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Max's Grease Pit (Vehicle custom jobs are our speciality!)


Max_Caine

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Well, StockItem() subroutine can stomach everything provided you give it a full description (e.g. VEHICLE.HUNTER or airplane.human.mig31). I thought that would apply to other subroutines like requirements check as well, but it seems i was wrong. There's a problem either with location of the resource or with consuming it.

And ReplaceItem() looks like it wont take anything besides Item.xxx type at all.

Moddable routines and resources will benefit from cleaning and being documented properly, but that's significant amount of work and is nowhere near current priority.

Edited by a333
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With Chris mooting the possibility of a 19.8 by this weekend, I'm reluctant to release the changes I have tried out in case 19.8 is more than just bugfixes. I'm going to continue to tweak and play with the figures, and if nothing happens by the end of Friday, I'll put out an updated version. However, I will talk about what I am workign with.

My experience of 19.7 is that each vehicle is "timed" for a particular era. Hunters for small, Scimitars for mediums and Hyperions for large. The bulk of alien weaponry is revealed in the medium period, but by the time you get to the larges, bugs notwithstanding the sheer volume of heavy weaponry aliens can employ kill a Scimitar through weight of firepower. And hey, that's how GH wans it :/ fair enough. So, I looked (and am still looking) at the numbers to see how each vehicle could be useful in its own right in each era, while at the same time not downplaying the value of new vehicles. So far, I've come up with a the following re-jigs

The Hunter currently has the highest AP (100), the lowest armour (60), the lowest HP (100) and uniquely has the 30 cal, which has the cheapest shots (35AP for 30 cal) and the most shots (7 shots). So far, the Hunter has continued to be useful long past what should have been its shelf life, mostly due to its speed. It can get in and out of fights very quickly, and it needs to! The 30 cal isn't that awesome a weapon, but it has enogh shots to actually land a hit, which it needs.

The Scimitar currently has the lowest AP (70), the medium armour (90) and the highest HP (300). The Scimitar is supposed to represent resilience, and a combination of 90 armour and 300HP have done so far. I'm not sure that 300HP will be adequate, but with more testing I'll see if it needs another bump.

The Hyperion currently has medium AP (85), the highest armour (120) and medium HP (200). Haven't used the altered Hyperion very much - only three games with it so far, so it isn't much to go on. 120 armour is a LOT, and makes it very hard to scratch, let alone kill. I'm currently trying to encourage a terror mission so I can stress-test the Hyperion.

The Hunter I know the best, and I think it's about the right degree of mobility verses risk. The Scimitar and the Hyperion are going to need more work to really see if HP is as worth it as I wish/want it to be.

Edited by Max_Caine
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I upped their HPs, TUs, and armor so they can take a few shots. The same old issues as the original XCom games, with tanks taking up space in the transport, and do not earn progression keeps them for base defense (if I ever see a base attack without having to farm one). I would suggest making alternate versions, with different characteristics. Such as a spotter tank (excellent sight range, weak armor, medium weapon), or mobile armored platform (medium sight, medium weapon, good armor). That would give tactical reasons to replace units with tanks, though it could easily imbalance the game until alien grenades are used*.

Max, your inbox is full. Not sure if you received my last two PMs about your mod?

*I am still on 18.51 until I get to plasma weapons to make sure all my changes (from last week) have worked, and then I can finally update. Who would have ever thought finding a few hours to play would be so difficult? ;)

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Just to keep people updated, I had a few little problems.. which became BIG problems and all my work was wiped (teach me not to back up my files!). I've rebuilt most of what I had got with the Hunter, and I thought I'd try out the medical module I had talked about previously.

Short story, I've spent today trying to make it work. Alas! The game only recognises soliders as carrying medical kits. I've tried out a few things to work out why, and it seems that medkits are negative solider grenades (i.e. does negative damage). You can set up your medical kit with any funky name you like, and so long as you make it a melee negative solider grenade, it will work as a medkit. This is leading me down other avenues of exploration, such as trying to make a functional TF2 medigun, but medical units are RIGHT OUT as far as vehicles are concerned.

Edited by Max_Caine
oops! looks like it has to be melee as well (we'll see about that!)
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Eh, tried that with the vehicle medical unit. Didn't work. You get some really weird-ass numbers if you try doing that, and it doesn't do anything if you clicky-click. And anyesy, medkits are statted to have negative damage and melee range. Dude! You wrote the book on this, and you don't know?

Edited by Max_Caine
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Not messed with medkits at all.

Have you tried to set smoke to have a negative damage?

Give the later vehicles a cloud of healing nano bots/super steroids or something similar if it works.

I don't have the game installed any more so can't check to see if I can find any bits they forgot to block.

