Messages

106

Discussion / Re: An Open Letter to the Developers

« on: August 06, 2013, 11:52:24 am »

not like xcom had, that was just stupid. but it should be cheaper to produce something myself compared to buying it on the open market.

You should think of your workshops as specialised fabrication centres, not industrial factories which use the cost-efficiencies of scale to mass-produce goods cheaply. It sounds like you're still pretty early in the game, when workshops are only really good for disassembling UFOs. But the value of your workshops is their ability to produce items you can't buy on the open market (ie - fabricating items no one's ever produced before). This kind of workshop does not achieve any cost-efficiencies when producing a medikit or an assault rifle that has been mass-produced on the open market.

107

Translating / Re: Searching translators

« on: August 05, 2013, 06:38:55 pm »

I thought Arabic is the only exception

Maybe. Arabic is the only one I know anything about. Perhaps I phrased it wrong.

108

Translating / Re: Searching translators

« on: August 05, 2013, 04:47:15 pm »

Therefore, you will have to either write all messages in reverse (and this will cause problems with wraparound texts, like emails)

I don't know about Hebrew, but other RTL languages, like Arabic, can not be written in reverse. Letter shape depends on the characters which come before and after it.

109

Discussion / Heavy skill gone in 2.5-dev

« on: August 05, 2013, 04:43:56 pm »

As of this commit today, I've removed all references to the heavy skill which appear in the UI and research texts. For those who are playing a game compiled after this commit, please keep an eye out for any mentions of the heavy skill I may have missed. This doesn't include generic references, just references to the skill which is no longer used.

OK: The machine gun is a heavy automatic assault rifle.

BAD: The machine gun requires a heavy weapons specialist.

110

Discussion / Re: An Open Letter to the Developers

« on: August 05, 2013, 11:29:01 am »

pricing issues for crafted items have already been discussed and are worked on in 2.5, as far as i read

If you're looking for a production economy, 2.5's changes are probably not what you expect. You still won't be able to produce regular items and then sell them for profit. But disassembling UFOs (and selling the parts) will net you a small profit, so maintaining a large number of workers can now be "cost-efficient".

somewhere i read that aircraft armor has unfixable serious balancing issues. why not just take it out instead of letting us waste time with it?

You may have read me complaining somewhere about armour-piercing rounds. Armour itself has no balancing issues and I equip all the craft I can afford to equip with armour. However, in the backend code all weapons treat armour just like "extra HP", so there is no difference, for example, between the regular Shiva rounds and the amour-piercing Shiva rounds in terms of how they impact different UFOs. These two ammo types are the only ones directly affected by this at the moment. It's a mechanic with room for improvement in the future, but I'd agree that the confusion and lack of feedback you identified with air combat should take precedence.

111

User modifications / Re: middle eastern issues

« on: July 31, 2013, 12:26:24 pm »

What's the target area they keep hitting? And what type of mission is it that you keep getting? If the aliens have a base in that area, they can be supplying it. You can usually identify bases by moving an interceptor over the area for a while.

112

Feature Requests / Re: Great Game, a few suggestions and a question

« on: July 26, 2013, 09:07:29 pm »

  Q1)  Daily update/mod - after downloading the daily, do I need to enable the /base mod or is that done on game startup?

No need to enable anything.

113

User modifications / Re: modding existing saves

« on: July 25, 2013, 11:33:36 am »

Weapon/armour stat changes should be compatible

gooch359: that means you shouldn't have to restart if you've changed the data of existing items, but you will if you have added new items.

114

User modifications / Re: modding existing saves

« on: July 24, 2013, 06:20:08 pm »

It depends on the changes you've made, I would think.

115

Bugs in stable version (2.5) / Re: June 29th build bugs

« on: July 24, 2013, 11:50:48 am »

I just fixed it. And then realized shipit fixed it first! Thanks for reporting.

116

Windows / Re: *sigh* where to begin?

« on: July 24, 2013, 12:45:54 am »

I'm not much of a hardware person, but it sounds like you might be on the lower end of supported hardware, so things will definitely run slowly. I used to run on an old laptop (similar RAM, but just one core processor) and the key was disabling everything in the video settings. Turn off all glsl shader components, turn off material settings, turn off glow maps and coronas. Lower the resolution. And of course, make sure you're not running anything else at the same time. I've never had problems with Avast, but if it's actively scanning while you're playing it will slow things down.

If you find your FPS are find again and want to restore some graphics features, the glsl shaders are usually the big bottleneck (in my experience, at least).

117

Discussion / Re: 2.5 sucks completely

« on: July 17, 2013, 10:51:38 am »

Bottom line, reaction fire sucks, but it can be beaten, and the game seems to be better for it.  Good job.

Thanks for posting the followup!

118

Bugs in stable version (2.5) / Re: June 29th build bugs

« on: July 04, 2013, 10:53:47 am »

1) One of the battlescape maps, I had 2 soldiers in the Firebird at the end of my first time. I thought they were safe, yet the aliens somehow knew they were in the aircraft and shot at them. They somehow could shoot through the corners of the ship and injured my soldiers (in other words, the aliens shot through the ship's hull)

We would need more information to properly find the gap (we have to manually build a shell around the aircraft to block weapon fire). Which map, what were the locations of your soldiers and the locations of the aliens? Otherwise it's like finding a needle in a haystack.

2) One of the maps is buggy and incomplete. It was UFO landing #14 for me with an oval fountain on the map. I had tried to reload a few different times but got the same map distortion so I ran it on autobattle to pass that point

See this.

- I miss having different outfits like urban, jungle, etc. I used to use that to help determine which of my troops were close, medium and far range fighters, etc. Now it's just "urban." Why was that option taken away?

We got great new soldier models, but we don't (yet) have different "camouflage" patterns for them.

- A tad slow at the beginning, which is fine and then however it ramped up too fast. I was on June of the following year and suddenly every ship was a harvester from no harvesters. I got about 7 harvesters in a row. I would prefer a more gradual increase with harvesters starting to appear on the map with more scouts and fighters. I am hoping that was just a random sporadic circumstance and not how the game will progress from here on in as that is when I stopped.

Just a random sporadic circumstance. The UFO appearance is a heavily sandbox mechanic -- so you'll see significant variations from time to time -- and this is made even less consistent by the fact that you're probably still missing lots of UFOs flying around outside of radar range.

119

User modifications / Re: Health values vs stun, smoke grenade

« on: July 01, 2013, 01:55:14 pm »

No, I think you've come to the limit of what can be done with script files at the moment. The following things can not be changed, as far as I know, in the script files:

- Stun threshold
- Bleeding damage
- Hospital heal rate
- Smoke visibility (the game has no partial visibility at all, btw)
- Smoke accuracy penalty

Regarding smoke, we do hope to implement some drawbacks to its use. I don't think there are any specific plans to reduce accuracy, but it is probably going to be considered at some point.

120

Coding / Re: the AI discussion

« on: June 27, 2013, 11:10:54 am »

Why is the routing info recaculated for every entity in use? Shouldn't there be just one routing table? Why does it relate to specific game entities at all? Am i misunderstanding?

My uninformed hypothesis which someone else will likely correct: I think the game may only be calculating the routing within a certain radius of each entity defined by their max TUs.