Sheepy
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Posts posted by Sheepy
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One thing you can always try, @_0_, is to re-download and re-install the game. It the game loads a corrupted sound or graphic a few seconds in, it may crash there. If the game always crash at exactly the same time or same action, definitely try this out.
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Pretty sure it won't. For that to happen, the ground combat must be built to run in realtime. Turn based play can be added on top of that, but not the other way round.
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Haven't seen report of that on this forum before. Any crash report?
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Selecting soldier or location at that level of intelligence would requires custom code or scripting for each, and can potentially be a whole new different level from modable Geoscape Events. (Which in many games are triggered by simple conditions like stress, skill, money, research etc.)
A potential middle point X2 can do is to record the first kill of every weapon and armour, first fallen location, in a predictable naming so that the xenopedia can try to use them. But I suspect these fixed trick will get old quickly, and it sounds like something that can be modded in, assuming mods will have a way to store custom properties to a game.
So, um, good idea but no I don't see how that is feasible or suitable for vanilla, esp. that the better mod support goal is unlikely to be met.
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2 hours ago, ShadowAdmiral said:
I thought about this argument. You have many more sientists than soldiers, so you are right it will be much more data and an extra GUI.
Hmm. I thought we are moving to the XCOM 2 model where staff is rarer than soldiers, given that the plan is to make it so that the players will have to reassign their room from time to time, for a more active base management.
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Well, players seems to hate streamlining, if the discussion about backpack, base expansion, weapon module and other topics is any indication.
And I quite like this idea despite its anti-streamline nature. We already pick specific scientist / engineer in XCOM 2, just need to expand the simple list into an all-scientist/engineer popup that also all their skills, either in icon or in (small) text.
But what I'm really after is scientist and engineer "tags" that can be used in the geoscape event system. e.g hire an enginner with underworld ties, see blackmarket event triggered for that engineer.
A meticulous scientist may yield slightly slower research but faster development, and may have an argue event with an impulsive scientist and you can decide to send them both to the upgraded recreation area (if it is build) to "fight it out".
If the impulsive scientist win the first scientist may even lost its meticulous personality.
I am sure this is not the focus of X2, but it just need to having the system in place and let modders dream up all the skills and personalities and backgrounds and all those RPG elements and events.
Just need the UI to show the tag on staff selection, and to show their (small) portrait instead of breaker icon. -
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Kickstarter Stretch Goals: Modular Weapons & Armour:
We would like to add an extra layer of customization to the weapons and armour in the game by making them "modular". For example, a suit of Jackal armour would have a base set of resistances plus a "plating" to add plating to:
- No Plating - TU bonus
- Ballistic Plating - starting equipment for extra kinetic resistance
- Ceramic Plating - early-game research that provides energy resistance
- Alloy Plating - mid-game research, providing strong energy and kinetic resistance
Both the suit of armour and the platings are items built in the workshop. You can customise your suit of armour based on the mission or the role of your unit, and also create more interesting tech tree choices. For example, when you research Alien Alloys do you build shiny new Wolf Armour or make do by some Alloy Plating for existing armour?
For the weapons the system would be similar. Alien Alloys might let you build shiny new MAG Weapons but also allow you to build barrel accelerators that boost the damage of your old weapons. More detailed customization like different scopes for each type of weapon (with advantages / disadvantages) is possible, but those would need to be designed so players don't feel obliged to customise every weapon if they don't want to.
Although I like this idea, I think it is much riskier than the other (stretch goals) because it is so tightly interwoven with the tech tree. There's always a chance that we'll find a better way to handle some of the issues solved by modular equipment (e.g. "upgrading" older equipment tiers can be done with other ways) and that the idea will end up being changed / dropped as a result.
(Quote simplified.)
Since module is the #1 stretch goal, I doubt Goldhawk can abandon modules now despite the fine print. It is not fun to see kickstarters drown this forum in complains and review-bomb the finished game on Steam. X2 need to have modules even if it means abolishing Development Project.
I like modular equipment (not necessary limited to firearms and armour - reuse the system!), and it's not an uncommon request, as proven by the goal votes. But I think the feature is currently in an awkward position in the grand scheme. I like to call them addons, to distinguish them from "mods" which can mean game mods. But I'll stick with "module" for this discussion, and try to lay the ground work by brainstorming their directions.
Equipment Upgrade
Upgrades of old equipments is currently planned to be done by scientists as Development Project in form of base weapon upgrade. Which is cool. Having a new rifle is much cooler than slapping a new scope onto an old rifle. Balancing will be pretty difficult if both the base weapons and the mods are upgradable, potentially affecting almost every part of the game.
Given the goal of 25 ground missions and the trouble of micromanaging modules (if not in research then in production and assemble), these upgrades should either be cheap and quick to produce as a temp boost, or a big investments that can actually replace an upper tier. For example a fully upgraded rifle with top modules may be on par with Laser mk3 if not Plasma, allowing players to skip lasers altogether, trading soldier skill reuse for lack of interceptor lasers at the strategic level.
