Sight Range

[depressed_positron]

After playing open-Xcom for a while with unlimited sight range or Jaggeds etc coming back to a game with a sight range limit feels awful.  Every dev update I try starting a new game and then less than an hour later I'm back in open-Xcom.

I have a feeling I'm alone in this.

This wouldn't be an issue except that everything has better eyesight than you and getting shot from fogged open ground just feels dumb at this point to me.

Other LoS things like people behind trees looking in the direction they are getting shot from and being unable to see the tile (like 5 away) that shoots them is infuriating.

[Keflin]

Good point, having been fired upon in real life, what alerted me to the location or source of the attack, was muzzle flash, then my eyes zoomed in on the attacker. Now granted some aliens have better eye sight or better sighting technologies, and some may have inferior. Likewise player sighting equipment or detection devices (motion sensor for example) would be helpful as well.

Wonderful topic LoS, it has so many dimensions to consider, like my simple peripheral vision thread and the counter considerations provided. It is a game, and it cannot be a perfect real life simulation.

Sometimes I have the LoS advantage and sometimes I do not. As Gunny Highway says, you adapt, improvise and overcome.

[Chris]

Yeah, the short sight ranges are very much part of X-Com so your soldiers won't have "realistic" vision ranges in the final game (although in X2 the aliens don't have longer sight ranges than your soldiers do, so you shouldn't get shot from literally beyond their sight at the moment).

The good news though is that modding sight ranges in Xenonauts 2 should be equally easy as it is in OpenXcom. If you want to play with unlimited sight ranges then once our mod tools exist it'll probably involve updating a single value, so you'll be free to play the game the way you want to.

[depressed_positron]

56 minutes ago, Chris said:

The good news though is that modding sight ranges in Xenonauts 2 should be equally easy as it is in OpenXcom. If you want to play with unlimited sight ranges then once our mod tools exist it'll probably involve updating a single value, so you'll be free to play the game the way you want to.

Know that setting it to mapSize won't break anything is good to hear.

 

1 hour ago, Keflin said:

Good point, having been fired upon in real life, what alerted me to the location or source of the attack, was muzzle flash, then my eyes zoomed in on the attacker. Now granted some aliens have better eye sight or better sighting technologies, and some may have inferior. Likewise player sighting equipment or detection devices (motion sensor for example) would be helpful as well.

Wonderful topic LoS, it has so many dimensions to consider, like my simple peripheral vision thread and the counter considerations provided. It is a game, and it cannot be a perfect real life simulation.

Sometimes I have the LoS advantage and sometimes I do not. As Gunny Highway says, you adapt, improvise and overcome.

I wasn't going to go all "add a camo stat to all units" or other common "add feature plz" stuff. XPiratez has this to an extent. I don't think there are weapons or actions that alter those stats mid mission yet, but it is do able. My main complaint was the harsh finite barrier that didn't have any clear cause and AI behavior that suggested this was arbitrary and that I was the only one bearing that penalty/malus. Having a cone of limited information outside of the base 90 degree cone with r= whatever that showed if there were things/amorphous black blobs that could be aliens or humans would be cool, but forum posts like that are bad posts. (my post here is bad post)

[Decius]

There are two schools of thought involved:

Some people want their view to represent reality: If the player sees an empty room, then the room is empty; if there is doubt about whether the room is empty, the room is not (fully) displayed to the player.

Others want their view to represent the belief state of their soldiers; if their soldiers don't see anything in the room, but they do see the room, those players want to see an empty room.

Both of those are good systems, they just aren't very compatible with each other.

Compromise positions that show confidence intervals are abstractly interesting, but I've never seen so much as a mockup of something like that that was playable, and it certainly doesn't look as good as either outcome because it needs to include both "what is here" and "certainty that there isn't more".

[TrashMan]

If my memory serves me right, Jagged Alliance 2 had infinite (well, across map) sight range, but obstacles could block it. Also, things like darkness and cammo could make someone harder to see. You could ambush unsuspecting patrols from behind the bushes (if you're next to it you can see trough, but enemies cannot really)

Worked Wonderfully there.

[Decius]

JA2 had the exterior environment revealed by default, and had very long sight range and rifle range, particularly once you got a proper sniper rifle into the hands of a sniper. JA2 also followed the 'belief state of soldiers' paradigm, and many times an enemy would be detected concurrently with them firing; there was no way to be certain that there wasn't someone just outside your ability to see.



 

[TrashMan]

And JA2 is the greatest team strategy game to have ever been made.