Preview 0.34.2 XCE - Open discussions

[Charon]

45 minutes ago, Solver said:

Why balance? That's a great question. I believe that game design is an iterative process. Or should be treated as such. You come up with some ideas, you implement them, and you look how they feel. Are they fun? Do they sound better on paper than in practice? You have an iteration then, and in your next iteration you work on the idea further, or not. Better yet, an iteration that you do touches all the game systems, so you get to experience the new interaction.

45 minutes ago, Solver said:

So then I believe that after an iteration that's heavier in terms of design/new features, you should do a balance iteration. Not because your beta should be perfectly balanced but because balancing gives you a much better idea of whether your new systems are fun. Maybe a system that seemed unfun in the last iteration is actually quite fun after a balance pass. Maybe you find that it's actually a useless system after balancing - it's something that ends up either being unbalanced or very boring. That in particular is something that happens very often in design.

45 minutes ago, Solver said:

It just ends up giving you a better game with less work. I believe that approach to game design works far better than first trying to get your systems in place and then balancing them in another phase of development.

 

Thats exactly what is happening right now.

You might not know that, but we regularly bring out patches to the community which follow exactly the pattern you describe. To even begin to give you a detailed list would be exhausting, so lets go with 1 example.

 

Weapons/Shotgun

At the start of the thread I suspected that the shotguns were completely useless because of their high TU cost, and the feedback the people gave us were telling the same story. So in Patch 1, or Patch DAY 7 as we call it, we totally revised the shotgun/carbine system and put it in the patch. The feedback we got was overwhelming positive, so say that we didnt have a single person bitching about shotguns/carbines again and we also had quite a number of people telling us the shotgun now has a place in their game, not OP, not too weak - exactly as it should be.

After that was fixed, and tested enough, with enough feedback from the community, i revamped the stun damage for shotguns/carbines to its appropriate level for Patch 2.

Next iteration, next test run and the system for shotguns/carbines has stayed the same ever since Patch 2.

 

This is the way we work. We bring out a Patch. The community tests it throughly and gives their feedback and we implement it. Its not over the top to say that 80% of good feedback gets implemented into the game straight away, or better, gets put on the list, since we need a lot of time to code the stuff as well. So far we had 3 Patches and 4 feedback iterations.

The only reason we havent already put out Patch 4 is because you, Solver, give us so much to work and implement with. Patch 4 will change the game entirely but before proper feedback can get back, the game has to be properly coded. Furthermore it doesnt make sense to let people test things we are going to change anyway - like the Country retaken base mission, where it is still not clear how it will play out finally. At this point I want to stress that increasing the number of base sizes in the way i described would enrich the game the most at this point. Special missions hurray, but to increase the base limits is slightly more important.

What you also dont see is that we regularly get in touch with the people who play X-Division via Steam. People have a problem - we talk to them. People want to give us feedback - we talk with them. From special developer invitations with Drages and me to single chat feedback session - we do them regularly and consistently.

This all happens silently and fluently behind the scene. Brandon, our steam tester, gave us feedback about the vehicle problem that it would not "really" be worth it to take a vehicle on a GC. I had similar thoughts and this feedback pushed this point over the edge and into the system we have right now - vehicles dont take up space in the chopper anymore and unconditionnaly are an integrated part of the GC without any drawback for the player, except if they dont want to use vehicles which is fine as well. I believe this is one of the best decisions ever, which not a lot of people will notice because it integrates so fluently into their experience that they wont even believe it had ever been differently.

We also have a steam group and reddit feed.

 

Like i said you would know that if you would actually look. We work exactly the way you describe it and i would say our work epic is beyond the words you used to describe the process.

At least thats my oppinion.

How do you like the new picture i posted in the X-Division Beta thread ?

 

Edited September 29, 2016 by Charon

[drages]

The difference of X-Division and a normal game development is mostly about the purposes and needs. We don't make it for money, we don't have any time limit, we don't have anything to fear about economical ways. 

For those reasons, we don't need to apply the rules of a standart development. I think this is the part i like most and the reason why all the modding system prevails world wide.

[Solver]

Very well then We may after all be closer in our opinion on those design issues than I originally thought. Since I have no special insight into the design process, and my knowledge of the mod itself isn't particularly deep, I will stop commenting on that further for now. It certainly looks like you'll be able to get some great things done with the features in 0.34.2.

[drages]

3 minutes ago, Solver said:

Very well then We may after all be closer in our opinion on those design issues than I originally thought. Since I have no special insight into the design process, and my knowledge of the mod itself isn't particularly deep, I will stop commenting on that further for now. It certainly looks like you'll be able to get some great things done with the features in 0.34.2.

I always want to have hear your ideas, about the ones we got or for future things you want to implement. Because there is many things we can't see or we can't imagine to add. To be honest we don't need any more things for a while.. just some things we talked with you already and i know that you are on them..

