Ol' Stinky

I put all ground tiles on layer 0, all props/walls on layer 1. That's correct, right? Or should I put the ground on layer 0, the bed on layer 1 and the walls on layer 2, or something? Edit: I've just gone ahead and done that anyway, and while putting the walls on layer 2 does indeed solve the prob of popup beds, it also causes the walls to take precedence over the xnauts/npcs. I'm torn as to which looks worse. Thanks! Yeah, I'm a big fan of the close quarter combat type stuff myself. The wide open maps in OG X-Com (and this) where you can plink away from out of sight's not really to my taste. Also, in my town map, some of the aliens can spawn inside the GP's office, which seems to work alright.

Welcome aboard! I'm not a dev, but I have been playing around with the map and submap editor. So I can't give you the official word, but I can give you my take on it. 1) The current answer is "pseudo-randomly, but also hand-crafted". This will leave you scratching your head, so let me explain. Mappers can place submaps in the levels as things stand; you might have noticed some of the existing ones already, such as some of the houses in the middle-east maps. If the authour wants, he can tell the game to choose a design of submap randomly from a selection. Again, some of the houses in the middle-east maps have different interiors from game to game. What does this mean? Well, most of my maps are fairly static in layout, since they're the result of me learning how to make maps/submaps and putting them online for everyone to enjoy/suffer. So those are hand-crafted, really. But one of my plans is to make a farm map with submaps that may or may not have anything on them, which might simulate OG X-COM farm maps to some extent, should you get that map. 2) I don't think they do, but there are ground battle-assets for the xeno base, so it's only a matter of time...

Cool! Well, Flash is a damn hard act to follow. I do have a few submaps going now, though. If you want to look at any of this stuff, it's all in my Stinky Maps .zip in my sig (or in the map list, which I have a post I edit when I update things worth noting). I've been playing with the town tileset, since at the rate Flash is going, he'll have reconstructed the entire Soviet state before the week's out. These submaps are all functional in terms of gameplay: there shouldn't be any intangible objects, impassible doors, etc. If I missed any, please let me know! There are some graphical glitches, but I know about those, and will talk about them in a bit. First, a real basic one. A grey stone house, door on the left side. These are all one storey, since when I started putting them together, I wasn't sure whether it was kosher to play with stairs or not. (I started these before Gaud told me it was probably only hilly terrain and the like that wouldn't feature, so I won't shy away from stairs from now on.) Stinky_L_town_greyabode_6x10_1h (2 variants): Mapping info: Squares in red are where doors can/will appear. If you want to use this, please be careful about placing props adjacent to the reds. I know about the dodgy town\house\props\BedA_SE, but can't seem to consistantly fix it. On one of the submaps, Gaud's suggestion of playing with sort values/placement order on the tile seemed to work, but whatever I did, I can't seem to replicate it! Argh! It's not pretty, but I'm leaving it in there for the time being; I kind of want to create more submaps and I've spent a fair while fiddling with this, but I'm not getting further. Next, a GP's clinic, also in grey. Door on the bottom side. Stinky_D_town_greyGP_20x8_1h: Door leads into reception area (the benches for waiting patients are behind the wall, you can't see them in the pic). To the right is an on-site pharmacist with its own office/stock area. The corridor to the left leads to three GP's offices and a nurse's ward. Mapping info: I'll probably come back and do a variant of this once I've made another town terror map. The door will be in the same place, but the spawns might change: I'll edit this post when I do that, but in the meantime, if you want to place an NPC inside, do it on the red tile. I'll keep that spot clear. I did have hospital beds in there, but the visual probs I was having annoyed me so at the moment, they're out. I'll put them back in once I know what I've done wrong/it's been resolved. I also created random NE/SW mazda and van props to scatter on the roads, which were looking a bit bare. Rather than post the submaps themselves, which are simple 1x3/2x3s etc. using assets you've already seen around, I'll post a pic of them on a map ingame: the imaginatively titled Stinky_Town_CorvLand_60x60_1. Stinky_mazda_NE Stinky_mazda_SW Stinky_van_NE Stinky_van_SW: (Click for bigger image) Mapping info: The duplicate files aren't a mistake. I figured that if the game selects from the submaps randomly, it won't check for copies, which means I can skew the odds of a bright cyan mazda appearing. As it stands, the prop has a 3/9 chance of being brown, the same for blue, 2/9 for yellow, and 1/9 for cyan. I have a perfectly rational explanation for these numbers, but I'm not going to tell you what it is. The red van's missing from the NE prop deliberately, too - the info's not been set on the spectre properly. It's still a 1x1 tile and (I think) the pivot info's wrong. I guess I should bug report it, but in the meantime, no red van's facing NE, only SW. The other vans are fine. Finally, a couple of pics of the building submaps ingame. (Click for bigger image) (Click for bigger image)

Yeah, now use the quickbattle option to test out the maps. Back in 18.4 it'd have a 50/50 chance of CTD for me with a prompt telling me a critical error has occured - I guessed it was archive-related. (I haven't encountered it since Chris let us use 18.5. Bliss.)

