Messages

16

Discussion / Re: What Alien Invasion needs in order to replace XCOM1 as the best game

« on: June 25, 2009, 05:22:52 am »

LOL, yes!

Or moving through an alien base in twos, with decent soldiers, veterans of many a raid and ufo mission and all of a sudden something flies around a corner and BLAM! The squad leader is down, the guy next to him bleeding to death, help too far away...

The blaster bombs were kind of a cool curve ball halfway through... but I think the reason they were so cool is because they were innovative and the game set you up in the right way for them. You learned not to bunch up, but to have the squaddies cover each other and move up... you pretty much expected that you will see what will get you, and if you set yourself up down a corridor you can see, you would probably be ok... esp since even the first armor would give you ok chances against an alien round.... then you get the gift of a blaster in the face and nope you were wrong... back to the drawing board of strategies...

In my opinion this is where Aftershock failed... the missile launchers were spam weapons and not very cool... and no defence against them either

17

Discussion / Re: Essence of XCOM-UFO.

« on: June 25, 2009, 05:14:01 am »

Sirine:

Not sure how having percentages OR fixed TU for usage changes the scenario that you wrote down. In the end it works the same as you described since the soldier level doesn't change in mission. The difference is that at start of mission you have to check how much TUs every shot will take for all your soldiers, which doesn't add anything to the game at all and subtracts from immersion in my opinion.

Now if you have a soldier that has more TUs and can fire 3 times, instead of always 2 no matter what, you are tempted to send him to the front. But he's also your skilled veteran... that creates suspense and tactical choices!

18

Discussion / Re: What Alien Invasion needs in order to replace XCOM1 as the best game

« on: June 25, 2009, 02:07:57 am »

From a different barrel, favorite XCom moment and somewhat unrelated to the original thread but I guess to put it out there
(BTW I hope this could be recreated, but I think its one of those things that you get to experience once and once only, because later you expect them to happen and are ready):

A bunch of rookies and a vet or two come out on the second skyranger and proceed to land at a terror site... first encounter with ethereals, everyone tries to disperse from the 'ranger and take up positions... spread out a bit and the troops come under heavy fire from a sectopod I think it was, and a bit of a firefight ensues. One fella bites the dust but so far they're holding.... then an ethereal comes into view... another soldier gets beserked/MCs... by now I'm like OH SH-... so he turns to the guy standing near the gas station and unloads whatever heavy weapon he was holding (I think HE-AC), my guy, the gas station, and some other things go up...
My turn begins and the other soldier that didn't make it as far as the gas station to shoot at the ethereal, but he can't see it in all the smoke... but wait, there it is, only a few squares away... lets check out what it was... oh it's still alive just passed out from the explosion and smoke!... last TUs are spend putting the guy in the backpack (I think that was a strategy for not having them wake up if I remember correctly)...
ok some more movement out, so far only 3 soldiers down, still 7 or so left... the MC guy is still around but I figure he'll be ok next turn (the thing that was trying to take him out is now in my backpack...)
next turn... two guys get PSId, one shoots a soldier, but he's not dead the other shoots into the sky... the guy that picked up the ethereal doubles back to the 'ranger, and shoots the rookie getting MCd... another guy runs out to the downed soldier and picks him up... they try to make it back as far as possible...  the beserked soldier is the furthest out and he finally gets MCd... another guy gets panicked.. the rest scramble madly and get into the ranger....
damn... the MCd guy is back and he tries to make it to the ranger but he's still off the ramp... I hate to leave him out there but if we stay the guys inside will succumb and turn on each other...
I hit abort....
I think the guy that got left behind was Buchard...
Anyway, they make it back to base with I think 4 guys and the ethereal something Navigator? Medic?... lets me do my PSI research and build my PSI lab... for a while I send tanks to these terror missions and shoot down ethereal UFOs over water as much as I can... eventually I screen out enough soldiers to create an invincible PSI taskforce and rip into the ethereals with their own weapons like no-one's bussines... I was grinning like an idiot every time I would have them shoot each other...
The sacrifice of Buchard and his buddies on that fateful mission will always be remembered

Oh there might be some discrepancies in the above turn account wise as it was back when the game first came out, but when that gas station went up I was basically thinking "that's not good"... and when I got that ethereal I knew the guy holding him had to go back no matter the cost... not sure if I knew by then that I needed the guy to get PSI research but I had to find out what happened there I guess

Anyway, best moment in XCom I ever had hands down

19

Discussion / Re: Essence of XCOM-UFO.

« on: June 25, 2009, 02:02:20 am »

Edit: DELETED
WHOOPS, looks like I somehow cross-posted here...
original here: http://ufoai.ninex.info/forum/index.php?topic=3751.msg27636#msg27636

20

Discussion / Re: Essence of XCOM-UFO.

« on: June 25, 2009, 01:31:21 am »

Muttons:

It won't make the rifle fire faster, but the 'shot' is not only pulling the trigger it also models the aiming/heft of the weapon etc. (hence the different modes of fire use different amounts of TU, the speed of the rifle doesn't change) so, if we are modeling all of the above, experience would HAVE TO impact how fast I can bring to bear/aim/fire the said weapon whereas a % based system says that no matter how skilled you are with that weapon you will always fire it at the same speed as a rookie that just barely figured out how it works... this is completely disregarding the fact that some of these weapons can be complicated (alien guns!)

