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Myopic Soldiers, Civilians


lemm

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I have a couple of suggestions.

First, and most importantly, I don't think the game has "scaled up" quite enough to accommodate the larger resolutions of today's computers. The soldiers in the DOS XCOM games had short visual ranges, but it worked because the screen wasn't that big and it would probably be confusing to the player if he had to move three screens to find a line to his target. However, when you play UFO2000 on double-resolution, you can see just how comical it actually looks when you can't even see a target half a block away. As it is in Xenonauts, the soldiers can only see about 25 yards ahead of them, which ends up looking a bit silly at times. For example, you can see an entire vegetable patch in your screen, but the soldier at one end of the patch cannot see the alien at the other end, even though they are just two squares outside of visual range and it looks like they should be able to see each other.

Likewise, I think the effective range of some of the weapons should be extended. What should be within the effective range for a handgun, and certainly an easy target for someone with an assault rifle, requires the sniper rifle to reliably hit.

Along the same lines, I think it would be refreshing if all the maps weren't conveniently sectioned into 15 square chunks. It would be enjoyable, for example, if there were mostly flat maps, out in the middle of nowhere and devoid of citizens, where you could have a firefight with aliens 40 squares away.

Secondly, would it be possible for unarmed civilians to flee the combat zone when they get to edge of the map, once they have been rescued? It's annoying to have to watch them wander around for 30 seconds while you're hunting down that last alien.

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As it is in Xenonauts, the soldiers can only see about 25 yards ahead of them, which ends up looking a bit silly at times. For example, you can see an entire vegetable patch in your screen, but the soldier at one end of the patch cannot see the alien at the other end, even though they are just two squares outside of visual range and it looks like they should be able to see each other.

I think the sighting and shooting range is intentionally very short to heighten the suspense of working through an area and give some differentiation to the weapon capabilities. Looking at the map in "real" scale I'm fairly sure they could easily spot and hit targets all the way across the map, so a large amount of range compression was done to make the game more interesting.

My biggest beefs are the amount of burst fire scatter and ridiculous distances they can throw grenades compared to how accurately they can fire their weapons. Every Xenonauts seems to be a human grenade launcher.

Edited by StellarRat
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You can adjust the angle and distance your troops can see (I think it is in armours_gc.xml) to test out higher values.

Remember that realistic values are not always the same as good gameplay values though.

Yeah, it wouldn't be much fun to move the ranges way out unless we had some truly gigantic maps to play on.
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The reason we've gone for relatively short sight ranges (and deliberately enclosed parts of the map) is to keep the suspense of "what's just around the corner?" that is very X-Com. Realistic sight ranges really would make the combat far more of a war of attrition and I think it'd make it more tedious if I'm honest.

That said, we are in the process of making larger maps. The mid-size UFO maps are 70x70 instead of 60x60 , and I'm working on a medium size terror map that is rectangular but still larger than the current maps.

Bear in mind the different missions are meant to have different feels - the crash sites are meant to be more of a search-and-destroy mission where limited sight ranges are important, whereas the terror sites are meant to be more of a straight-up deathmatch. Therefore the terror sites are more open in layout (the new one is a town plaza map) and may be more to your tastes.

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I think it's the very sharp cutoff - here you see everything, there it's all black - that is really more bothersome than sight ranges itself. And it all happening in a very brightly lit + mostly uncluttered environment.

EU2012 where you see a bit of terrain first, and it's almost always night/late time, and maps are quite cluttered, does better in this regard. It doesn't feel like your people are blind, it only feels natural, like it's meant to be like that. Well, if you ignore that spawn mechanic.

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The reason we've gone for relatively short sight ranges (and deliberately enclosed parts of the map) is to keep the suspense of "what's just around the corner?" that is very X-Com. Realistic sight ranges really would make the combat far more of a war of attrition and I think it'd make it more tedious if I'm honest.
Is there any possibly of reducing the grenade throwing ranges to something more in proportion to the sighting and shooting ranges (you could also factor in the strength of the thrower)? That's one thing that always bothered me about X-Com and it seems to have carried over to your game as well. I think you could cut them down to 1/4 of what they are now. Two or three house lengths ought to be the extreme limit. Edited by StellarRat
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@HWP I don't think the entire level will be visible with fog of war due to limited sight range (though that's a legitimate design choice), but visually at least the fade to black should be tweaked to look more natural at some point. I think that sense of exploration makes it a bit more exciting, even if realistically you would know what was there from Chinook approach!

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Is there any possibly of reducing the grenade throwing ranges to something more in proportion to the sighting and shooting ranges (you could also factor in the strength of the thrower)? That's one thing that always bothered me about X-Com and it seems to have carried over to your game as well. I think you could cut them down to 1/4 of what they are now. Two or three house lengths ought to be the extreme limit.

^^ I agree with this, it's odd that you've got a squad of troops who've apparently all been through the same Six Million Dollar Man project and have a bionic throwing arm :)

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