Questions about maps and research

[Amaror]

I am not long on these forums, so i wanted to ask this.

Do you know what the devs are planning about the combat maps?

Now it's just two maps, that's fine, it's an alpha, but what are they planning to do?

Are they planning to create some maps and it's random on which map you land, or are they really going to do it like ufo and make it that the maps generate themselves.

In my opinion it would really hurt the athmosphere if it would always be the same maps, just in some random order.

Also: Are they planning to add more research options?

There are just so many kinds of research shown and yet there seems to be so dissappointingly few research options.

Edit: oh and to not sound too negative her :-)

The new air combat is a blast and the music of the air combat is just awesome!

[GoodGuyEddy]

The maps will be randomly generated out of tile sets, right now there are only the industrial and farm tile sets in the game, but the maps aren't randomly generated yet. There will also be city,desert and i don't know what other sets. There will be more research, the tech tree is limited due to it being in alpha.

oh and to not sound too negative her

"not" goes before "to" in this sentence, and it is spelled "here".

Edited April 20, 2012 by GoodGuyEddy

[GoodGuyEddy]

Hey i got a medal! sweet.

[zzz]

Are they planning to create some maps and it's random on which map you land,

It's work more like this. But there also some randomisation possible in map itself. How much randomisation possible for map depends on map. If you don't understand me - It's can be very close to ufo:eu map management.

Also: Are they planning to add more research options?

Add to what? If you talk about (12?) researches available in current alpha - yes - there will be more. If you talk about whole researches.xml - I don't know.

Edited April 20, 2012 by zzz

[MrPyro]

There's a lot more detail about the map generation in the Mapping section of the forum, but my basic understanding is that it will work something like this:

For each terrain type (desert, farm, etc) there will be several maps.

Each map consists of an arrangement of sub-maps; for example, an industrial map might have a warehouse in the top left corner, then a powerplant, then parking space. However, there will be several instances of each of these things, so there might be 4 warehouse sub-maps, for example. When you go into a particular mission, it picks a map, and then fills in the various sub-map areas from the options available. This means that even if you ended up with the same layout of warehouses and plants, they might use different warehouse/plant sub-maps, so the map would still look noticably different.

[zzz]

This means that even if you ended up with the same layout of warehouses and plants,

T

It depends from map. It's possible to make map where warehouse can switch to plant or grass, or any same size submap. You place on map just "containers" of specific size. "Container" can contain any count of any submaps with this specific size, and on map load for each "container" copy randomly select sub-map from it contains .

It's not about just "warehouses", but yes - most time it work how you say, especialy for Chris maps, just to save design of map.

Layout of this containers always the same for this map. But you can have any count of maps(layouts) for tileset. Staring position also can be randomly chosen from some of defined for this map.

Old ufos has system very close to this, and it has set of "submaps" to randomly choose from too.

Not sure you need all this explanations, and not sure you can understand what i'am talking about.

Edited April 20, 2012 by zzz

[MrPyro]

T

It depends from map. It's possible to make map where warehouse can switch to plant or grass, or any same size submap. You place on map just "containers" of specific size. "Container" can contain any count of any submaps with this specific size, and on map load for each "container" copy randomly select sub-map from it contains .

It's not about just "warehouses", but yes - most time it work how you say, especialy for Chris maps, just to save design of map.

Layout of this containers always the same for this map. But you can have any count of maps(layouts) for tileset. Staring position also can be randomly chosen from some of defined for this map.

Old ufos has system very close to this, and it has set of "submaps" to randomly choose from too.

Not sure you need all this explanations, and not sure you can understand what i'am talking about.

Hi zzz,

Thanks for that. My understanding came from a quick read of a thread in the Mapping section ages ago, so I didn't think it was necessarily perfect, but I think I was fairly close.

I don't know how much info the OP required, but hopefully we've answered the question; if not, Amaror, I'd really advise hitting the Mapping section of the forum if you want the serious crunchy detail.

[Chris]

There should be about 80 research projects in the final game I think. There will be a lot more maps too but I'll probably have to hire a level designer once we've got the basic tiles set up because it's just very time consuming to build them.

[Zeromanicus]

I spoilt myself with a peek through the files, some of the higher tier gear is very