."

This fluff should presumably be removed since not only is ambidexterity and dual-wield not in the game, but IIRC the policy is that dual-wield will very specifically /never/ be implemented, so unlike various other fluff that may or may not come to pass (like lasers having trouble w/ smoke, for instance) this text is permanently wrong instead of merely temporarily misleading.



Edit:

The same issue applies for the description of the 7.62mm P-12 pistol.

3

Bugs in older version (2.3.1) / Heavy Needler damage for 'precision shot' -- typo?

« on: December 13, 2010, 05:59:23 am »

2.3.1, Gentoo.

Code: [Select]

weapon_mod needlerheavy     
{
    {                                                                                                                               
      name        "_Precision Shot"                                                                                                 
      skill       sniper                                                                                                           
      projtl        bolter                                                                                                         
      impact        bolterImpact                                                                                                   
      hitbody       null                                                                                                           
      firesnd       weapons/bolter2                                                                                                 
      speed       0                                                                                                                 
      spread        "1.8 1.8"                                                                                                       
      crouch        0.5                                                                                                             
      range       250                                                                                                               
      shots       1                                                                                                                 
      ammo        1                                                                                                                 
      delaybetweenshots 2                                                                                                           
      time        16                                                                                                               
      damage        "50 5"                                                                                                         
      dmgweight     normal_heavy                                                                                                   
    }     
}

The per-shot damage for the other heavy-needler fire modes is 110/10, normal_heavy.  The per-shot damage for the regular needler fire modes is either 80/5 or 100/5 -- the last being precision-shot.  Is the "50 5" supposed to be "150 5"?

4

Feature Requests / Details worth un-hiding from the user?

« on: August 05, 2010, 08:36:56 pm »

1- Original stats for characters (or more directly, the delta).

e.g. 'Speed 45' -> 'Speed 48 (28+17)' or the like.

This matters a fair bit as long as XP costs are related to the delta rather than the absolute value, but doesn't seem accessible unless the user records them.


2- Spread values when crouched. 

This can be read from the .ufo files, but I wouldn't be surprised if many players never read them.  Without reading them, it's not necessarily obvious that e.g. crouching with a sniper rifle or laser rifle reduces spread 50%, that crouching with a plasma rifle reduces spread by only 30%, and crouching has no effect on accuracy w/ the grenade launcher.  This magnifies differences in accuracy and might affect weapon choices.


3- Availability of elites.

Given that there's a 1% chance of a recruitment candidate being qualitatively rather head-and-shoulders above all the rest, it might not be entirely unreasonable to generate an e-mail mentioning these by name when they appear.


4- Impact of armor and randomness on damage.

Right now, the damage values presented (per the firing mode descriptions et al -- there's nothing target/armor-specific) are on a total-for-all-shots-assuming-all-shots-hit, no-armor-reduction basis.    This can be misleading for e.g. fast-firing light-damage-per-shot weapons vs. medium armor, so some in-game information might be useful.

e.g. -- UFOPedia containing a generated table for # shot, per-shot damage of (researched weapon vs. researched armor) pairs; or perhaps a min-mean-max damage triplet displayed when the targeting cursor is over a target (and both the target and the target's armor are fully identified).  For simplicity, the latter would assume all shots hit.  That triplet doesn't require any tracing, so should be quite quick to compute (I'd be more worried about intelligible display *shrug*).

5

Discussion / Aliens impaired by wounds?

« on: July 18, 2010, 12:46:49 am »

Had the following happen in a recent battle:

- Used IR, found a solitary alien (Taman, IIRC; it's fairly early, haven't seen anybody but Tamans and Ortnoks) in a farmhouse. He's facing a soldier that I have on the other side of the wall (fine, infravision; it's safe, with no windows or doorways on that side).

- Ran a soldier into the farmhouse point-blank range right behind the alien.  Four shots with a laser rifle showing 100%.  Each shot appears to hit the right tile, but alien (somewhat unusually for a Taman; if he was wearing anything heavier than medium armor, it wasn't captured afterwards) does *not* go down. 

