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agris

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Posts posted by agris

    Xenonauts 2 - Feedback & Priorities

    in Monthly Development Updates

    Posted · Edited by agris

    Hey Chris, I just played v0.0.5 and have a few pieces of feedback.

    On a win7 64 system w/ i5-2500k, AMD R9 290 and 32 gb DDR3, I was getting a smooth 60 fps the entire time in 1920x1200 on fantastic.

    FEEDBACK

    I love the visual style, but there are problems with the visual clarity of items and actors.

    1. Weapon icons should be rendered underneath the ammo counter. Right now the ballistic rifle (I believe) mostly obfuscates the maximum ammo number. Make the current/max ammo count render on top of the icon.

    2. Selected soldier visibility. The character who is selected should have their selection circle rendered on TOP of foliage/env art. Right now it is hard to see which character is selected when they're standing in heavy foliage. I think the ideal solution would be a Fallout1/Diablo1 esque environment transparency bubble rendered around the selected soldier. Here's an example: http://i56.tinypic.com/f2ub9c.jpg

    3. Team location and visibility. For non-selected soldiers, there isn't much contrast between the soldiers and map art. I love how the map art looks, and I think all that needs to be done is to give soldiers a thin selection circle underneath them. Based on the current system, I think thin yellow would be 'selectable solder' and the current thickness in green for selected soldier would visually distinguish them. These circles should be rendered over the environment art, but no transparency bubble for unselected soldiers.

    4. Enemy visibility. I think you should place a thin red selection ring around all visible enemies, similar to the player selection ring. Right now it's hard to scan the terrain and distinguish an enemy, but that's not due to bad art or contrast but more the nature of the 3D map. A simple selection circle underneath all enemies would make getting an 'at-a-glance' sitrep much reasier.

    5. Tree visibility. I love the tree art. They look great. If the cursor, when swept 'under' a tree caused the tree to dither / go transparent, similar to the player transparency bubble suggestion earlier but with a larger 'brush spot size', that would be an easy way to retain the great art but make enemy selection more functional. Same thing could apply for enemies behind the lower side (from the camera's perspective) of any elevated terrain. Toggle-able treetops is also an option, but a less elegant one IMO.

    This coupled with the enemy/soldier selection rings would improve at-a-glance situational awareness across the board, which was my biggest complaint from the demo. Escape hiding the UI is also kinda annoying, but I understand it's pre-alpha.

     

    Bonus feedback: don't neglect the multimonitor people, please enable borderless fullscreen windowed mode. Unity supports it natively by launching with the -popupwindow option, but it doesn't work with the default unity launcher. Right now we can't enable windowed at full desktop resolution, give us that option and native support for borderless fullscreen windowed mode please!

    Mods to include with X:CE

    in X:CE General Discussion

    Posted

    The mod is actually not modular, so it can't be included as it is, unless somebody converts it. And this one might even make sense to just include in X:CE, but it appears the author is no longer active.

    I can't speak to the conversion (point me to a general method and I'll look at it), but based on the author's own words (last sentence), I think incorporation with credit, even with him being inactive, would be fine.

    UI Usability

    in Xenonauts General Discussion

    Posted · Edited by agris

    This is good feedback. I'll be watching this thread and it would be great if others added their UI-specific concerns. Changes like this will likely be gradually rolled out with the Community Edition releases.

    I'll add my two shillings:

    All items equipped on a soldier and in their inventory during GC should have the same detailed tooltips as the unequipped items in the soldier equip screen. That means a description, damage, accuracy, firing modes, etc. Right now, during GC, the best we get is "Pistol" "Rifle" etc, and none of the crunchy technical details. Additionally, all item tooltips should specify the item weight! Currently, I don't think any of them do (that is, the detailed tooltips in the soldier equip screen).

    Another improvement for soldier management on dropships: add a way to remap the hotkey number of a given xenonaut assigned to a dropship. Currently, the only way to do this is un-assign all the soldiers and reassigning them in the desired numerical order. It would help the flow of GC to know that I've setup my soldiers so 1 - 3 are assault, 4 to 6 riflemen, 7 MG and 8 medic (for example). As an implementation suggestion, if you could change the game so that in the dropship layout menu, once a soldier is selected (or maybe the mouse hovers over them), the player hits CTL + # to reassigns them to that #. This request arisen periodically but so far, no luck.

    EDIT: A more feasible and elegant solution to reordering soldiers is dragging their portraits to the desired position in the bottom row of portraits shown in the dropship layout screen. Right now soldier position (numerical) has no impact on the position of those portraits. Instead, make it so that portrait order follows 1 to 16, left to right. Then, let players just drag portraits to change numerical ordering.

