Charon

@Chrisgo to bed. Its 23 52. You can work tomorrow. Which is in a few minutes. :P

At the right side you have a green square that the path of the damage can take, around the corner. Hence the damage. The way that a grenade does transfer energy are: 1. Shrapnels (which travel in a straight path), 2. Shockwaves (which compress air and take the path of the least resistance), 3. chemical (which can travel the path of air), and 4. heat (which also travels with the path of air). 1. cannot travel around corners, but 2.,3. and 4. can. It depends on how you define your grenade technology to work. It worked like this since X1.

As the current creative content holder following announcements and clarifications have been added: These clarifications have been added to address installation questions as well as removing ambiguity of how to reuse creative content of the project. Cheers ! Charon

This is absolutely genius. They are becoming self-aware. @Chris had to ping you about this. But the question is real, the forum is overrun by bots, but at what point can we no longer distinguish authenticate human posts from bot ones ?

Indeed. You picked up on that very well. Indeed he keeps his side of the football field "clean". Though somebody suggested that i am in the wrong thread for this kind of talk, so i will get lost ;).

That somebody translated "Cleaners" as "Ausputzer" either doesnt know any german, or has intricate football knowledge, or wants to make an elaborate joke or uses google translate. Google translate actually thinks this is correct. All your base are belong to us. Such translations really add some spice to a game.

wrong categoy ? Unless you redesigned the interface, and hooked Xenonauts.exe into unity and remade the game ? Edit: Doesnt seem to be the first time this happened.

deleted by me, @ charon

I tend to take charge of projects is participate in, so that has advantages and disadvantages. Here is just my 2 cents. The most important part that is missing in this thread are end users. People who can NOT program but want to mod. You need 2 groups of people. One group of people who can make the actual program, and the second group of people who can not program but would like to produce creative content. People who want to mod and can program are put into the group of people who can program. The question that you have to ask yourself is what is the target audience. You could propably answer that by saying that the target audience are people who are willing to produce creative content. This target audience will propably be somewhere beetween people who can program, and people who cant. The big discrepancy is not in the quality, but the quantity. The overwhelming amount of people who want to create creative content cant program, even if the quality is not on par. If you want to have a high quantity of creative content make tools which are designed for people who dont know how to use computers, if you want to get high quality mods you have to increase the capability of the tools. One of the examples of a very programmy system is @ Illunaks modmerging system: https://www.goldhawkinteractive.com/forums/index.php?/topic/11156-documentation-modular-mods-system/. Very handy for programmers indeed, but nobody else used it because nobody understood how it worked. The other problem is that the modular mod system is actually a chain. Have one faulty mod in your mod loading order and everything may break down. Even worse, without actually notifying the user of it. 20 hours into the campaign and it breaks. If your software can be misused, the users will misuse it. Simply put you need QA. Otherwise you will simply end up with wolves designing a barn for sheep. Very handy for wolves indeed ... Other thoughts include: Proprietary or open source ? Version Control ? Git ? Public hosting ? Licenses ? Dependencies ? Contracts ? Which GUI library ? Programming Language ? This post does not express my interest in participating, merely my interest in getting quality tools running. Otherwise you will simply end up with dead code ... Cheers Charon

hm ...

Dieser Beitrag sollte jetzt nur noch funktionierende Links enthalten. Man darf @ Solver danken.

@Solver Please delete the links: OP link works

Ive downloaded every single link in this thread and its always 0 bytes. Except for my own one, which i uploaded: This ones works correctly. The confusion comes from the fact that this thread is full of links which dont work. I recommend removing all links in this thread which actually dont work, with a note that a moderator edited each post, in its post, and move my own version into the OP. Currently no links in this thread work except mine. Cheers @ Solver <3 PS: I can assist in the german language, if the need arises.

