jamoecw

actually if you are the commander of a global military force pretty much every decision laid before you will have numbers attached up the wazoo. sitting in the command center with a report saying that if you give the go ahead on the shot that it will have a ~65% chance to connect will be very realistic. what is unrealistic about the numbers presented is that it doesn't give numbers on what will happen when you connect with the shot, especially on that completely unknown alien that no one knows anything about. really exact numbers aren't really necessary in games like this, jagged alliance did away with the numbers. the problem is what people consider to be 'low' 'moderate' 'likely' and 'certain.' which is why numbers are generally preferred. Alien Invasion went ahead and used the engine they were using to allow a first person perspective on characters so they could judge a shot before it was made. one could even autocalc the battle, as far as immersion goes that is pretty realistic for the 70's, as satellite coverage is supposed to be nonexistent, and real time battlefield command and control didn't exist. as for medkits, the original xcom didn't have the medkits do any healing at all. they stabilized a region on the body, and countered to a limited degree the degradation the injury had on performance. a lot of people didn't bother with medkits, since they didn't do much, and generally speaking if you were hit hard enough to get through your armor then it was probably enough to kill. only in cases were the armor and weapon strength were fairly balanced did the medkit come into play (assuming you didn't chuck it for extra ammo). if i were to make a dream remake of xcom, i would have the chopper flying around with troops in it at the start of a mission, and i would have to deploy them either by rope or by landing, while having a door gunner and what ever other choppers i brought to support the mission. all the while having to worry about the aliens and their unknown anti air capability, do i drop my troops right on top of the ufo, or start them half a mile or so back? on the geoscape i would have to decide if i wanted to paradrop them or allow more time to pass in order to get a chopper out to the site. do i do scorched earth around the ufo in order to keep the aliens penned into their ufo, or do i try and keep the infrastructure intact? do i arm a nation in hopes of them helping against the aliens, or do i keep control in order to ensure that they don't start a war with their enemies? do i give away artifacts to various scientists around the world in hopes of making my own weapons, or do i focus on adapting them in order to equip my soldiers with them? do i start building super bunkers in order to concentrate the my defenses later on, or spend the money on better coverage? do i focus on being able to deploy hundreds of troops per ufo, or just an elite handful?

the ufo: X games were a big let down with their non endless supply of troops at your disposal, in a game like that i can see having your soldiers getting knocked out instead of dying (i dislike the term permadeath). the biggest factor in xcom is the equipment being used, you retain the tech level, and might even recover the equipment itself, so the loss of a troop, no matter how elite is significantly different than the games that actually coined the term permadeath (JRPGs). in those games when your character died it was game over, have to restart from the beginning, this game is nowhere close to that. so all in all, no this game does not have permadeath, though it does have death. why doesn't it have permadeath? because you only suffer an experience and money loss with each death. if you compare this game to diablo 1 (a western RPG which isn't considered to have permadeath, aside from hardcore mode) you can see that only the ufo: X games had permadeath. what you are asking for is somewhere between godmode and just plain old death, sometimes referred to as the party death system (only death of the entire party results in any penalty what so ever).

in the original xcom this tactic was able to be used, but instead of total disregard for adjacent friendlies, it was a significantly reduced chance for friendly fire. similar to shooting through an adjacent window, sometimes you still hit the frame (which is pretty bad for the situation of adjacent friendly). tanks were also a great source of mobile cover, a miss into cover rarely resulted in damage of any significance early on. the thing that gets me currently with adjacent friendlies, is grenades. you can't throw a grenade over someone else if they are right next to you. i am sure chris will have this sorted out before the final version.

i think Thothkins suggestion is the best solution, though Gorlom's would be the easiest to implement (using Flying Disc's map of course).

ya that is my sentiment as well. so really this means that this free service might end up getting him more money, the way it should be in my opinion. based on your avatar you like comic books, so i'll tell you that there is a kickstarter for a comic, done by a couple of artists from DC. i wanted to see some of their work before kicking them some money, but all of their work referenced is tightly controlled from DC, so i decided to not give them any, had they done any web comics that i could read for free i might have kicked them some money.

that's a waste of a barrett, it seems he is only shootin a block or two away, well under the mile or so that they can cold fire from.

having a development schedule is a lot like having a train schedule, sometimes you have to choose whether to close the doors without getting every one on, or to fall a little behind. everyone likes trains that runs on time, but nobody likes getting left at the station.

so does "Cover in adjacent tiles to shooter is disregarded from the accuracy calculation, so shooting through windows / over walls is much easier" mean that you can throw grenades over tanks?