    My last shilling (ok, so it was 3) is also dropship related and builds on another post. Using a popup menu similar to soldier roles and set equipment as default / set default equipment / change role / add new role; it would be beneficial to have user-defined soldier placement on the dropship based on soldier role, with each of those placement templates saveable. Therefore I could setup an "Assault" dropship template using 3 assaults in the front, 2 riflemen by 1 door, a medic by the other, and rocketeers in the center. As I move soldier positions on the dropship, I can select "set positions/roles as default" or "set default positions for dropship role", with dropship role being 'Assault' as mentioned previously. You would need all the correct soldier roles already assigned to the dropshop for this to work, but I think it would go a long way in making the process of changing dropship layout less tedious.

    Anyway, I don't know how difficult these are, but I appreciate your willingness to take suggestions bonds0097.

    EDIT: a UI issue with column sorting of soldiers in the base http://www.goldhawkinteractive.com/forums/showthread.php/10797-Xenonauts-Community-Edition-discussion?p=129559#post129559

    Xenonauts: Community Edition discussion

    in X:CE General Discussion

    Posted

    Hi llunak! I've posted about a bug related to sorting renamed soldiers by name in the bug forums since v.1.03 but it still persists in the v.1.07HF that I'm playing right now. Could this be fixed in the Community Edition?

    Basically, renamed soldiers keep getting sorted by their old name in the Barracks screen instead of the new name you give them. To me this defeats the purpose of renaming soldiers and is a constant source of irritation.

    So if the game gives me the following starting soldiers

    1. Angel

    2. Brutus

    3. Charlie

    4. Dick

    5. Edgar

    and I rename Angel to Zorro and Dick to Xerxes and then sort by name, they will get sorted alphabetically but by their old names (which the game somehow remembers):

    1. Zorro

    2. Brutus

    3. Charlie

    4. Xerxes

    5. Edgar

    Is fixing this feasible?

    Perhaps related, sorting soldiers by multiple columns frequently results in the list of soldiers being truncated. Oddly, you can scroll to the top of the list.. and continue scrolling upwards, until there are about ~10-15 rows of white space above the last (top) entry. This white space appears to be at the expense of the truncated soldiers.

    Anyone else getting this?

    Xenonaut Choices MOD - Part 1

    in Modding Discussion

    Posted

    Wow, what a cool idea, I never though of kitting out the aliens with better gear, as my mod is intending to let you keep the stuff you take from battle its a good fit. I will definitely look into it.

    Maybe I can come up with some really weird enemy weapons like living guns (aliens you can hold but spit venom etc).

    I will see how easy it is to implement.

    I think it would be cool to see aliens with the equivalent of suicide vests. Upon their death, they detonate. That would really change the tactics used in GC.

    RFC: Modular system for mods

    in Modding Discussion

    Posted

    This project reminds of the ubiquitous WeiDU mod tool for the Infinity Engine games (Baldur's Gate, etc). http://weidu.org/WeiDU/README-WeiDU.html#htoc1

    I have a question: I know that higher priority mods overwrite lower priority ones if they have the same values, but how does it deal with two mods modifying Researches.AleniumExplosives? Mod A adds UnlockKnowledge("Researches.ExampleA") while Mod B adds UnlockKnowledge("Researches.ExampleB"). Would it add both of these or overwrite one of them?

    I wonder if this could be solved by the mod author specifying that RFC should "extend" the attribute (either at the beginning or end), vs. replace. Some command that give finer control over how the patch data should interact with existing data. Or the ability to input specifically what strings are to be overwritten, doing a string compare and, if true, override the string.

    Xenonauts: Community Edition discussion

    in X:CE General Discussion

    Posted

    I saw the changelog yes, but its not the same thing as a features list. Some one on the fence about using it, like Lerzan, wont go through all of them to see if theres anything they like, especially since it would be reasonable to assume a change log would be filled mostly with bug fixes or techincal details.

    An example feature list would be like:

    • Memorial Wall

    • Quicksaving added

    • speed controls in air combat

    • Multi mod loading support (Later in the post, but before the changelog explain how your supposed to install mods for it to work)

    • Large sections of the game now moddable

      • Put in a few major examples here

      [*]And a Ton of bug fixes!

    You get what I mean. Just like if you made a mod and were to explain what it does and why someone should get it.

    This would go a long way in showing people who aren't active on the forums what the CE is all about.

    Xenonauts: Community Edition discussion

    in X:CE General Discussion

    Posted

    My point was that, in code at the moment, there doesn't appear to be any simulation of accuracy at all.

    [...]