In the vehicle weapons xml where you specify a VV.weapon can you identify a soldier weapon instead or does that cause a crash still?

I do find that some of the limitations are a bit poorly thought out when it comes to bullettype.

Why can normal projectiles not be given an area damage when it is clearly possible with bullettype=rocket.

What is the reason for negative damage being limited to only one bullettype?

Why have totally different systems for burst and single shot instead of sharing the code that works?

It would have been much easier to just have all weapons work the same and add flags for specific features you wanted to add or remove.

Would have made my life easier at least :P

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Well, one thing has been changed at least. A weapon with bullettype normal can have a radius. Check the medium/heavy drone's weapon. The microrockets I made as a secondary weapon for the Hyperion are normals with a radius, just to see if it worked (and so I can make a salvo of rockets). And I'm experimenting with negatives right now, seeing if I can make a medigun for vehicles.

EDIT: Okay, having experimented with various vehucle setups:

Grenade: Nil points. Grenade makes the explody noise, nothing happens.

Bullet: Nil points. Bullets with a negative damage score do not appear!

Rocket: Nil points. Rocket appears, goes boom, does not have any effect

Have yet to try a gastype with a negative score.

Edited by Max_Caine
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I've been very slow with the updating. The actual work has been done for a while now. The problem is the playtesting. It's not enough just to stick a vehicle into a quickbattle or two, say "it works" and then declare jobs' a good 'un. It's necessary to play with the damn thing for dozens of battles in the specific setting that the player would find the vehicle. I.e. Hunter to start with, then Scimitar, then Hyperion. However, I've done a lot of testing with the Hunter, enough that I'm confident about it, so I'm releasing it in a separate mod to the original vehicle mod.

In this mod are the secondary weapons for the Hunter. They are:

Smoke grenades. Nuff said. 6 shots.

Tow missiles. they are quite awesome. Very accurate, very deadly, and with no overdamage! One problem: you get two shots.

Concussion grenades: A mix of stun grenades and flashbangs. You get six of these. They are somewhat OP verses noncoms, but loose their bite quite quickly verses guards and especially soliders.

Now, onto vehicles.

You have the standard Hunter. The only change that has been made to it is to ramp up the APs from 70 to 90. This makes quite a signficant chane in the way it handles. It's great for probing forwards and leaping back, as the armour can generally take a hit or two whereas a human scout can't. It's not so hot at actual fighting.

huntertype2_zps46717b5f.png

However, this is why you have the Type 3 Hunter.

type3hunter_zpscd4d114c.png

The prmary changes are to armour, hitpoints and sight range. These being:

Armour +10 (70)

Hitpoints +100 (200)

Sight range -4 (16)

That's right, boys and girls, the Type 3 has less sight range than anything else. This isn't such a problem - provided the Type 3 works with infantry, the sight range problem is taken care of. While the Type 2 runs off everywhere like Herbie on crack, the Type 3 is better off sticking with infantry.

Or it would be, if I didn't discover an interesting issue.

See, during testing I've found that while aliens will take a crack at Type 2s, their priority systems seem to put the Type 3 as "unkillable - ignore". I have parked a Type 3 next to 2 noncoms only for those noncoms to completely ignore the big easy-to-shoot target and blast away at the infantry that were following up behind it. Now, to be fair, just boosting armour from 60 to 70 is one hell of a boost when it comes to absorbing damage, but a Type 3 under laboratory tests will blow up with sufficent damage done to it. The Type 3 can run rampant around a map, and because like all vehicle it can crush UFO props, my current preferred technique when breaching UFOs is to blast the door with C4, scream "KNOCK KNOCK" and rush in with 4 tons of armoured monstrosity.

It also hasn't helped that with the switching between versions, I've lost savegames which means that I am just now getting onto corvettes - again. I'm hoping my first terror mission I do with the Type 3 will be a proper stress test for it. The Type 3 is an unlockable project, however it is research-topic dependant. Researching the Hunter project unlocks the Type 2 (listed as "Hunter Scout Car") and the Type 3 (listed as "Type 3 Scout Car") If you've already researched the Hunter, you can't research the Type 3. So it would mean starting again. However, the secondary weapons are not research dependant, so you can use those.

Edited by Max_Caine
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  • 3 weeks later...

It could be, as the RAM is concerned with almost completely different files. I can think of... three files, possibly four which would need merging but otherwise neither mod interacts with files the other would use.

EDIT: For people wondering where this mod is going, I've encountered some issues with the sprites that need working through. And I'm putting most of my time into the ACA at the moment, as that's almost complete, so I've been going back through all the Xenopedia files changing, polishing and tweaking.

Edited by Max_Caine
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