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Messages - Prinegon

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1
Design / Re: "FIX BAYONET"
« on: April 27, 2011, 07:07:26 am »
A Bayonette would be more effective than a combat knife. It has a greater reach and a greater parry value. It would be a two handed weapon and would therefore, since you can use your momentum (and/or weight) ad advantage, have a greater penetrability.

But I don't know if a Bayonette would be usable on every modern rifle, since fighting with it would damage the rifle itself. I don't talk about the barrel to get misjudged, but one hit on the lenses and you couldn't aim with a laser rifle at all. So I don't think a Bayonette would find it's use on a modern weapon anymore.

2
Artwork / Re: New design for Stiletto interceptor model?
« on: March 30, 2011, 02:38:54 am »
I actually like H-Hours Idea. Internal storage would be best. Those external batteries would totally burst the stiletto's capability for stealth. And since todays military vehicles (airhicle?) get more and more stealthy it would feel wrong for a future military fighter to be such radar visible.

To start a rocket for a jet it doesn't need much, since the jet just has to drop the missle. The actual start of the missles engine would first happen in its free fall. So there is nothing against missles being stored on a roundeel over a dropping chamber.

3
Artwork / Re: New design for Stiletto interceptor model?
« on: March 29, 2011, 08:09:02 pm »
I don t like the weaponary placement at all.
As one can clearly see in the first picture the rocket batteries are mounted directly under the manoeuvering nozzles. I don't think its the best idea to store the weaponary in the jets steam.

The second problem is, the suspension doesn't look right. Since the color of the suspension is mismatched to the jets colors you can clearly see they are added afterwards. especially the lower girder seems to be as thin as brass. I'd like either to match the color of the suspension to the jet, or to give them a warning color (like red or yellow).

4
Feature Requests / Re: Robots?
« on: March 22, 2011, 08:26:24 am »
Also it as any dev would say: "it would be unneccecary coding with little to no benefit to the gameplay"

Well, for starters it'd be just enough to implement immobile robots or androids, perhaps a robot reloading on a power jack or one android with open head so you could see into his mainframe, and some of his chips laying on a workbench beside it. It would add greatly for the admosphere, especially for japaneese terror missions, to have theese meshes usable as "furniture" and it would be no coding work at all (well, but a lot of designing work, though).

5
Artwork / Re: GUI Design
« on: June 09, 2010, 08:05:42 am »
Afaik the most common and also most effective way to show TU (or TU used) would be TU shown on the field you are about to move as mouse_hover_over effect (using an extra symbol, if moving to this field means, you will not be able to sit down).

I think, since it depends most of personal preferences if one experiences a gui of a game to be good or bad, it even might be a good idea to make the gui costomizable. One loves really small gui not using up much screen size at all, the other one prefers the gui to hold up more information. One might be fine orientating by unit numbers, the other one likes the units heads inside, one needs the names, the other one not and one even doesn't use the gui at all. Being able to costumize the gui to ones own needs may improve the usability of the game significantly.

6
Artwork / Re: GUI Design
« on: June 01, 2010, 06:49:39 pm »
@H-Hour: I really love the unit-indicators at your floor marker.

7
Discussion / Re: Medical staff
« on: May 30, 2010, 03:21:17 pm »
Well, I know about an experiment, where people got googles that turn your vision upside down and had to wear them all day. After few days the brain began to adapt to the inverted vision and to invert the percept back to normal orientation. The change was so significant it took several hours to return to normal vision once the googles were gone.

Okay, turning your vision around is not putting two more eyes in your back, but it makes it reasonable, once one could find a way to connect the eyes nerves to the brain properly, the brain eventually would be able to adapt to the change.

