Directional Indicator for Heard Events in Ground Combat

I feel you think you try to improve, but make things to be different. I think player should not have any directions, he must be disorientated. Hidden is hidden, this noises is about "somewhere something happened" you have no directions only guesses.

Maybe the easiest way to do any kind of sound tracking system would be to ignore the directional indicators completely.

Instead when anything on the map generates a sound place a large radiating template above that point if any xeno soldier is in range.

The range could be determined by a loudness value set in the same place the sound file is specified.

The template would be larger than this value and the centre point would be suitably randomised.

I guess it is sort of similar to how the x-com motion tracker worked, except displayed on the actual play area.

For example:

A weapon sound file is requested by an alien firing a plasma rifle.

The game checks weapons_gc.xml for the correct sound file and also reads that this sound has a loudness of 20.

A check is done to see if any xeno soldier is within 20 tiles of the firing unit.

If any are within range then a 25 radius template is placed over the firing unit, overlaying the fog of war.

The centre point is shifted in a random direction.

The distance of the shift increases by 1 tile for every 5+ tiles distance between firer and listener.

That may allow sounds to be displayed without having to change much about sound tracking.

It still means code would need to be added of course, although range calculations for things like morale may already be in the game and available to reuse.

I'd be down for nixing 'hidden movement' in the original X-COM and moving to a more compact version of that like XCOM:EU. Just show shots/aliens moving in LoS and then have some vague indicators for noise/etc at the edges. It'd cut out a significant amount of downtime.

Yeh Erutan i thinks thats the approach we re trying to reach, Maybe Gaudlike have a good point, does seem feasable.

I like the general idea.

How it is implemented is not really important to me.

Gam

Inplementation could follow the "Area of Effect" like system of a weapon.

2 options:

1)When alien shot (beyong the shooting sound) and/or do his last movement it triggers an visuall effect that expand for 2 or 3(max) tiles, if we can see it from fog, we ll get a clue if not we re not, we re not supposed to identify the general direction of the sound.

Badside: too easy to identify the real spot of the alien if we re near.

2) option 2 much like the first but its 1 wide circle always same wideness 4? 5? 6? tiles. The wide area would give us a general idea of the place of the event not a good place of the alien.

The general cue of the event would be the unplaced sound we have today.

OBS: I find all this extremely crude. Since the game is still alfa, can t general sound be placed or something like that at the corner of the maps. This would act like cardinal and mayhaps can be a better and more immersive, elegant cue.

I missed out page 3.. but if the code is already capable of understanding where a bit of movement or sound is coming from (it does it outside of FOW) then I would have thought the easiest way of letting the player know would be through some kind of text based report. E.g. a button within the main actions panel you could click that asks a character, or the whole group, to give a report. This would then just bring up a text overlay saying something like 'nothing to report' or 'movement seen to North West' or 'distant human gunfire heard to South East'.

I should 'I would have thought the easiest way' as I have no actual idea whether that is easy or incredibly difficult... the concept just sounds easy.

Lancebloke: Chris has previously said that the game doen't track enough for that to be possible. I think what the camera tracks and what the game engine tracks are different things. (and the game would need to track both the source of the enemy movement and how it relates to the players units)

Let's not overcomplicate things.

There's no need for a check against all actors - aliens and civies can be left out. So when an alien shoots, the game checks the "noise" value of the weapon and checks who is the closest Xenonaut to it, and checks if he can hear it.

If so an aditional graphics displaying the general direction of the sound is shown.

Yeah although movement noise would be good it isn't really necessary.

Tracking movement by eye and weapon fire by ear (civvie, npc, and alien weapons) would be enough.

It would be nice if the ability was there though so people could mod in armours with quieter movement etc.

Incidentally that could also remove the need for projectile animations to a degree as well.

You would have the camera point at the impact point and a noise indicator show where the shot may have originated from.

Burst fire may also become easier to model as you just need to generate multiple impact points on firing which don't need to justify how much they missed the target by as the current method does.