Equipment Specialisation
This is I think a very good design goal of modules. Example would be scope that turns a rifle into marksman rifle (+Aim -TU), or full auto receiver that make it burst only. The tradeoff means the power level stays the same, and the mods can thus be made very cheap or free because they don't significantly affect game balance. Yet they make players happy, because they allow players to fine tune their experience. To this end, mods can be tiered too. A simple scope increase aim and firing cost moderately, while a computerised scope increase them greatly. The high end scope simply expand possibilities and does not render the cheap scope useless.
This can be taken further, like proposed. Melee plating to fight Reapers. Static Charger for Androns. Psychiatric medication to cleanse psionic debuffs. A cool concept, but I think the vanilla should leave it to mods because the target-specific extreme specialisation is usually hard to balance, esp. since we can't limit modules like class abilities.
Equipment Generalisation
An interesting twist is we can make higher tier weapons specialised, and use mods to make them more versatile. UFO: Afterlight tried to do this with lasers weapons. In there, laser rifles are specialised against high dodge enemies, and by default only have single shot modes. But players can add a cooler module to add a burst mode to make them more flexible. This design can make new weapon tiers much more interesting, make lasers accurate and slow and give plasma short range, freeing them from braindead upgrade without limiting their roles forever.
Afterlight took it to the extreme, such as all higher weapon tiers are niche for specific enemy types and ballistic remains the most versatile option all the way into endgame. It's one of the ways it forces players to use different weapon loadout by mission. So forceful that the weapons easily determine a mission's success or failure. (While its armor loadout is a matter of life or death, without involving enemies. You must change team loadout by mission in UFO Afterlight.)
Special Ammo
Chris has said he'd discuss ammo during beta. Traditionally you bring various ammo and switch on the field. X-COM, TFTD, Apoc, and UFO all use this system. Kind of works, but can't say it is too successful. XCOM2 proved that you can do them as a plain upgrade that cannot be changed on field, which in our case I imagine would be done as a weapon module. But I don't think that works well when you can transfer ammo (you can do that in X2, right?)
Beyond Weapon and Armor
Let's try to think what else can have module. Medkit is an obvious choice, where it can have different drugs for buff or cleanse effect. Grenades can have fuses. Mind Shield may be a module of an Energy Shield. Motion scanner can have different sensors. So many possibilities before we even start thinking about ammo!
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XCOW: Extraterrestrial Cold War
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1 hour ago, Larry Burstyn said:
What function do the two whole silhouettes serve? I think we all know what humans look like and the picture of the alien's face shows more than the silhouette.
Bottom right has overwatch listed twice??
The alien orange heads could be smaller without the loss of information as could the facial portraits .
Silhouettes: Location injuries. Not in alpha build but is in stretch goal.
I thought having two overwatch may be better in some cases, but in hindsight yes one is enough.
Concur on orange heads too big. Face is more difficult; they are important to balance the panel sizes lol.
They can be made smaller if the weapon panels is smaller first, which is definitely possible.
(e.g. remove mode slider, expand belt only on hover, collapse non-active gear like Phoenix Point)59 minutes ago, Larry Burstyn said:The blue rifle image is unnecessary as the rifle is shown in the bottom right square.
They serve different purposes.
The blue floating weapons let you quickly identify the weapons in a formation without hovering or clicking them one by one. In the mock up you can hide the soldier bar and still tell that shotgun and rifle are in the front while all support weapons are in the dropship, and the shotguns are at the "outwards" of each side. (When no soldier is selected; floatie overlap is a problem that few games solved.) Not having to look down to learn that is very useful, esp. when you have over 10 soldiers.
The red floating weapons is a quick indicator of the threat of an alien, again so that you don't need to click or zoom them one by one. Works even when you zoom out.
And the big one in inventory panel is, to be honest,
to fill up the space of four firing modesoh I mean to justify the designer's amazing work of course.
It is needed there to show which weapon is active (or inactive), since soldiers can have multiple weapons in all current and discussed inventory plan. But the whole panel can be smaller yes.Won't have time to revise the mock up soon, but thanks for the comments.
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Yes I love more info with less clicks. So it is no surprise that between XCOM2, Phoenix Point, Invisible Inc, and BattleTech I like the last one most.
I do think I made some of the elements too big. And something can be made dynamic.
(e.g. Remove mode slider, Show only active weapon's modes, Hide max move area dynamically like PP.)
But the biggest problem I see when I compare X2 with them is the amount of info.X2 starts with more soldiers than the full team of all these games.
I quite hate fishing for items belt by belt, backpack by backpack in X1.
In all those games I can see all (limited) equipments just by tabbing through (less characters to tab through too).Then X2 have the firing arc of BattleTech, vision cone of Invisible Inc, locational damage of Phoenix Point (TBC), and more attack options than XCOM 2.
X2 also have crouch and the most fine grained TU system. Only Inv.Inc is comparable but they have no PC facing.
And Inv.Inc's battlefield is so complicated that they need a wireframe mode for practical planning, which I also suggested for X2 before.There are few combat mechanics they have that X2 don't. My UI mockup is my effort of showing most info and keep it simple.
UI can be "dumped down" by hiding information, but I hate that approach for a tactical game.