There will be moders i hope in near future.. and X Division will be a huge showcase to show them the way to all modding abilities with the code examples for them. Some people want to have only the default game with just new additions, like you did at XCE and it's mods. They can just look to the X-Division, get the code with all the possibilities. Maybe someone will make a great mod with just default game borders, like without any weapon or enemy units but with all the new abilities. 

My biggest hope to get some old good modders to return here and use all of those.

[drages]

20 hours ago, Solver said:

Thanks.

Yes, I now see the game only supports 1;1, 1;2, 2;1 and 2;2 as sizes. Anything else will crash. The reason is that those sizes are the only ones with images base thumbnails that appear in the top bar. I understand the limitation, but it's probably better to just draw a 2x2 thumbnail there and not crash. Or you guys could even make a few bigger thumbnails that could then be added

All of the possible building icons are here; from 1x3 to 6x2:

buildings-icons.zip

buildings-icons.zip

Edited September 30, 2016 by drages

[Solver]

Excellent, I think those are exactly what was needed. I'll throw them in.

[Solver]

Drages, I added those icons to the game, and they look great. At least with the Large Hangar, I haven't tested all the sizes. 

[drages]

1 hour ago, Solver said:

Drages, I added those icons to the game, and they look great. At least with the Large Hangar, I haven't tested all the sizes. 

I used same formula with the default. I am very restrict to default game art style at my designs already. If you need anything please ask.

I would like to have different plane type with special hangar type for possible bomber sized planes and capture ufos for example but I think it need a huge work. 

[sfarrelly]

one final question about the hangars. I'm not sure if they can be properly implemented.

As you can see the aircraft image is stretched to fit the image of the building. I had that particular building set to allow for 2 aircraft (which might cause other problems) so i'm curious if there's a way to define an area for each aircraft to appear in?

I've noticed that there's a UFO hull layer on the vanilla submaps (which i can't find a way to assign in the editor, have to assign it manually in the xml). Does that layer decide how/where the aircraft is displayed? If it does, then great  

[drages]

It could be complicated. It would be great to able to put plane image whatever you want to put. If can't I need to edit all the plane images but then it can only show 1 plane again.

[Solver]

Yeah, the airplane image just gets stretched over the hangar image if there's an airplane. There isn't a way to do anything better looking there, or to have different images for 1 or 2 airplanes.

[drages]

48 minutes ago, Solver said:

Yeah, the airplane image just gets stretched over the hangar image if there's an airplane. There isn't a way to do anything better looking there, or to have different images for 1 or 2 airplanes.

Got it.

[Charon]

1 hour ago, Solver said:

Yeah, the airplane image just gets stretched over the hangar image if there's an airplane. There isn't a way to do anything better looking there, or to have different images for 1 or 2 airplanes.

An idea would be simply that the hangar image would get proportianally smaller the more aircraft there are, with a maximum size, and starting from the center of the pic. Exactly the same way Aircraft weapons are coded right now. If there are too many, the game makes them smaller so they fit on the screen.

Edited October 1, 2016 by Charon

[Solver]

Yeah I considered that and looked at it. Hangars don't know how many planes are in them though, planes really belong to the base. Making a smaller image wouldn't be hard, but there's no way to tell that a hangar has 1 of 2 planes. That would require reworking some other related parts of the code, and I don't think that is a good idea.

[Charon]

4 minutes ago, Solver said:

Yeah I considered that and looked at it. Hangars don't know how many planes are in them though, planes really belong to the base. Making a smaller image wouldn't be hard, but there's no way to tell that a hangar has 1 of 2 planes. That would require reworking some other related parts of the code, and I don't think that is a good idea.

k

[Larry Burstyn]

I think this is too early but I'll ask anyway.  Any release date for a "final" version of 34.2?  I am having major problems because of my eyes in finding stuff in that seemingly endless list of things to do that happens in X-Division.

[Solver]

That is perhaps more a question that should be directed to the X-Division people, they'll need to release a new version of the mod. As for myself, I am closing in on another updated version of 0.34.2 with some mapping fixes and more that the X-Division team has requested.

[Charon]

1 hour ago, Larry Burstyn said:

I think this is too early but I'll ask anyway.  Any release date for a "final" version of 34.2?  I am having major problems because of my eyes in finding stuff in that seemingly endless list of things to do that happens in X-Division.

Since all people point to us lets answer this question.

 

For the core of the question, neither the new 34.2 nor the new 99.4 will change that you will have to scroll through thousand and thousands of strings to find what you are looking for. There is no fix for tired eyes.

I dont know how hard this is but i believe making the Storage items fonts bigger is a matter of seconds if one knows what he/she is doing. I will forward this question to Draku to optionally implement a bigger font mod for X-Division, as even the slightest work can help a lot of people.

As far as Solver statement is concerned he may implement an alphabetic order system. Additionally i requested an sorting ID so we developers can manually sort all items before you have to start looking for them. I think this system would have a lot of advantages.

 

Thats the current status of the ongoing affairs.