PS: A link to one of the experiments description: http://www.madsci.org/posts/archives/mar97/858984531.Ns.r.html

8
Offtopic / Re: Saving America 1 shrimp at a time.
« on: May 29, 2010, 11:21:15 pm »
Wow, you totally convinced me! Buying stuff from the neighbourhood and also saving my country labors is a great idea. I will tell all my friends and relatives...
...too bad for you, I live in Germany, so my decision to support local production will be negative for the american jobmarket :-P

Okay, lets get serious. There is sence in the idea to prefer local products over imports. Not only you can be sure the products are made under the rules of your own country (well, as sure as you can get without having a real proof), however products imported may have less quality criteria than products made in your country (in germany, imports follow european quality standards that normaly are not so strict than german standards). You also can help environment if your buying decision prevents unnecessary transportations.
But as already said, this may work for deciding if you buy a local potato or one from spain (or italy, if you come from spain :P ), but for most of the products this just doesn't work. You just cannot grow a orange in finland, e.g. (or at least grow one with reasonable production costs). Bringing the knowhow to build, lets say microwaves in each and every country, so everyone could buy a local produced microwave instead of a import will also proove unefficient. And I really doubt Bayer will relinquish on their Nexavar patent, so this pills can by produced by every country on its own (what doesn't inhibit India from doing so, but thats a different story).

9
Artwork / Re: GUI Design
« on: May 29, 2010, 10:46:54 pm »
Of course there are other ways to represent is, like the way it is done in civilization, where offscreen-units are displayed as a little arrowed bubble at the edge in the direction the unit would be.

As I wrote before, that way of repräsentation would also be a way to help player orientating and it would be a very nice one, too. Make the numbers clickable and center the view on the soldier selecting him, once clicked the number bubble, and it would be perfect. However, implementation of this may be a little more complicated, though.

10
Artwork / Re: GUI Design
« on: May 29, 2010, 04:12:54 pm »
I know what I'm talking about, I had interface design as a subject in college.

As I had. Doesn't say too much theese days.
Of course a map view is more preciese in where your team members stand and from where danger occurs. And if this game would be real time strategy, I would totally agree a map is indispensable. For a turn based strategy game the map is over the top. There would be two ways to implement a map view: A permanent map, or a callable map.
If the map is permanent, like in games like starcraft, you are using much display expanse reducing the area for the main window. You are not able to do a too small map, since a map you could not recognize anything (or recognizing anything would take more efford than simply scrolling to the right position) is no good. And since maps are not common in round based strategy games many players probably won't use the map at all anyhow.
Making the map callable would make things even worse. However the action would be to call the map (pressing "m" to show the map, moving your mouse to a specific edge do drag in the map, zooming out, until the area display becomes a map), a player would have to take efford to call a map, in some implementations even his attention is dragged away from the main window (like if you press m and you see the map, instead of the main window). Scrolling around to find the desired location may prove as the prefered solution, even if it will take longer in the middle, since the player has not to change his attention.
There is a reason why a map is uncommon in turn based games and only used, if the playable area is really big (like in heroes of might and magic or civilization). And to be fair, how often did you really use the map in theese games? How often did you zoom out maximal in civ4 to see the whole world, just to zoom in in the desired location? Of theese reasons I think a map is over the top: Too much unused information and too much display area for its usefullness.

As I played Ufo Enemy unknown (Terror from the deep was not my game, though), I normally knew the relative position of each team member to each other. I knew, if I moved Joe, next to him was another XCOM-Operative to cover him, far to the north were two Operatives charging a house and 3 Operatives try to get to the ufo in the south. Even if you increase the number of operatives you will use, the action will not take place all over the map, there will be 2 to 5 spots where your people will be. Showing the relative position of your operatives may not help you distinguish between the left or the right operative charging the house far to the north, but you will get one of them, if you select one in the gui based on the information the arrows will give you and normally this will be good enough (since you normally would move both operatives charging the house one after the other). So more information is not needed and I can't imagine a more simple way to give this information to the player.

My second design combining the relative position with the position of opponents, however, is flawed, since I use the same representation for two different concepts. The directive position marker shows the relative position refering to the current selected operative, but the opponents marker shows the direction opponents are relative to the person represented by the gui button. Using the same representation for different things is confusing and should be avoided.

The same mistake is already done in the actual gui, since you use the same buttons once for selecting a operative and selecting a floor level. But since a new gui is searched in this thread this mistake is to be avoided in the future, once the new gui is implemented.

11
Artwork / Re: GUI Design
« on: May 28, 2010, 01:42:38 am »
The arrows wouldbe useless. The trick to interfaces it to put only the information you need, in a clear, concise way.