well if it doesn't go belly up then problems are inevitable, and therefore as long as problems keep happening (at an infrequent rate hopefully), the company will continue to exist. although anyone that is familiar with legalities of owning one's own business knows that even well after a company goes belly up problems still crop up, which the owner needs to attend to. it is the reason most large companies that go belly up sell themselves off to some other company. it is why some game companies don't want their old stuff that can't demand money being given away, so that they will have assets in which some other company might spend a few bucks to buy their company if need be.

the difference is that steam only checks a few lines in a file for validation, while desura actually checks the files. desura also will allow you to play one of their games while another is downloading, instead of pausing the download. desura will provide more info if their is a problem due to their process, which is good for developing games. overall i think desura is an upgrade over steam, though it hardly beats steam in every area.

well in the original game once you got a factory going you didn't have to worry too much about keeping the countries happy. the selling feature was pretty much a method to help one expand the number of bases, it was cheap and gamey, so i support cutting it. now once it has in fact been cut you need to address the fact that it costs more to run multiple bases instead of one super base, but it does in fact help you do your job much better. so in the end i am expecting something to get changed/balanced to help out budget wise for multiple bases, until then i would recommend making decisions about what is important to research and operate off of a more limited research division, and get new bases capable of making ground missions sooner.

remember when you said that being the boss meant having to get up in the middle of the night to fix the servers? on one hand i am pretty envious of you for going through this and getting all that experience, on the other hand it seems to be very frustrating, i guess i am neutral overall to the prospect of getting up in the middle of the night, and trying to get the website going over a week or so.

given the retro feel of the game, shouldn't it be 'Shield Pack' expansion? i personally didn't think many people cared about the shields, heck i had figured they would get cut. i personally would like better grenade physics and corner cover. jean-luc is right in that the shields would be unique to xenonauts, and guadlike is right that if coded right it would give a resource to modders.

wouldn't PPSh-41s be the weapon of choice for inside a UFO?

its up! looking forward to trying out the suppression.

i imagine the thought was similar to the tibeten defense against china. 'if we don't provoke them they won't have a reason to invade our rather worthless piece of land.' although major powers rarely do things in an outwardly logical fashion.

you had a decent amount of core engine code in before kick starter, and without having to keep the versions stable during kickstarter (as you weren't releasing them to the public) should have increased pace a bit, core engine wise especially.

they are smaller (less digital space not physical size), they can take physical beatings much better, but not temperature (though that shouldn't be a huge issue if it is of high quality), they are faster, and they are also more expensive. http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/high_end_gpus.html your graphics card is rated number 2 out of all cards currently on the market (mine is 1/3 as good at double the performance to price ratio), and you have double the ram i have, but other than that and a glowing fan our computers are pretty much the same specs. why 16GB? i didn't see much reason for more than 4GB myself. my younger brother doesn't know much about computers and tried to copy me, has a pretty similar rig as mine, but a far worse graphics card than mine, and a glowing fan. graphics cards are pretty tricky as far as what is better than what nowadays. i think my rig is more cost efficient than yours, but i can't say i am not a little jealous.

i hope she is okay, i remember that when i didn't have health insurance i skipped an angle grinder off my shin bone, and the next month i put a screw driver through my hand. that acounted for my 7th and 8th visits to the hospital in my life (as a pateint anyway) and the 1st and 2nd time going to the emergency room as a patient. fairly useless visits overall, but that tends to be my experiance with hospitals, at least as a patient, hopefully it was a useless visit for your wife as well (as in she was fine and didn't actually need to go to the hospital). EDIT: oh yeah, and don't worry about your name, chris says that later on their will be the opportunity to to buy that later as well.

what router do you use? i have found that linksys 54g series to be incredibly stable.

ya, i like that you have heroes that come from outside the US. villains are villains due to what they do, not where they come from.

i believe i was talking about their lack of promiscuity, didn't say much about their looks. i thought france or england would have the smartest women, but from the looks of it might be the U.S. which really surprises me.

the real question is whether it will do better by the same ratio that xcom did vs. enforcer.

dithering isn't in yet, still on the list of things to do. no news on the other stuff that i can think of. @ender101 - the things he is talking about is dithering, multitile overlays, and climbing. dithering as i said is pretty much on the things to do (keeping track of your guy when he is behind a wall), multitile overlays are pretty common for 2D engines, it was even around when xcom was made (xcom used it for the explosion animations, several jrpgs used static ones in order to help draw scenery, JA2 used static ones to add texture/grime to tiles)