Dynamic UI is one way to solve that, e.g. Inv.Inc's one action bars per subject. But ultimately X2's focus is not on closing doors, dragging guard, or trading items.So, there is no perfect solution.
Unfortunately, none of the games offer much in way of UI customisation, and I really don't expect X2 to breakthrough on this front.-
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I've made a UI mockup with UI elements that I'd like to see:
- Bigger Everything! Well, except the weapons.
- See major equipments of all soldiers. See heal-able HP and stun damage.
- TU, HP, and main weapon above everyone (friends, foes, and 3rd parties).
- Outline move area, move + shot area (before turning), and vision cone.
- When selecting move location, show line to all enemies, and who can be shot from that location (after turning), and whether each can see you (red eye icon in the mockup, above the left alien). Default to move + fire instead of ignore move and fire.
- When hovering over target, see accuracy of all modes. See hovered target's TU and HP but without numbers.
Full UI mockup (understandably most clustered):
Animated mockup (Not always playing correctly; did my best):
Fine touches: See all inventory on screen (slot based), Selecter soldier's skills, Silhouette for human and alien, Replace shot mode text with icons, Firing hint.
TU has a blue overwatch marker to represent snap TU. Tried adding current firing mode marker, but a bit redundant with moving shot boundary and live TU prediction.
Floating TU and HP is white to emphasis coloured status icons such as the red eye for sight.
If a walk plan renders you unable to fire at a target after turning, it can be conveyed by "not-attackable line" to that target.
I think we can also rotate vision cone with mouse move, and update TU prediction (and maybe cone colour) to indicate whether there is enough TU left for overwatch.In hindsight I could have made the alien indicator smaller and add their weapon icons below. And add reaction shot indicator next to sight indicator.
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Inventory has not been implemented in the demo, other than switching primary and secondary weapon.
Which is good, because it's a hot topic and the design may change:
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Looking for resources to do a UI mockup and found these on ArtStation!
(Edit: Click for sharp image. The forum thumbnails are not doing them justice!)https://www.artstation.com/artwork/gqZn8
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Work in Progress. I'm shamelessly using my own inventory proposal (two weapons + gadget(s)) because the size fit quite well.
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One of the weird AI behaviour in AI War is that when the AI think it's going to lost a combat it'll commands its units to evenly split to all available escape points. This is non-optimal from a human's point of view, but it is designed to prevent players from exploiting AI behaviour and funnel them into specific escape point(s). So what you think is smart or stupid may not be actually that smart or stupid when applied to AI.
It's one of the very, very few games that has a gradual AI difficulty setting, possibly the only one in modern time, from 1 to 10, and the differences is very big.
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3 hours ago, lemm said:
If turning has no penalty then the optimal way to move anywhere is to move one square, spin around, move another square, spin around, and so forth.
In theory yes. In reality, players will break up their move into parts but not grid by grid, like moving from window to window while on a corridor. For an experiment in free facing and/or free direction that does not sound too bad. It will get harder and harder to test things out in later development stages.
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If you mean Xenonauts 2 - since this is the Xenonauts 2 forum - have you tried pressing "Tab"?
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Can we just try setting turn cost to zero and how that goes? Changing everything in the TU system just to solve the turning problem sounds a little extreme to. We don't even need to touch facing. If free turning is enjoyable and intuitive then we can consider whether to push it further.
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13 hours ago, mazex said:
And as everyone (?) these days runs 1920x1080 or higher resolutions there is space for a bit bigger panels?
Higher resolution does not mean bigger screen estate for UI elements. Screen size does. All flagship smartphones has 3K or 4K resolutions, but that doesn't mean we can fit more buttons onto the the small screens.
Apart from shifting things to corners, I think we also need floating label above everyone. I'm making a full UI mockup but it'll take a while to finish.
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Just stumbled upon this report on BBC.
Since X2 will be set in a modern cold war, it may be interesting to look at real life efforts to dig up the old cold wars.
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20180622-the-nuclear-bunker-in-europes-north-korea
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A DLC would be nice. Hindsight is always perfect.
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I posted the same illustration in the base thread lol. And we're not the only one that thinks that as first impression, too.
But you know what, it is just a game. It Goldhawk decides to get rid of the XCOM mimic impression by making the base more realistic, kudos to them. If they decide to spend our kickstarter money elsewhere, I don't mind either.
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UFO series also has prone, and it is quite detailed because it calculates LoS and LoF in 3D. And XCOM apoc has prone too.
But I agree, having standing and prone is good enough for Xenonautes 2. It keeps the posture system simple while still presenting an interesting tactical option. I'd prefer complexity be spend on other aspects of the tactical game.
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I concur that switching from horizontal bar to vertical bar will improve the display. Not all three bars need to be horizontal; I think the TU bar is most important.
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Honest summary of the campaign
in Xenonauts-2 General Discussion
Posted
Yes. Great job on the video. I actually downloaded the video and went through it screen by screen to see what has been implemented, and I see why you said what you feel about the various changes. Personally I think you did fantastic with so little resources and with much better communication with the community than many much bigger teams. Enjoy my kickstarter backing!