This may be true for you. But since I normally don't move my squad by number, but by position, the relative position to each other would be a more useful information to me than the number of the unit itself. Of course there are other ways to represent is, like the way it is done in civilization, where offscreen-units are displayed as a little arrowed bubble at the edge in the direction the unit would be. And yes, the red arrows are over the top. To color one piece of the border in green of the units button would be enough to show its direction relative to the selected unit (as well as there could be added a second border on which enemy sightings would be colored in red in its direction).
In my example the unit 6 would be northern-west to the currently selected unit and would face aliens coming from three directions: north, northern-west and southern-west.

But as I said, I wanted to point out a principle, not to actually do the design.

12
Sounds and Music / Re: song for game/feedback
« on: May 27, 2010, 06:41:46 pm »
This music piece is quite nice and fitting. However, I see 2 problems with this music (apart from some of the instruments don't sound real)
I don't like the song to fell nearly silent after 1:15. This silence is even more quiet, than the very beginning. Imho it doesn't fit after there was a crescendo from the start on. This piece seems much more harmonic if the part between 1:15 and 1:50 just is cut out.
The second thing is, that this piece is too short. In loop it will get anoying quite early, I fear.

13
Artwork / Re: GUI Design
« on: May 27, 2010, 06:22:06 pm »
Why not adapt the principal from starcraft 2? Build some groups (A,B,C,D) (or I,II,III,IV). Each member within the group can be chosen with the keys 1 to 6 (or to 8 ), each group can be chosen with STRG+ 1 to 4.

To help the player orientating even better, the position of each soldier relative to the current selected soldier could be added. In my attachment I did this with (okay, I admit, ugly) red arrows and a red circle for the selected player (I used paint and didn't want to spend much time for it). Other representation like highlighting the respective direction would also be possible, of course.

14
Artwork / Re: GUI Design
« on: May 20, 2010, 04:32:20 pm »
Even then, you can't move soldiers as groups, anyway. You have to move them one by one. So what'd be the point?

This is so at this moment. But this doesn't have to stay so. Even in a turn based setting movement formations are really possible and, imho, very wishable. And this is not only, because of a player would be able to move around more troops much easier, but once implemented, alien movement could be tactical, too.

Lets say, one is able to group i.e. up to 5 people and designate a group leader. As long as not ungrouped again, movement of the leader would move the whole group in formation. If you move other members of the group first, the formation is automatically changed. If you move in formation, the movement is automatically adjusted, so that each member of the group automatically keep their relative distances to each other, if possible. People would automatically slow down, if someone needs more movement points than the other to reach its designied position, using the pool of unused movement points for cover fire.
Of course, this would be problematic to implement, one would have to make sure blocking soilders would step out of the way as well as to prevent a soilder to move around the map alone while the others wait for him to reach his position indefinitely, because cause of a narrow passage his destination would be outside of something, while the destination of all other soilders is inside. But theese are all things, a little ai-work could handle. With a little ai-work this movement could be even extended, e.g. soilders automatically crack their formation up to move behind cover, if in reach, or so. 

15
Artwork / Re: GUI Design
« on: May 19, 2010, 02:33:38 pm »
Well, there is no reason not to orientate your efforts on a game, that improved the gameplay of ufo.

Don't get me wrong, ufo was an incredible game for its time, and if this game gets completed exactly the way, ufo was, it is a great game. But this project is in a state it almost is completed the way ufo was, so it is really fair to look around to other games of this genre to see, what was done better there.
If it was on me to change one thing in ufo:ai the way, Jagged Alliance is working, I probably would change the movement system to the hybrid: realtime, when no enemy is around, turn-modus otherwise. This really helped keep action in flow during missions. But I know, this change would probably turn the whole game system arround and will not be implemented (at least not for a time).

But the Jagged Alliance games do have some things, whose integration is not illusorial in this game, like jumping over fences or opening crates. And yes, some of the gui-decisions of JA were quite good. Please, don't turn this game into a jagged alliance clone, no one is (or should be) wanting that. But please don't be closeminded towards ideas just because its origans are in JA.

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