Bah, neither of those seemed to work. No matter, I'll just take out the hospital beds for the time being.

Damn, you guys are helpful. Okay, cheers for the assistance. I'll leave out custom spectres for now, since learning all of this is enough of a task on its own, I don't need to make it more complicated. I do think I'm on the way to taming the sub-ed now. I've only got one issue left with my submaps: props that are more than one tile in size tend to take precedence over (say) walls. Here's a pic. It's only when the beds are seen by a soldier that this happens. Layers shouldn't be the problem - I checked and the wall and the bed are both on 1. (Unless that's a mistake, but I thought 0 was for ground tiles and 1 for objects on top.) Any suggestions on how to fix it?

Okay, so now I'm getting Baby's First Submap building up and running - it's only a simple house in the town tileset. I'm having to alter some spectres, though, because they're set to passable and such. These are props I'm using to decorate inside; kitchen counters, sofas, bookcases and the like. If I create a (say) terror level map wihich includes my submap, do I need to include the modified spectres with any maps I create? If I dip into other tilesets (like soviettown for the wood textures), again, will that cause any problems for people trying to use my maps? Oh, and where do we stand in regard to heights? Back in the first alphas I played, there was at least one map with proper stairs up and running, but since then I've heard that the heights were problematic with the game's engine. Am I going on bad/outdated info, or are we okay to place multiple floors in the submaps? Sorry for the possibly dumb questions, but this is all new to me.

Well, I'm not sure what actually went wrong when I tried to create a custom spectre. I tried both the "add spectre" button and going for a .png, and editing a copy of an existing spectre. The editor didn't seem to load it, except after I made that longwinded post. Then it did. Of course. (; I have no idea what I did differently, so it wouldn't really be any help. It was probably user error rather than a bug, too.

Wow, thanks! Edit: Reapers now reap. Excellent.

Well, it seems that we can mod the UFO campers out of the game. Now, this might no longer be applicable in 18.51, but in 18.4, you can get the aliens to leave the UFO by going into assets\ufocontents and setting the defensive aliens to aggressive. From what I can tell, they're "aggressive" in that they'll hide behind cover out in the open and try to kill you with reaction fire, but never active fire. Defensive aliens will, funnily enough - I ended up setting all the lightscout/scout aliens to defensive so they'd actually shoot at me. When I tried no defenders, it wasn't a million miles from 18.5. Go figure. So hopefully we can mod the problem out to some extent. Even if we can't, I'll probably release my Loadsa Reapers mod. At least those guys won't fire through walls.

If only the aliens had laser technology, they might be able to fix the problem themselves. (I'm seriously glad to hear it's a bug and not a flaw in the A.I. Looking forward to the real deal!) Also, a check whether they cause friendly fire. A lot of times in 18.4 I've heard the death rattle of an alien in Hidden Movement when there's no more friendly A.I.s around, and it's because a stupid lizard shot his buddy in the back trying to snipe one of my men. This applies to friendly A.I.s as well as X-nauts' reaction fire. But to be honest, I'd rather they fix the blind aliens bug and have friendly fire/wall blasting problems, than have to sit on 18.5 for a longer period of time while they fix every issue with the A.I..

I'm going to open by saying you're wrong, and your mod is cool as hell. Thanks for doing this.

Well, for me, it's that half-hour I want it for the most. I can clearly tell when it's midnight on-site and can avoid sending my troops into trouble. Also, on second thought, there'd be no need for the day icon; the absence of the moon icon would be enough info. Anyway! Would you mind sharing your work with us when you've got something up and running? I'm sure there's a whole bunch of us who'd like to use it.

I'm lucky enough to still have 18.4 on my PC. So, five minutes ago, I did a little experiment. I edited the ship loadout so that every UFO comes with at least eight reapers. Then I did the same thing in 18.5. I started a new game in both, and downed my first lightscout. Off goes Charlie in both 18.4 and 18.5. In 18.5, two reapers started in sight. I immediately ordered my men to throw down their weapons and begin peace talks. The reapers were happy to oblige, and, apart from the diplomatic faux pas of impregnating the civilians nearby, co-existed with us peacefully. In 18.4, four reapers started in sight. I immediately ordered my men to throw down their weapons and begin peace talks. The reapers killed everyone. Something clearly broke with the A.I. Here's to hoping that the 15.1 update fixes it!

I've been mucking around with the level editor, as well as getting the work of others over in the map forum, and figured it was time to see how they play in the "real thing". I'm noticing that the game tends to select one or two maps every tileset, though. However, random is random and all that! I guess I'm asking others if they've noticed the same. It could be that this isn't a problem at all. So: have you guys drawn the same couple of maps repeatedly (for light scouts, at least)?