@Solver

Surprisingly, I have to agree with Solver on this one. Nothing is more fun killing than knowing exactly what the map is going to be like, and with that you dont really need to pay attention anymore, and that lessens the fun. During the development process of X-Division we took on what needed work the most, and for maps it was the terror missions. Because we added so much aliens the relatively small terror maps felt more cramped than usual. One of the things the team did was create different leveled versions of the same building. Eg: Additionally we simply alternated the vanilla layout. That was a very easy copy and paste job, as we simply copied one level as textdata and pasted it one level higher. Given that terror missions are quite hard, the added variety felt like a good reward for taking on a difficult mission. Keep in mind though that we also forbid the aliens from starting inside of a building, vanilla does not contain any spawn points on higher levels, and the more aggressive AI meant that the player never really had to search for the aliens (thus we also removed the reveal after 20 turns mechanic, and later added it with 40 turns back in again). However we could do better. All of this is based on illunaks contribution of allowing submaps to load other submaps. This technical aspect alone makes a lot possible. Want to make an asset which contains all other boxes ? We can do that. Want to make another asset that loads said box mix with 20% possibility ? Just put and add 2 of the box mix as a file, and 8 empty ones. I am familiar with all the map packs and how they work (mostly) and its not an understatement to say that without the lovely added chaotic and unpredictable maps X-Division would have never come to be. Before people would add additional unit content if no map variety would have been present the gameplay loop would have quickly burned out. Nothings more fun killing than "Been there, done that, seen everything". Imagine playing 200 hours of X-Division on the vanilla maps only, and you will see how much core the mapping scene is to the modding community. Unfortunately, Illunaks contributions came way too late. By the time the functionality was added, all the other maps had already been written, and no map content which utilises this system has been published today. The mapmakers moved on, and thats just that. It came around that that somebody actually implemented this system, and improved on other aspects of vanilla maps too, focusing on the battleship map. Here is showcase of how that could look like: More images of actual implemented variations can be downloaded here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1bY-FRNoOYGcEpiQ4ILPaWGlFoagedOtU/view?usp=share_link Here i talk roughly 2 hours about proper game design and explain the ins and outs of the system specifically for maps. And the presented idea visualised in a CAD: This was all done with the functionality that XCE and Illunak provided and is already possible in X1. Now this shouldnt be an argument because it is possible in X1 it should be possible in X2, just showing that the concept removed from the implementation works. Put to the test the procedural generation of battleship maps increased the loading time by 50%. That sounds long, but if you realise you will play at least an hour on such a map its usually worth it. However as Solver once noted, the increased loading time fundamentally shows that something wrong happens in that system, and it should really not take more than 300 ms between a procedurally and non procedurally map generated. Performance is still a factor, and the faster a map loads the happier the players are, as you break immersion less with lower loading times. However, the system will have to be build with procedurally generated content in mind, otherwise you will just end up with scaling issues like in X1. I strongly advise follwoing points: Hire somebody that actually cares about procedurally generated maps. Whether you like it or not, randomised maps are THE factor for the longevity of a game, and a healthy modding scene. Just take a look at Wacraft 3, the public map editor kept the game alive until the game company literally killed its own modding scene, and spawned entirely new genres, like DOTA. Some programmers just really dont like to do procedurally generated maps, others do. If you cant do it yourself, hire somebody who cares for randomised maps. You will have the highest return on gains on this. Make a public map editor available on day 1. Before anything else can happen for a game, there need to be maps. That means before any other modding can happen, you need the possibility to increase the map variety by the community. Just like Illunaks technical achievements were unmatched, as unmatched was the lack of actual modders who used it. By September 2015 the community scene mostly moved on to other things. So that people feel attracted to the vanilla game, and the modding scene, you need a public map editor. The more map variety there is on day 1, and/or the possibility to make their own, the longer you will attract players. The longer you attract players, the higher the chance for them to buy the next game, the higher the chance they really like your content, and the higher the chance they will start to add to the modding community. Because people WILL move on, the question of it is just "when". Providing a bigger variety increases the time window people spend on your creative content, and therefore increase the time window you can paint yourself in a positive light. All of this is a statement about the biggest bang for the buck that the IP can get, not necessarily how possible it is to achieve it. I have not been filled in about the details of the legal issues for a public map editor, or the situation GI is in. But again i have to stress that the least amount of effort is required to implement the system I presented. The modularity of the system is fully accessible, how much effort the map creator spends on any particular asset is a free choice, assets can be reused on other maps ( additional to the "one map, different biomes" idea), and the gain of the system is exponential. By creating only 36 small submaps you can create 5 figure variations of meaningful and good looking maps. Sincerely, Charon PS: I had to chuckle at @Komandos post again, he put it, as other people would say "most expertly", in very few words. PPS: I do love handcrafted maps, but as Solver said, simply turning an asset in all 4 directions can provide immense value, with little to no effort. As a matter of fact most 4x variations i produced are the same asset rotated in 4 directions.