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Gauddlike

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That's a possibility but we don't know thar the UFOs have largely similiar basic shapes.

A "small" UFO could be long and slim, requiring the same "possible space" as a battleship. That would mean that a large portion of the map is empty.

Creating complicated formulas for that only limits map designers because the game can only do "the standard allocation" and could not be convinced to work with any creative map designs...

That's why I suggested to allocate "UFO shapes" where they do fit. That way the maps can be tailored to a few UFO types for which they do fit.

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Gazz, what you suggest is largely what we're thinking at this end. I imagine the solution will be something along those lines.

Regarding the 2-part missions, to be honest the biggest problem with the capital ships would be actually making the outside of them into proper tiles that go on the ground. If we can do that, we'll just do one-part missions on a really big map. Only doing the interior is a quick and easy way around the tile production problem. I actually do think it'll make the game a bit less fun (as Sathra mentioned, lots of base-lite missions), but the current design is for it to work that way.

If we get time, we'll do those UFO tiles too...I think there's certainly something very evocative about approaching a massive smoking UFO on the ground with your little team of guys and thinking "crap, that's a big UFO"...but we'd do that after we'd got all the other tiles done.

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Caveat, New to this, have not played the game, Stupid paypal.

Well technically, I have not played the game in it's current state. If you released just the world map and sitrep interface a couple years ago, I think I downloaded that, but that was my last contact with ya'all before the recent media storm. I'm making assumptions based on the previous three games, this might be mechanically impossible on non-applicable.

The way I would like to do the big ship multi part missions... have them require two teams.

I'm assuming that by time you are fighting a ship of this size, you will be well into the game, have multiple bases, several strike teams, and generally a lot going on logistically between fights.

For a ship this size, you would send in two (or more) troop carriers.

The first team's job would be to create (if needed) and hold the breach. That would be a normal mission, but instead of a whoe ufo somewhere on the map you have a large section of ufo that extends off the map along one or more edge. This team's job is to secure the area, kill any aliens that have escaped from the door/hull breach and then take the entrance to the enemy ship and hold it for X turns. I saw something about you having a take and hold victory condition to avoid "wounded floater hiding in the chimney" syndrome from bogging down gameplay. This would be a perfect use for that system. Once the outside is held it is assumed that that team would contain the ship and deal with any further leaks.

Then the second team kicks in, interior base style mission with simple entrance area (the breach/door secured by the first team) and whatever crazy interior of the ship shaped space you want to design without worrying about external objects, map sizes, or tileset constraints.

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Regarding the 2-part missions, to be honest the biggest problem with the capital ships would be actually making the outside of them into proper tiles that go on the ground. If we can do that, we'll just do one-part missions on a really big map.

What if you... cheat?

Some kind of I dunno... optical shield?

Some animated texture that makes the visible outside of the ship blur and weave.

It's just a foggy idea (sorry!) but it might let you get away with a lot fewer dedicated "outer hull" tiles.

Anyway, if you're not cheating, you're not trying hard enough. =P

I imagine a seamless, animated texture, the size of the entire tactical viewscreen.

Any tile that contains UFO "outer hull" does not actually show the outher hull graphics - or maybe only a faint shadow of them.

For the most part, any outer hull pixel serves as the alpha channel of the screen-filling wavy texture.

That way you get smooth "distortions" waving across all the visible outer hull of the UFO.

It may not look especially biological but it would look extremely alien and cover up any failure to produce a genuine biological look.

And alas, a "genuine biological look" is very difficult to pull off because with "properly" curved lines, you end up with damn near every tile of the UFO being a unique piece, custom-made to fit only one spot on the hull.

For X-Com they needed what, a grand total of 10 different tiles? Plus a bunch of decals for guns and such?

Maybe you'd still need more tiles than X-Com did to display some angles and curved lines, but you wouldn't need thousands to display every possible line.

Edited by Gazz
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Or some kind of escape pods.

Only the relatively simple escape pods land / survive unharmed, most of the ship ends up as non-navigable rubble fields.

Or... the hull of alien ships is very strong.

Strong enough to survive hitting the surface forcefully enough that large portions of it end up buried... and therefore conveniently invisible. =P

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Or... the hull of alien ships is very strong.

Strong enough to survive hitting the surface forcefully enough that large portions of it end up buried... and therefore conveniently invisible. =P

That would be pretty cool, but the game would need to be able to support 'basement' levels. Not sure if does so now or not.

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