- On its turn, the Taman does... nothing.  No attempt to escape, doesn't fire a weapon.  Which is lucky for the soldier, but unexpected.

- Soldier promptly kills the Taman with the next shot.


Is it that the alien was losing TUs with each hit and therefore not able to respond?  Could the alien have somehow expended all its firepower earlier?  Alien resigned to the idea that it was simply a good day to die?  Or was this an AI glitch?

It wasn't really clear to me whether I was somehow missing a target w/o cover in an adjacent square, whether the laser rifle just has highly variable damage, whether the armor was absorbing it all, or whether I'd actually burned through the armor and left a nearly dead, probably massively bleeding/screaming alien right in front of me.  I can definitely understand (and support) not showing reports like "alien Blah hit, -25 HP" or the like -- and in other situations it can definitely be unclear whether you hit at all -- but with such visibility here, some feedback on whether the alien appears to be laserproof and angry vs. almost dead seems appropriate.

6

Feature Requests / Covered arcs / Areas?

« on: July 17, 2010, 12:55:46 am »

Has there been any consideration to the use of covered arcs or areas for reaction fire?

For those not familiar with these concepts -

- A "covered arc" is the sector between the shooter and either two points (which constrains distance; i.e. bounded sector, so the shooter normally ignores those moving too far away, even if they're within the angle) or two vectors (i.e. at any visible target; only the angle matters). 

- A  "covered area" OTOH would be denoting a particular small area to focus on (which would be similar to a covered arc with *minimum* distance as well, and minimum distance ~ maximum distance).  At an extreme, this might be a single tile or a circle containing several tiles.



The narrower the field of fire, the smaller the number of time units that should be required for firing (in so far as the weapon is already pointing in approximately the proper direction).  The narrower the distance range, the easier it is to sight the weapon to an appropriate distance.    In either case, while there would obviously be no effect on the number of TUs expended *after* firing (such as handling the effects of recoil, letting a weapon's capacitors recharge, et al -- incidentally, TU expenditures should probably vary based on how fast a character is and how skilled he is with the weapon, sometimes in nonintuitive ways like a faster player spending *more* TUs on certain things but that's a different discussion), the number of TUs expended *before* firing should be faster and the likelihood of getting off the shot should be higher.

With that would come the penalties of significantly worsened response outside the arcs, and perhaps an unwillingness to even attempt a shot unless the target poses obvious imminent mortal threat (e.g. just showed up next to a window 2 tiles away -- perfectly reasonable for soldier to ignore the ordered field of fire in the interest of self-preservation; whereas plinking at an alien with a plasma pistol 40 tiles away and outside the arc wouldn't happen even if it were an easy shot).

These would add a certain coherence to reaction fire, and allow one to balance having actually realistic abilities to fire back without making units into ridiculous super-soldiers with amazing reflexes over *everywhere*.

If this UI is not really feasible, I'd suggest instead giving bonuses to reaction fire where a target had been observed the previous turn or two; and at doors, windows, ramps, and staircases, because these are normally going to get far more attention.

7

Linux / Observations from Gentoo 2.3 ebuild

« on: July 14, 2010, 11:16:27 am »

(2.6.34-gentoo-r1, x86_64, 3GB RAM, 2GHz, Mobility Radeon X1400 w/ Mesa DRI R300, 1.5 Mesa 7.8.2 renderer, graphics options basically unchecked; from stock Portage not svn)

- Performance seems more than adequate.

- Gameplay seems mostly stable.  I've had one or two crashes so far, IIRC, both in Battlescape, both prior to a recent Mesa and kernel upgrade (and both having corresponding log messages in dmesg output about memory allocation in Mesa)

- Quite a bit of ground texture flickering.

- Language should probably default to something not null (locale, fallback to English probably), otherwise all one will see are text variable names.