Throwing things

[br54]

So I've been watching someone play Xcom TFTD and during a lot of the early missions, I noticed that he was able to toss just about anything around. Magazines, guns, bodies, even hot potato grenades. I'd love to see something like this in Xenonauts-2. During a recent replay of Xenonauts, I found it very cumbersome to transfer extra magazines and other items to other soldiers. You need to get them close to each other, have one drop a magazine, move them out of the way, get the other guy to stand on that spot and pick it up. By that point, if they haven't died of reaction fire, it's unlikely that they'd be able to even reload their weapon. I'd love to see this kind of mechanic implemented for Xenonauts-2.

 

Just imagine a guy decked out in Predator armor, armed to the teeth with various amounts of ammo for various kinetic and energy weapons, just throwing magazines to anyone he can see, like he's playing support in Battlefield 1.

 

It'd also be fun to hot potato grenades.

[Dagar]

Might be possible; after all a throwing mechanic is already in place. The soldiers being able to catch the stuff is what really would need work though; you may not want to pick up the mags from the ground each time. You could tie the throwing range and accuracy to the weight of the object; in Xenonauts cycling multiple soldiers through one weapon is also a thing.

Also, all is fun and games until you realize this gives the potential to the aliens to also toss grenades back...

[Chris]

It's theoretically possible, but it's not really something I'm going to think about too much at this stage - but potentially it could be added later on in development if all is going smoothly.

The other way to solve the issue is to give the "ground" inventory a radius, so instead of just being the single tile on which the unit is stood you can pick up items from adjacent (non-blocked) tiles too. That means transferring ammo from one soldier to another would onlyneed them to be stood next to each other; it's a bit easier in terms of UI too.

Either way it's something I'm willing to consider but I think we need all the key gameplay mechanics in place first.

[Decius]

Would it be excessively difficult to make the 'ground' area also include things in the hands of adjacent 'nauts that haven't been fired this turn, or perhaps have a slot to place things in adjacent empty hands?

 

[Chris]

On 2/20/2019 at 1:25 PM, Decius said:

Would it be excessively difficult to make the 'ground' area also include things in the hands of adjacent 'nauts that haven't been fired this turn, or perhaps have a slot to place things in adjacent empty hands?

 

I doubt that'd be the easiest approach from a code perspective, and I also think we'd get a lot of bug reports reading something like "One of my soldiers found a random shotgun lying around on the floor. Another unconnected bug - one of my soldiers lost his shotgun for no reason."

[Ninothree]

...but, it could lead to the super awesome bug of stealing the weapon out of your opponent's hands.

[Decius]

18 hours ago, Chris said:

I doubt that'd be the easiest approach from a code perspective, and I also think we'd get a lot of bug reports reading something like "One of my soldiers found a random shotgun lying around on the floor. Another unconnected bug - one of my soldiers lost his shotgun for no reason."

Yeah, I tried to imagine the UX for that, and the only way I could think of would be to have an inventory system with an explicit 'handoff' slot on the part of the donor, and an explicit 'handoff' spot that could be picked up from. Way too much clutter in the interface, and the primary attempted use case would be people wanting everyone to fire the same shotgun in the same turn; if you wanted someone to have that gun, you would have had them carry it!