I have concrete_5x5 and indus_concrete_10x10 from the Ind tileset, which look identical to me in every way other than size. In fact, I put them into the map I made about half an hour ago. I did get a glitch in the mapmaker though which refused to place down the LR roads you'd want to use. At first I thought it was the tiles and had to settle for putting down rural road (ugh, it looked hideous). I then tried deleting the rural stuff and replanting the road I wanted, in some sort of hope that I could trick the program and, um, it worked. Well, not complaining.

Well, fair enough then. But thank you for your time nonetheless!

Oh. Yeah, I don't have an SSD. Desura took so long for me that I left it running, so I figured it was downloading the whole darn game. I say "took" because I directly download it now, after one too many times coming back to the PC to find Desura gave up at some point. As for the A.I., I have to agree. I don't think I've seen it actively fire at one of my soldiers, even when I had a guy drop his weapon and give the giant lizardman a hug and a kiss. Initially, I figured it was bugged in prioritising allied NPCs over soldiers. So I went through the map files and turned off friendly A.I. in every map. No joy. At the moment, I feel like I'm invading their home world.

If I do that, burst fire works, but there's no explosion. The radius value's ignored by the game.

Disclaimer: if this is merely me being a programming noob, please tell me what I'm mucking up, and I'll withdraw the suggestion. Thanks! At the moment, it seems that if you change a weapon to have an explosive effect, it can't be burst fire as well. It's not any kind of issue with the game because, well, no area of effect weapons are meant to have a burst fire mode as things stand. So, consider this modified rifle that causes explosions (as an example, not as something I'm looking to put in). <Weapon name="weapon.rifle" bulletType="rocket" emptySound="Empty Click 1"> <props range="18" hands="2" recoil="0" weight="5" isHeavy="0" clipSize="20" reloadAPCost="15" reloadSound="Weapon Assault Rifle Reload" reactionModifier="1.0" hpLimit="80" /> <SingleShot sound="Weapon Assault Rifle Single" delay="0.6" suppressionValue="20" suppressionRadius="1"> <Set1 ap="17" accuracy="75" /> <Set2 ap="20" accuracy="85" /> <Set3 ap="23" accuracy="100" /> </SingleShot> <BurstFire ap="35" accuracy="50" sound="Weapon Assault Rifle Burst" delay="0.6" burstdelay="0.1" shotCount="3" suppressionValue="32" suppressionRadius="2" /> <GUIImage name="gui/weapons/AssaultRifle.png"/> <GroundImage name="grounditemimages/assaultrifle.png"/> <Ammos> <Ammo name="ammo.ballistic.rifle" type="kinetic" damage="25" mitigation="10" isHypervelocity="0"> <Projectile spectre="projectiles/bullet/bullet" speed="1200"/> <Impact spectre="particles/bulletplume/bulletplume" radius="4" fireChance="0" smokeChance="0" gasType="RocketFragSmoke" /> </Ammo> </Ammos></Weapon> I know you guys have your hands full at the moment with game-critical matters - and I only ask because I don't know how much work it would actually be to implement. But it would be cool as hell to be able to make player-plasma weapons different from the other tiers by having explosive effects, or to give the aliens a bit more variety in weaponry.

If you mean "is there a 18.4_to_18.5.zip type download?" then I'm afraid there isn't, as far as I know. I see you're from NZ, so I can see how that's a major bummer for you - sorry to be the bearer of bad news. (You guys still have download caps/month, right?) If you mean "do I have to start up Desura and d/l it through that?", you can download the full 18.5 install from this thread.

I don't know whether this is an oversight or known placeholder art that's slated to be sorted a bit later. Either way, it's a cosmetic issue. At least some of the desert tileset "mesa" props turn into squares of broken wooden crates when destroyed. It'd be cool if it could turn into rock_cover objects instead.

I don't think it should even be an option, rocket launchers shouldn't have reaction fire. Does it make sense on some level that a guy who's quick on the trigger opens fire with a rocket launcher when a reaper comes screaming towards him? Sure. But does it make sense to force rocketeers to turn away at the end of their turn so they don't do anything stupid? Not in game terms since it's pointless busywork, and not in terms of immersion as soldiers spinning around in warzones is a little daft. No chance of a reaction shot also adds to give the RL more character. Not that the RL needs it particularly, but it's always a welcome little bonus. If there's someone out there who loves the idea of soldiers ambushing with RLs, they can mod it back in anyway.

Is it still possible to get 18.3? I haven't played with the submap editor yet, although it looks a lot harder to get to grips with than the map editor. I'd like to get to grips with it, once I finish getting a few maps for each tileset done (with the default stuff we have).

How about an icon next to the crashsite marker that indicates whether it's currently a night or day mission? Like this: Sorry for the terrible art job. ;P It should also tell you when you examine the crashsite, the same way it tells you the tileset and size of the crashed UFO.