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Classic Invasion mod - Development


SoulFilcher

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It is a good concept for sure and I'm certain a lot of people will enjoy it. The only thing I personally find lacking is how the classic UFOs feel in terms of looks, as the Xenonauts models are quite beautiful. Would you consider making their hull/floor/roof tiles more smooth in some outlandish way, maybe playing a bit with colors, since design is intended to match the originals and you probably would be reluctant to touch it?

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It is a good concept for sure and I'm certain a lot of people will enjoy it. The only thing I personally find lacking is how the classic UFOs feel in terms of looks, as the Xenonauts models are quite beautiful. Would you consider making their hull/floor/roof tiles more smooth in some outlandish way, maybe playing a bit with colors, since design is intended to match the originals and you probably would be reluctant to touch it?

I agree. I like Xenonaut UFOs a lot and moving to the tiles felt like a downgrade for me, but I always jump to the artwork when modding, even in cases I don't know an idea will work, so I told myself I wouldn't do it this time. I need to make sure the mod will work as intended before I create artwork that may have no real use. Don't worry, everything you see in the mod now is a placeholder for this alpha testing. Once we reach a polishing phase we can think about how these tiles should look like.

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Another piece of feedback would be I'm finding your UFOs significantly easier, especially with the destructible hulls. I'm usually able to send 2 assault guys on the second floor and they clean up alone. I think you could benefit a bit more from limiting a control room in the last room and stuffing a bit more aliens in the UFO. That's mainly feedback on the 2-floor UFO. It could also be an issue with how those are balanced against the ticker, it quite feels like I have the upper hand in terms of tech level by a lot.

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Hey SoulFilcher. Will you be suing some kind of custom artwork for this? I wanted to try out this mod when it's done, but what I'd really like to see is some more stuff in those rather empty UFO's. Like extra seats and monitors and such.

Oh and will they be more destructible? I wanted to pretty much blow up a part of the exterior with the tank cannon and just swarm the craft from multiple sides.

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Another piece of feedback would be I'm finding your UFOs significantly easier, especially with the destructible hulls. I'm usually able to send 2 assault guys on the second floor and they clean up alone. I think you could benefit a bit more from limiting a control room in the last room and stuffing a bit more aliens in the UFO. That's mainly feedback on the 2-floor UFO. It could also be an issue with how those are balanced against the ticker, it quite feels like I have the upper hand in terms of tech level by a lot.

I'm taking notes, I don't remember which crew I used but its probably from the corvette. Crew for all UFOs are placeholders now, the plan is to have specific crew for each type that gets better with ticker too, so each UFO type stays relevant.

Hey SoulFilcher. Will you be suing some kind of custom artwork for this? I wanted to try out this mod when it's done, but what I'd really like to see is some more stuff in those rather empty UFO's. Like extra seats and monitors and such.

Oh and will they be more destructible? I wanted to pretty much blow up a part of the exterior with the tank cannon and just swarm the craft from multiple sides.

Yes, I will use custom art. UFOs feel empty right now because they only include the important props like power source, weapons, controls and stuff like that. Later I will add crates and other props to fill them, but these will have some level of randomization, so you won't know what is where exactly until you enter the UFO, I think it will add a lot of replayability to the mod. UFOs hull and interior walls are already fully destructible, so you can blast your way in as much as you like. How easy/hard they can be destroyed is something left for future balance patches, but right now 3~4 C4 charges can open a hull wall.

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Yes you can! From a player's point of view I'd like to know what should be the priority for the mod. What does it need the most right now?

You can see I'm full of plans for it, but its a lot of work to do and it would be better to focus on things that can greatly improve the experience for players.

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I would like to check out this mod in more detail, but I haven't gotten a hang of all the tools yet. If you could tell me how could I open everything up and take a closer look at all the UFO's and their interiors I'm pretty sure I could come up with something. Right now I think most of the craft need some kind of human containment units with people trapped in stasis.

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You have plenty of points to work on as far as I can see, how you would prioritize those is up to you but I think pretty much all of them are required to have a complete mod at your hands anyway. You could leave the fine-tuning of ticker and crew balance for the end since those are the easiest to tweak and the other points will probably put off potential testers more - you will need more opinions on the balance side anyway since it's quite subjective and shouldn't be determined by one or two players.

If there are specific things you'd like to know about, you'd better ask directly.

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I would like to check out this mod in more detail, but I haven't gotten a hang of all the tools yet. If you could tell me how could I open everything up and take a closer look at all the UFO's and their interiors I'm pretty sure I could come up with something. Right now I think most of the craft need some kind of human containment units with people trapped in stasis.

I guess the best option would be using the submap editor, but it won't open the tiles in the mod, so you need to copy them to the game's standard folder first. There will be humans inside tubes, but not in all UFOs ;)

You have plenty of points to work on as far as I can see, how you would prioritize those is up to you but I think pretty much all of them are required to have a complete mod at your hands anyway. You could leave the fine-tuning of ticker and crew balance for the end since those are the easiest to tweak and the other points will probably put off potential testers more - you will need more opinions on the balance side anyway since it's quite subjective and shouldn't be determined by one or two players.

If there are specific things you'd like to know about, you'd better ask directly.

Fair enough, I'll try to upload a new version once I get the major bugs out of the way, after that it will be hard work to make all my ideas come to reality.

EDIT: This grenade issue is killing me. I have no idea why it works like that for my UFOs and not for vanilla buildings for example. If I don't find a solution to this problem I'm going to put the project on a halt.

EDIT 2: Well, you can actually throw grenade inside buildings through walls. The game is broken like that. So this isn't a mod bug after all.

Edited by SoulFilcher
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Hmm I see how it's made. It seems I was looking at the wrong model of the UFO. The project looks interesting, but will the craft have any kind of hull around the walls or will they be making the actual UFO like in the first X-COM?

The idea is to have them look as close to the originals as possible.

Hmm, have you painted ufo roof tiles on top of the rooms? I had similar issues with my alien base mod, and managed to fix it with those...

I tried painting roofs and it didn't fix the problem, then I tested other buildings in the game and saw that its a global issue, grenades can land in the tile just behind the wall that blocks it. The only way I see that could fix it right now is adding full tile walls around the UFO, but the problem would persist for inner walls between rooms. This is a game bug, not a mod bug, so I won't crack my head to fix it.

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  • 6 months later...
  • 1 month later...

I haven't been working on it, but I don't consider it dead, it's just that I haven't been playing Xenonauts, so I will probably pick it up again some time.

I remember I hit a design problem with the battle ship. In X-Com elevators worked like real elevators and you could move up and down freely, but in Xenonauts we have back-and-forth teleporters, so the central, wide elevator in that ship cannot be done in the same way, and I haven't decided what to do about it.

Edited by SoulFilcher
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