PyRoT

It's amazing but the $125,000 level has been achieved. I really hope that we can reach 140k in the last ~3 days. Anything to make this great game even better! I will say though that with all this by-hand work with sprites, any future games should have a more automated process so more resources can be directed towards other things

Isn't it more realistic to have to destroy a wall using a grenade anyway? A rifle round to the side of a building should not be able to bring a wall down should it?

Yes I wanted to show that a slightly more simple effect can be done very easily.

That's right. Although, if the devs automated or made into a batch process, the sprite rendering tasks, it would also not take long to switch around textures to give soldiers guerrilla-style camo patterns. I think it would be nice to add into the game but a mod wouldn't hurt either, at least then we'd all be happy with simple recoloring.

The question is also, would we find recoloring of the sprites acceptable? I for one wouldn't mind at all, I'd welcome it with open arms. I think most of us would like it and the extra dimension would be well worth it. There have been many games that have taken greater shortcuts and done well. X-com apocalypse had only one image of a person for the equip-screen. Dragon Age 2 used the same map for every dungeon (going a bit too far there IMO). Having basic soldiers with different colors isn't a huge deal in my opinion.

I posted a suggestion a while back which I will replicate below: URL: http://www.goldhawkinteractive.com/forums/showthread.php/2020-Hostile-Militias-Cult-Of-Sirius-Aliens-Engaging-in-psychological-warfare One objection was the time to create the new sprites. I decided to experiment and using a simple Photoshop macro, was able to change the uniform color of as many sprites as I like without any effort at all. Using this, I could recolor soldier sprites and quickly generate them for a hostile force that would need to be dealt with in terror situations or a base attack. [ATTACH=CONFIG]1221[/ATTACH] Here is a few soldier sprites. Their blue uniforms have gone Green. The Helmets a bit as well. Their skin is still the normal color. Would it be implementable?

Thanks Chris. You've crafted an excellent game so far and I look forward to seeing the progress. Especially the xenopedia autopsy pics haha. Ill be contributing soon

I finally tried playing the alpha yesterday and was incredibly impressed! The interceptor combat is really cool and the geoscape has an amazing feel. Also very impressed with the amount of detail in the writing. Love the tileset details etc. I have a few suggestions though. 1. When buying/selling/assigning researchers, it would be great to have a movable bar. It takes a long time to click the arrow to sell 80 piece of alien alloy for example. It would best, as in Apocalypse, where you can slide the bar to quickly sell everything. Assigning many scientists to a project would also help a great deal. 2. Slow down the smoke animation. It's too fast! I'd recommend even redoing it so its more dispersed less detailed as the details enhance the tiling effect so it doesn't look so good and scary. There also needs to be some more lighter smoke variations so that the smoke fades out over an area. 3. Lower alpha of walls that are in front of soldiers. 4. Make the fog of war much scarier by having more of a falloff effect like in the first two games. There absolutely must be a library available that can filter tile set colors/contrasts to get the right look, simply darkening them would definitely be good enough though. 5. Have civilians running away from the aliens. They seem to run randomly, and often towards them. As panicked as people can get, they never run towards the source of the panic. 6. Soldeirs should sometimes survive being "killed", if they don't already...

Yep pretty Much. Shifted the hue for the cyan colors. It seems to work really well and could generate alternative sprites for enemy human soldiers.

Here is a few soldier sprites. Their blue uniforms have gone Green. The Helmets a bit as well. Their skin is still the normal color. I used the same procedure on various sprite images using a macro. It could be done for all the thousands of sprites in just a few minutes.

I mentioned in my first post that this could be either way. However, I think that since these scientist are top in their field, they probably wouldn't need increasing skill over time. If skill did have to increase then I think it would be ok to keep the initial price, or at most, only increase their salaries but less than hiring someone of equal skill (this is not unusual for any company). It would add the dynamic that you need to let people go and/or replace them with cheaper lower quality recruits to keep costs down. But I'd prefer skill not increasing.

Interesting, although my hope was to revamp the research / manufacturing part of the game more so than the combat. I wonder why Chris would be against it, I thought it was quite awesome. Made it feel more like a real base / system. Although I guess since this X-COM is world based, you would be getting the best of the best scientists anyway. Still, would be fun.

This should be easy to implement. The price of a scientist, engineer or soldier could be based on their skill. Apocalypse had skill ranks but salaries were the same. Either their accumulated skill, or initial level. It would not be linear so you would have to pay a premium to get really good employees. But if you could afford it, then you would benefit from faster research, manufacturing and better soldiers. It should be very expensive to get top of the line people but worth it if you can afford it. If you can't afford it and get the top people, you'd obviously cripple your overall efforts. Thoughts?

Thank you for your reply. Would you be kind enough to point me to, or help me get a hold of some sprites to play with? I am not sure where to get them from And it sounds like I should play part 1 (I only played 2 and 3 and loved them!).

Did you ever play Apocalypse? I found it much more immersive when the cult or other enemy human factions attacked me (or I them). And I honestly don't think it will take much work to re-render human sprites with slightly different colors. You only need to regenerate the human allies, and certainly not from scratch. For example, if they are 3D models they probably use textures.. so if you simply modify the color of a few bitmaps, you can re-render every sprite pretty quickly as it will simply reference the alternate texture bitmap. This could be done in batch mode so it would be even quicker. Alternatively, you could simply create a macro in Photoshop to shift the hue of an image and resave it, then batch execute this on all the human ally sprites. More detiled functions could be performed even such as shifting the hue of only certain colors. Whether its 8 or 8000 of them, it would be the same amount of effort. Hell, I'd be willing to do it for them for free!