Line of fire at corners

[Blackhorn]

So I'm frustrated because I just lost 2 people while trying to get inside a building in which an alien was hiding. I placed the first guy three tiles away from the door thinking it would be enough. It wasn't - the alien was able to shoot me without any cosequences, I didn't even spot him. After containing the situation I recreated the situation and it turned out my guy's line of fire was blocked:

 

and the alien could shoot freely:

 

Can someone explain to me what is going on here? And one more thing, how was he even able to see me when the wall is clearly blocking the line of sight?

Edited August 5, 2017 by Blackhorn

[Lobuno]

Sometimes I've been able to spot aliens directly through building or UFO's walls, even from the outside of UFOs.

So I will try to explain clearly what is going on here:

- This game is deeply broken.

- Many game mechanics/features are hidden from the player, and you can't realize how broken the game avtually is. You must dig in the xml files and the game code to see that.

- Solver is doing a great job fixing a lot of thins in the X:CE mod, but sadly it's not enough, too much of a job for a single individual. New bugs and broken mechanics are still being discovered.

- The very same developers have stated the game engine is NOT APPROPRIATE for this game, but they realized too late and a lot work was already done.

Don't take it too harsh and just try to enjoy th game as it is, install some mods, the X:CE, etc... The game will still be broken but you can have some fun, if some situation is just plain wrong, like the one you described just reload the game. Or else quit gaming and play/wait for other games.

 

Cheers!!

[Solver]

What you see there is the most confusing aspect of the game's LOS system, the corner leaning leading to asymmetrical line of fire. In your pictures, yes, the guy inside the building can shoot at the guy outside, but not vice versa. The best way of explaining is that characters can actually lean into adjacent tiles when standing at corners/doorways, and in this case, the guy inside can "lean out of the door" and so get a shot along this wall, while the guy outside cannot from that position. So in this case it's not actually wrong, but it is confusing.

The bad news is that the LOS/LOF system is very convoluted. In X:CE, the bugs have been pretty much fixed so that the system works as intended, but even as intended it has several scenarios that are difficult to understand, and this is by far the most confusing one. The good news is that, if you play for a while, you'll get a feeling for these things and become able to recognize the asymmetrical LOF situations and other corner cases.

23 minutes ago, Lobuno said:

Sometimes I've been able to spot aliens directly through building or UFO's walls, even from the outside of UFOs.

Some UFOs are broken beyond fixing. Rectangular things work okay with the game, rounded things don't. So landingships (essentially circular) and cruisers (circular with wings) are the worst.

[pão]

On 05/08/2017 at 8:54 PM, Solver said:

In X:CE, the bugs have been pretty much fixed so that the system works as intended

I think that might not be quite the case, check this thread and my response below the OP:

 

 

[Slider2k]

Is it possible to mod how LOS (line of shot) is drawn? I'd like it to be drawn from the center of source square to the center of target square, to avoid some extreme shooting angles and make cover angles more effective.

[Solver]

No.

[SteveG700]

So I came to this thread just ask about this very question.

Just started playing today, and keep reloading my first mission to try to get a feel for the game's mechanisms. How the game handles shooting from behind a wall may well be a deal-breaker. What I'm seeing in the OP's screenshots is actually acceptable to me (well, there should be a cover penalty, not a zero chance to hit), but that's not what I'm experiencing. I will put two guys flanking a door before I open it, or I'll put a guy at a building corner, and they can't seem to draw a line-of-sight past a 45-degree angle, effectively meaning there's no "leaning out". An ayy will be naked as a jaybird standing out in the open, and my soldier won't be able to shoot him unless I step out from behind cover.

That's frustrating. Don't seem to be able hop through a window either, even when it's broken. Very cumbersome to always have to breach through a door.

Edited April 8, 2018 by SteveG700

[Rodmar18]

On 4/8/2018 at 4:12 AM, SteveG700 said:

Don't seem to be able hop through a window either, even when it's broken.

Some map features have kept going patched until the very last version of Community Edition. For instance, if I remember well, some wooden barns still had non passable-through, open windows in the previous version.