    In terms of the suggestion of damage/hp increases, this was merely a suggesting given that accuracy/evasion systems don't exist. It's not ideal, but it would function as a simulation of greater piloting skill in the absence of variables which actually allow you to do that.

    Furthermore, actually the effects are pretty equivalent. On average increasing chance to hit from say 50% to 60% is the equivalent of a 20% increase in damage output, for example. I'm not actually sure then why the accuracy increase would be less hard to balance or marginalise higher level tech more.

    All good points, I didn't realize there was no accuracy value for missiles. Perhaps their turn radius / speed could be adjusted as 'planes' gain experience, though I'm sure that would complicate the displaying of statistics in the Xenopedia.

    I would agree with your analysis that damage / accuracy are equivalent, except for one factor. The last hit required to destroy a UFO. With a given amount of health left, a lower accuracy / higher damage attack is going to have a 'spikier' probability distribution of destroying the UFO than a more accurate / lower damage attack. Or, to view it another way, it could take 3 hits of a lower damage weapon to finish a UFO (all at higher probability of the hit striking) or 1 hit of a higher damage weapon at a lower probability of success. The absolute values of damage / probability would need to be analyzed to determine what makes more sense, but the game-play elements that you want to emphasize (a more predictable 'smooth' probabilistic distribution of damage vs. a more random 'spikier' distribution of damage) would really dictate the correct course.

    I think damage is one of the big things later weapon systems have going for them (in addition to AoE), so I wouldn't like older tech used by experienced pilots to co-opt that advantage. Rather, with experience should come predictable results (i.e. smoother probability curve of dealing damage). A novice using advanced weapon tech would result in a 'spikier' or more random distribution of damage over time. Could the differences between damage and accuracy be smoothed out by adjusting the damage? Sure, but then what's the incentive to upgrade (other than AoE), especially if accuracy isn't on the table?

    Xenonauts: Community Edition discussion

    in X:CE General Discussion

    Posted · Edited by agris

    - aircraft experience. Since cannons and missiles have an accuracy value, implementing increased accuracy and dodge (reducing enemy accuracy) with experience should be doable.

    I couldn't agree more on the aircraft experience suggestion. This is a less complex solution to implementing pilots, like bonds0097 suggests.

    Regarding aircraft XP, that's something I'd like to work on down the line.

    The idea would be to create separate Pilot entities that can be recruited/assigned to aircraft/promoted/killed/gain XP, etc. Basically expanding on the unimplemented stretch goal. Pilots would have stats that translate to bonuses during air combat.

    For portraits, I'll just use the default portraits and photoshop aviator glasses on all of them. :P

    That sounds great, but involves a lot more work than making 1 plane = 1 pilot. There should be caps for the increases that experience gives you, something like the next tech class equivalent minus a certain value (OFFSET). So if you're flying a F-17 Condor and the next plane is the F-99, with a maneuverability and dodge of X and Y, the max level a F-17 Condor could achieve would limit this to X-OFFSET1 and Y-OFFSET2.

    Same for the weapon systems. Planes (i.e. pilots) should have experience with a given loadout on hardpoints. So using an autocannon and sidewinder missiles, you can increase their accuracy to a certain point not to exceed an amount LESS than the next available tech. If that same plane (pilot) switches the loadout on his hardpoints to the next tech, the accuracy resets to standard and he has to learn how they work all over again.. but the accuracy is never equivalent to the next level of tech. The degree of offset between "experienced old tech" and "novice new tech" would be governed by the degree of technical advance.

    This isn't true, unless you count 'homing' as accuracy.

    You could possibly simulate it with damage/HP increases on planes, though.

    I disagree. An experienced pilot who knows the weapons behavior of his loadout will know the limitations of his homing and kinetic kill devices. This will affect how he establishes conditions for the launching of missiles / deployment of ordnance and how he leads his targets based on target speed and flight path / trajectory. There are plenty of "roleplaying" reasons why a more experienced pilot would have more accuracy with a given weapon set. I don't think HP or DMG should ever be increased. Too hard to balance and marginalizes the affects of improved tech too much.

    Memorial Wall - Help Needed

    in X:CE General Discussion

    Posted

    You should probably give a bit more space per soldier to fit mugshot, rank insignia and medals there too to make it more personal. If there was another line or two of space per each soldier, I think it would be a funny little extra feature to have one extra modifiable cell where player could write some presonal last words. (how he/she served, death circumstances, most glorious heroics etc.) :)

    Like this maybe:

    0ch3gn0.jpg

    Then just add small next/previous arrows for browsing. (I don't feel listing and sorting is that important here anyways, but to see the face of the fallen comrades is.)

    This looks great Skitso, I hope it's possible.

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