Gauddlike

Pity a building can't just add a pre defined number of virtual scientists/technicians that don't need hiring or living space. Call it a research AI or automated production equipment to boost productivity.

Unless the AI moves its soldiers the way a player would. Walk scout forward, spot enemy, use soldier with higher TU to throw grenade/shoot using squad sight, run to cover with scout. In that situation you would likely never see the scout unless it happened to walk into line of sight of one of your static troops.

Quick suggestion related to psi protecting armour. Is it possible/desirable for the degradation to be linked to strength of the powers? That would probably mean the psi degradation value being moved from the armour to the individual psi powers if so. For example fear might have degradation 1 while mind control has degradation 3 so it protects against fear attacks 3 times longer than it would against the bigger psi assault.

I can't even find the original post that bit of information came from so can't decide if it was an official response or just a feeling someone posted up that I somehow got stuck in my head

One of those things that was put in to serve a single purpose without considering how it could have been done a touch differently to allow a wider application. Like my pet peeve the weapon fire modes! I guess you would need to rewrite how the rooms themselves work to get this to do what you wanted it to?

Yeah I guess it is because of the auto upgrade. No reason to spend time working out how to apply it on an individual basis when all of the buildings are always going to be one or the other.

I believe that the rng roll for damage is only done once for the weapon which may be the reason area effects feel so unpredictable. Assume for a second that I have thrown a grenade at a group of 3 enemies and also managed to get 2 cover props into the area. The grenade lands and the rng decides that I was unlucky and the damage is 50 points, the lowest it can go. Every object within the area of the grenade takes 50 damage and I wonder what the point was as there is no visible damage. Rewind time and repeat the shot but this time the rng likes me and I do the maximum 150 damage. Everything in the area takes 150 damage leading to dismemberment and all sorts of unpleasantness, this makes me happy. In the first case the grenade looks like a pretty puff of smoke and nothing more, in the second case it is a devastating weapon of mass destruction. It was suggested a while back that explosives could roll individually for everything in their area of effect to make them a little less of an 'all or nothing' weapon. That shouldn't be much of a problem for small explosives but could get a little excessive for larger blasts affecting large amounts of tiles.

I was only asking because if you were not having a performance issue using the old atlas then the new version would have nothing to fix On the up side at least it didn't cause any extra long loading times or frame rate issues of its own.

Both upgraded buildings do have an effect. Research time for the advanced interceptor dropped from around 200 hours to around 130 hours. Construction time of the Hunter scout car went from around 96 hours to around 65 hours. Taking into account the rough numbers that means both seem to give roughly a 50% increase in speed.

That doesn't need to involve ammos.xml though. Bonus stats could be added in weapons_gc.xml where the current ammunition stats are. You can add multiple ammunition types to a weapon there already, the game just cannot display them, I haven't tried but this should in theory also allow you to replace the default ammo with an upgraded one via research. Rocket launchers for example already upgrade their ammunition through research and all have their stats set in weapons_gc.xml so the functionality is already there. It would likely be simpler to just allow bonus stats to be defined in the current weapons_gc and not dig deeper to change where the game looks for the existing stats. I think the suggested addition of new stats for ammunition is a good one, I just don't see the need to also move the information over to a new file. Let's just say we both want more variable ammunition stats and leave it to Solver to decide how best to do that if he decides to try it I like the option to have a right click menu for ammunition types, it does seem easier than having to try and rework the existing screen completely. Unless a new tab just for 'advanced ammunition' could be made or something similar.

Probably not through the roof, I don't think that works too well a lot of the time. A floor tile tends to remain a floor tile even after it is destroyed. The walls should be breachable though.

I assume this is a typo in the post rather than your actual change? If this is the change you made to the file then the spectres should probably say armour.basic_red not armour.base_red. Just starting from basics because we can't see your file structure

Did you have any performance problems at all? Were both jumping in places or were both running smoothly?

The game, specifically the UI, would still not support those ammunition types though, all you would be doing would be moving the ammunition stat location from weapons_gc.xml where the weapon stats are and putting them in ammos.xml. It is identical to the current functionality but moved to another location. What do you see this change doing? Maybe I am just not seeing it so hopefully you can explain it to me I am always interested in changes to the weapon and ammunition system, if it requires a long and in depth discussion though might be a good plan to post up a new thread and just link it here to avoid derailing this thread. *edit* Now that is a nice change Solver, very happy with that one!

Not the purple bellies!

That's interesting, if they look identical to other buildings in the area then it is unlikely to be a spectre problem either. Might be worthwhile getting a screenshot of any specific building you see this issue with if you can to make it easier to try and identify the problem. Also are you using any map packs or was it a vanilla submap building?

The problem with landing on those props you mention is that they would need to be reworked in most cases to allow it. The top section would have to be removed and placed as a separate prop on the second level of the submap. Those objects would need to be exactly one tile high which many of them are not. Then you would also need to make sure that when you destroyed the bottom half of the object the top half vanished as well. It should all be possible but not a quick easy fix. Building rooftops should all be possible to land on, some of the submaps were built without the extra level needed to allow you to fly onto them though. That should be a fairly easy fix, just open every last building submap in the editor, add a level, then save it and move on.

Not really sure what you mean by more of the same, it would be a unique layout, just not necessarily simply larger than the one before. Your concept is OK I just like the idea of more enemies in a smaller space as a challenging mission rather than the challenge always being a bigger ship with a bigger crew. When you down a big transport ship you know you are likely going to be hunting a few enemies through a lot of space. I want people to down a battleship and know that they will likely be fighting a lot of enemies closer together instead. To recreate that feel with a ship design as large as the one you are working on would need an absolutely massive crew, which could be interesting in its own right, but not the sort of mission I was looking at giving. I am not saying I don't like your concept though, it is a very impressive vessel and could create an interesting mission. As TD says, it has echoes of the OG battleship which is not a bad thing. Incidentally the term dreadnought comes from the HMS Dreadnought which was the first ship of the class to be built. http://www.history.navy.mil/photos/sh-fornv/uk/uksh-d/drednt9.htm

The basic colour change works well with basic and jackal armour but not so well with others as they have much more subtle colours. You can come up with some interesting colours though and the process only takes minutes once you have the procedure to get your final colour.

It wasn't really an accusation that you made up the values just worth pointing out that the situation you used those examples in was not a valid in game example. The current weapons are not balanced against the example you used so it was fair to point out the environment they were actually balanced for. We all use examples that are not 100% precise in order to highlight issues we see so don't let that worry you too much

It is a known bug with the game engine that the game will not run windowed mode unless your resolution is smaller than your desktop resolution in both directions. For example my desktop is 1680x1050, windowed mode will not work above 1600x900. This is a failing of the basic game engine that Goldhawk have no access rights to modify so cannot be fixed. A quick forum search shows reports of this problem going back to 2011 with many of them answered with pretty much the same post, most of the time by me

It is quite a versatile program.

I like the chance of a critical hit but also prefer more stable damage numbers in general. Something like the D&D system so each weapon has a critical chance and a critical damage threat range of its own. More ways to differentiate between weapons as well. Lasers hit critical spots more often but plasmas do massive damage when they crit... Bit off topic though. I think the bigger the variance the worse the damage can appear, especially taking into account cover saves. I prefer more control less rng in my fights.

You can use photoshop to set up an automated colour change if it is a basic one. You can record the steps and then tell the program to repeat those steps for a designated set of files/folders.

I assumed that was what it did but wasn't sure, you never mentioned that functionality specifically. I like to know what a mod does before I consider downloading it.