Sirine:
I played the first XCom and loved it, and the % system always annoyed me.

Long story short: I like the current system of fixed TUs for firemodes, scaling the TUs for soldiers not weapons is best

21

Discussion / Re: Essence of XCOM-UFO.

« on: June 22, 2009, 11:37:13 pm »

Destructavator:
The very first pic is from the loosing vid from the CD version (or PSX version, dunno)
vid here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=932WM42lRpE&feature=related

Sirine:
I don't think that percentage based TU usage is a good idea, the reason in my opinion for different ammount of TUs for different soldiers is because some people are faster and some slower. The guys that are faster because they just are, or because they've been on a trillion missions and are just -that- good are obviously going to shoot faster as well, and as such more often in a turn. A percentage based TU usage would mean that the slowest guy would be able to shoot as fast as a superhuman veteran of a million battles... not really fun nor does it make much sense

(short version: hey I got better! why is it harder for me to use my rifle?)

22

Translating / Re: Launguage selector translation proposal

« on: June 22, 2009, 11:20:06 pm »

I'm using Vista and don't have a build environ set up so I guess I can't just simply compile it into my packages and test it...

Here is the link to a zip with the MO and PO file if you have a way of testing it otherwise:
http://rapidshare.com/files/247511498/EN_with_modified_langSelList.zip.html

Now on to the reason why I believe it would work:
It looks to me that the .po file is actually MIME encoded as UTF8 and when read it as such it shows all the fonts (I also tested this in a browser with same results, UTF8 shows the chars), so then it will not matter what font is used as long as its UTF8.

Then again I haven't tested it in game

P.S. Is there something special you have to do to enable the forum's "new replies to your posts" feature for my account? It doesn't seem to do anything...

23

Design / Re: Alien Concept: Reanimator

« on: June 20, 2009, 08:48:27 pm »

The old Chryssalid was the only alien I dreaded when going into those terror missions... I would sweep the map and they would just keep coming at you, resistant to lasers, converting all civilians, eating your soldiers, etc.

I think the reasons for that were:
it was faaaast (so it could pop up from around the corner and hit at least one soldier)
then everyone would fire on the zombie which was reasonably tough
and after they killed the zombie and used up all their TUs you would still have a chryssalid right in front of you
and if you didn't manage to take down the first one you actually had two
rinse, repeat

in most missions I would pair my guys into two, in the missions with Chrissalids they were all together holding hands like little schoolchildren on a field trip through a dark forrest

24

Design / Re: Tachyon?

« on: June 20, 2009, 08:40:21 pm »

Also to comment on Titan's post, it looks like the tech was just changed from Tachyon to Particle Accel. the proposals that are under 'rejected' wouldn't work well realism wise with either tech, it probably just happens that they were rejected before the name change.

25

Design / Re: Tachyon?

« on: June 20, 2009, 08:38:02 pm »

Should we therefore edit the wiki ufopaedia entry for the armor to remove references to tachyon?

26

Translating / Re: Launguage selector translation proposal

« on: June 20, 2009, 07:12:46 pm »

I doubt the selector would have a problem displaying the fonts because when you change the language it has to display the new version in native fonts anyway so that's already there.

So I went ahead and put it together but not sure how to get the po file back in the game... the steps for compiling it in are kind of fragmented on the wiki. If you want to take a look I can post the .po and .mo files somewhere.

27

Bugs prior to release 2.3 / Re: ufoai-2.3-dev-win32-24761 crash to geo

« on: June 19, 2009, 11:39:26 pm »

Cool, I guess it's a known issue then.

Thanks!

28

Translating / Launguage selector translation proposal

« on: June 19, 2009, 09:36:39 pm »

Folks, the standard approach in most software these days (UFO:AI included) is to list the languages in whatever currently selected language is being used. I've seen this trend broken a few times and I think it works actually quite well when it's set so that the language is written in its own native way.

For example currently we have:
English
...
Polish
...
Japanese

and if we switch to Polish we have:

Angielski
...
Polski
...
Japonski

whereas I think for the language selector alone it would be best to have:

English
...
Polski
...
日本語

If this sounds like something of a good idea I can work on it;
Also I haven't looked at the language files in detail, but what is used for No Language? If a separate type is/can be used it can have the modified list, and then the other language lists can be left alone

let me know

29

Design / Tachyon?

« on: June 19, 2009, 09:21:05 pm »

Quick question re: weapon types and info texts. I've seen some of the armor texts mention Tachyon weapons, but I haven't actually seen tachyon weapon types mentioned anywhere other than the proposal for some rocket. Is that weapon class still in, or does it refer to something else and just requires cleanup?

30

Bugs prior to release 2.3 / Re: ufoai-2.3-dev-win32-24761 crash to geo

« on: June 19, 2009, 08:33:14 pm »

Same thing happened to me with Farm+ (landed harvester I think it was) map using ufoai-2.3-dev-win32-24654.

EDIT: My crash was a few turns in however.

EDIT #2: Happens pretty thoroughly now, error is:

ERROR: LET_PathMove: Actor Move is out of sync: 127:128:0, should be 123:126:0 (Step 6 of 6) (Team 1)
This is 24761 running on Vista x64

I can upload the save if it's worthwhile right before the mission start