 

Best Regards

Charon

Edited October 1, 2016 by Charon

[Solver]

I've done alphabetic sorting for the storage screen (also possible to sort by value/quantity). I am not sure how a sort ID system could potentially be more convenient - whatever sorting order you define, it will not be as clear to players as alphabetic storage is.

[drages]

1 minute ago, Solver said:

I've done alphabetic sorting for the storage screen (also possible to sort by value/quantity). I am not sure how a sort ID system could potentially be more convenient - whatever sorting order you define, it will not be as clear to players as alphabetic storage is.

Naming a "plasma clip" as a "Ammunition - Plasma Clip" could look lame at other scenes like soldier equipment.. Naming a clear weapon as "Weapon - ****". So charon wants to organize it at background i think.

[Solver]

I understand that. But if I, as a player, am looking for plasma clips, I expect them to be alphabetically sorted, somewhere under P. It's easier than remembering some arbitrary category order, like weapons first, ammunition second, etc.

[Draku]

2 hours ago, Larry Burstyn said:

I think this is too early but I'll ask anyway.  Any release date for a "final" version of 34.2?  I am having major problems because of my eyes in finding stuff in that seemingly endless list of things to do that happens in X-Division.

I can increase font size for you, exemple:

from this:

to +3 fontsize:

or +5 fonsize:

or any other font size. This is work in progress...

[Solver]

How do you do that? Are you just changing the font in the Lua script?

[Draku]

4 minutes ago, Solver said:

How do you do that? Are you just changing the font in the Lua script?

For now I change headerFontSize value in storeview.lua

[Charon]

33 minutes ago, Solver said:

I understand that. But if I, as a player, am looking for plasma clips, I expect them to be alphabetically sorted, somewhere under P. It's easier than remembering some arbitrary category order, like weapons first, ammunition second, etc.

I completely and utterly disagree as an alphabetic system brings the most chaos into X-Division since, like, ever, and for any other bigger mod as well.

 

You are still thinking in vanilla/XCE style where you can basically count any number of item categories at 2 hands.

 

How many weapons does xenonauts have ? 30 ? 40 ? Additionaly an convinient naming system as every branch is simply the same weapon with an additional prefix like "Laser" or "Plasma". Easy to remember how it is called, easy to look up. Once you actually add a lot of stuff where the naming isnt that easy and straightforward it starts to get problematic.

I mean i dont even think the vanilla/XCE game needs an alphabetic order, they are not enough items to even justify it.

 

I also fundamentally disagree with your statement that the player "expects" anything, and at the very least not an alphabetical order. Most if not all games have custom orders for anything, to group them into categories and groups and NOT into an alphabetical order. You are looking for XY dagger in game XY and i can guarantee you that dagger will be under a custom system grouped together with other daggers and not alphabetically. Even xenonauts has this system. You look for alien alloys and it will be grouped together what the game normally labels as "ressources", so alenium and co. Armors are grouped together, aircraft weapons are grouped together, etc ... in EVERY game.

 

So not only does an alphabetic order not sort good in the slightest way, it also makes looking up things a horror.

Lets say we have the aformentioned 2 ressources "Alenium" a changed version of "XAlien alloys". If you want to effectively look up your ressoruces for your bases you will have to scroll down and up for every base, and most importantly you have to keep all the numbers in your head. And this is only with 2 ressources.

 

X-Division has around 50 differnt aircraft weapons with ranging names from A to Z. Before the player even can start to look up he has to

A. memorise the name of every weapon he wants to look up
B. Have to have ALL relevant stats in his head, like damage weapon output and usability

After that he will scroll up and down try to find all the different items while trying to keep remembering the whole list he has in his head, and the new numbers for every items, etc ...

 

Now compare this to a custom ID sorting system. All aircraft weapons are grouped together so

A. if the player spots 1 aircraft weapon he will know that these are all the aircraft weapons he has
B. easy comparing of stock count with other aircraft weapons
C. Easy power level sorting. Earlier weapons have a lower ID and better weapons have a higher ID. You dont have to be a genius to figure out what weapon is "generally" better or at a higher level than another one since there is a nice sorting generally telling you how things stand.
D. Easy telling where 1 category ends and another one starts
E. Easier Base to Base comparing as you already know where aircraftweapons are grouped together

 

I dont think alphabetically sorting has been put under a good light in any game for the last 10 years. It is simply inferior to group sorting since most players remember the group they want to look up, not the exact name of an item, even more when the content becomes a bigger and bigger number. An alphabetical order even has the prerequirment that you have all the individual names in your head before you even start comparing, which in most cases results in constant switching to look if you remembered the name correctly.

 

An alphabetically order is so bad that i dont even know how anyone cant see the obvious flaws in it, let alone consider it as a sorting system.

The basic rule for alphabetic sorting is that it is only a viable option if it is to be expected that the player knows every item by name. Even than a group sorting is still superior.

 

I hope you dont get offended by my open words .