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Memorial Wall - Help Needed


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Cool, I'll polish them up and PM to you. Could take ~24h as I'm not at home atm. BTW, I'm not that fond of the random callsign idea though. Or at least make the callsigns changeable. Can mission detail contain mission type and location too? Or will it be only the random mission codename?

Edited by Skitso
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That one is going to be a bit of a pain in the butt :) Could use some discussion first.

Agreed, that's several projects down the road and would require a lot of changes. That said, I'm thinking along the lines of your generic buildings in terms of just having a list of generic 'conditions' and being able to create medals that are awarded when some combination of conditions at specified thresholds are achieved.

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Yes, I agree with that approach in general, but there are many fine points to take care of. The medal system wasn't really built for modding. Maybe I'll try that myself if you don't feel like doing it, but it would certainly be cool to have better medal possibilities - just let me know if you get bored of this stuff.

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Yes, I agree with that approach in general, but there are many fine points to take care of. The medal system wasn't really built for modding. Maybe I'll try that myself if you don't feel like doing it, but it would certainly be cool to have better medal possibilities - just let me know if you get bored of this stuff.

Feel free, there are a few other things I'm interested in looking at first. Couple small things but I'm thinking of tackling some of the stretch goals, the motion detector looks potentially interesting.

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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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Updated artwork courtesy of Skitso, this should be ready for release later today. Just have some minor changes I want to make to the mission description:

mjPFVvX.png

To clarify, I am not looking for feedback on major design changes. What you see here is more or less what you're going to get. I am open to small changes that can be implemented within the constraints of this design.

I will be storing the dead soldier's country of origin so that if we ever get tiny flags I can display them in front of the name.

Edited by bonds0097
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Woops, didn't realize how much the forums shrank images. Gimme a sec to fix.

And yes, the idea is to have terror missions show 'Terror Mission in <city>' (or somesuch, I'll shove this in strings.xml), base defense as 'Defense of <base name>' etc.

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Just a minor point, but I think for terror missions a cooler description is something like "Defence of <city>" or even "Battle of <city>". For base defence missions it might be better like "Defence of <base name> base" - bases can be called stuff like "Soviet Union", so "Defence of Soviet Union base" is probably more sensible than "Defence of Soviet Union".

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I think 'Defence of <City>' for terror missions is good.

What about alien base missions, 'Assault near <city>' or 'Alien Base Assault near <city'?

Base defence is tricky because players can name bases anything they want. I name mine 'Station Alpha', 'Station Beta' for example so 'Defence of Station Alpha Base' sounds clunky. If I named my base 'Bravo Base' for example, that would be even worse. :P How about 'Base Defence - <base name>'? Ultimately this will all be changeable via strings.xml but I think it's worth deciding on some sensible defaults.

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I will be storing the dead soldier's country of origin so that if we ever get tiny flags I can display them in front of the name.

Would it be much work to store the other data as well/is the other data already stored? (headshot, skill stats)

I'd love to see it get extended later on to something closer to Skitso's expanded view.

This is great, however. Looking forward to it!

(I don't like the idea of callsigns though, I can already assign those manually if I want.)

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I would call alien base missions "Alien base assault near <city>", or if GUI space permits "Capture of alien base near <city>" for something that looks more like a complete sentence. That is to distinguish them from normal crashsite/landed UFO missions that I would call "Ground assault near <city>".

Base defence is indeed very dependent on what people name their bases. My bases tend to be named things like AFCOM, EUCOM and such based on their region, so "Defence of AFCOM base" makes sense, but indeed "Defence of Bravo Base Base" sucks. "Base Defence - <base name>" is a good suggestion, probably the safest bet.

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Would it be much work to store the other data as well/is the other data already stored? (headshot, skill stats)

I'd love to see it get extended later on to something closer to Skitso's expanded view.

This is great, however. Looking forward to it!

(I don't like the idea of callsigns though, I can already assign those manually if I want.)

The soldier itself is deleted upon death so I do have to pick what data is saved. Furthermore, with all the dead soldiers there will be, it doesn't make sense to store a bunch of data in the savegame that will likely not be used.

Whatever happens with callsigns is independent of the wall. That said, I'll definitely be implementing a nickname system very similar to FiraXCOMs system (soldiers get assigned a nickname upon reaching X rank and name is shown as <rank> <first name> <nickname> <last name>) because I like it a lot. That said, I'm sure I can make it toggleable whenever I do implement it.

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I would call alien base missions "Alien base assault near <city>", or if GUI space permits "Capture of alien base near <city>" for something that looks more like a complete sentence. That is to distinguish them from normal crashsite/landed UFO missions that I would call "Ground assault near <city>".

Base defence is indeed very dependent on what people name their bases. My bases tend to be named things like AFCOM, EUCOM and such based on their region, so "Defence of AFCOM base" makes sense, but indeed "Defence of Bravo Base Base" sucks. "Base Defence - <base name>" is a good suggestion, probably the safest bet.

You raise an interesting point there. "Capture of alien base near <city>" assumes that the mission was successful, right? 'Assault of alien base near <city>' would be more neutral.

That said, would it be desirable to distinguish on the wall between successful missions (at least your soldier died for a good cause) and failed missions (oh no, Pvt. Schmuckatelli died in vain)? And if so, what would be a good way to do that? I could go with a colored background (like stats have in the other screens) with green for success and red for failed? Or I could just add an asterisk or '(F)' at the end of failed missions, something along those lines.

What do you think?

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Very good point there. I think it makes sense to store mission fail/success (it's not difficult to do), and then the best differentiation on the memorial would be through the text. Like:

Alien base success: Capture of alien base near <city>

Alien base failure: Assault on alien base near <city>

Terror success: Defence of <city>

Terror failure: Massacre of <city>

Base defence success: Base defence - <base>

Base defence failure: Loss of <base>

UFO mission success: Seizure of UFO near <city>

UFO mission failure: UFO assault near <city>

How about something like that?

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Very good point there. I think it makes sense to store mission fail/success (it's not difficult to do), and then the best differentiation on the memorial would be through the text. Like:

Alien base success: Capture of alien base near <city>

Alien base failure: Assault on alien base near <city>

Terror success: Defence of <city>

Terror failure: Massacre of <city>

Base defence success: Base defence - <base>

Base defence failure: Loss of <base>

UFO mission success: Seizure of UFO near <city>

UFO mission failure: UFO assault near <city>

How about something like that?

I like this.

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That said, I'll definitely be implementing a nickname system very similar to FiraXCOMs system (soldiers get assigned a nickname upon reaching X rank and name is shown as <rank> <first name> <nickname> <last name>) because I like it a lot. That said, I'm sure I can make it toggleable whenever I do implement it.

Yeah, it's a cool feature - as long as I can rename the callsign to whatever I like it to be.

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All done. This should get released with X:CE 0.25.

u8Moirw.png

Changes since I last posted:

- Every mission type now generates a unique string, dependent on success or failure, look for DeadSoldiers.* in strings.xml to customize. I used Solver's suggestions in all cases.

- The list is now sortable. Sorting by date is nonsensical since it is a string and not a real date. I didn't feel this was worth fixing but perhaps in the future.

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