Messages

46

Bugs / Electrokinetic Imprint targeting routine

« on: January 13, 2016, 01:49:13 am »

When Electrokinetic Imprint is invoked on an invalid target, such as a tile that is occupied, the character does the casting animation; the Psi points get deducted; the Action Points get deducted; red error text tells you what you did wrong; and no Electrokinetic Imprint is produced.

It would be better if the targeting cursor toggled for tiles that are invalid. This is already the case when trying to invoke Bilocation (requires a human target) on a robot, or invoking Force Field (requires unoccupied location) on an occupied tile.

Even better would be if the balloon help for Electrokinetic Imprint used the same wording as Force Field:

on the designated unoccupied location

rather than its current wording:

at the target location

47

Suggestions / Re: flag Dog Crate as a Utility

« on: January 13, 2016, 01:30:51 am »

Are you telling that you're carrying dog crates around with you all the time?

Yep. I have had Dog Crates in my inventory from the moment I saw them in the shop (before I got Bret's quest). Now at level 16 (using Oddities) I still have them in my inventory.

But saying that, I've read on these boards of other players hoarding in their Inventory all the keys and access cards they encounter while wandering around. I only carry the SGS Cave Access Card. Any other key I stash in a box / crate / barrel / shelf / desk as close to the door it unlocks as possible.

Hmmm, too bad we can't use them to capture actual dogs.

Yes!

You can drag dog crate to your action bar and use it from there with number keys.

Oh! Mea culpa - that satisfies the goal of this suggestion. Please disregard this thread :-) I must have missed that. Probably because when the cursor interacts with a net or grenade, decorations appear around the Utility slots in the Inventory screen, and when the cursor interacts with the Dog Crate, such decorators don't appear.

Thanks!

48

General / Re: playermade maps

« on: January 13, 2016, 12:43:46 am »

You'd need to reverse engineer it and make your own map viewer/editor from scratch.

I was thinking that the code already exists (in the game source files) for reading the data files, composing the map, occluding tiles, applying lighting effects, applying fog-of-war, applying field-of-view. If this function or module were replicated to a standalone tool and then much of it commented out (FOW, FOV, lighting) it could loop through all maps (including vents); read a map; "draw" it - but instead of the output going to a screen, it would be dumped to a file.

screenshot the areas as you go

This is certainly an effective fallback solution, but it is labour intensive and it might miss transition zones, secret doors / rooms, vent systems, etc. Plus although it's fine if people save the screenshots lossless (eg as PNG) from the start, but if they don't know JPEG is lossy then they've done all that manual effort and ended up with a degraded result with bleeding edges (and not the good kind of "bleeding edge"!)

Should already be possible to open the png in paint and edit it

That's true, however there is a big difference in efficiency between:

• raster images (eg BMP, PNG) which are a grid of coloured pixels
• vector images (eg SVG) which contain geometric shapes (rectangles, arcs, lines, arrows) and text

I had thought you had made the file as SVG and exported it to PNG. Working with vectors is much less effort to rearrange lots of blocks to change the document shape from landscape to portrait. Multiple shapes can be rotated to 40 degree angle at once.

For your next version, check out the open source cross platform Inkscape and see if it makes your process of building up the map easier. It might take a little bit of getting used to that the software knows about rectangles, lines, etc and resizing them itself, but I think after a brief adjustment it will be a relief that the software does more for you.

49

Bugs / Pickpocketing destructibles

« on: January 12, 2016, 07:31:36 am »

Several destructible objects can be pickpocketed:

• they have the red hand cursor
• they show the pickpocketing progress bar
• they show the loot window (some objects show it only momentarily).

They include:

• security cameras
• rocks
• a Wall in GMS compound
• a Flimsy Shack

50

General / Re: playermade maps

« on: January 12, 2016, 07:15:28 am »

Very nice, Pipboy. Would you consider uploading the SVG instead of PNG? It's far smaller / quicker to download, and it would establish yours as the baseline for others to maintain in the future, due to its readily modifiable format.

Awesome work though!

To the devs regarding the work DQwiks has done, and the screenshots epeli seeks, how easy is it for you to throw together a resource file unpacker (much like those which exist for Baldur's Gate, Homeworld, etc.) that can dump the bare maps? I understand that these aren't pre-rendered raster backdrops like in older games, and that lighting etc. would be completely missing, but it would encourage community involvement like this.

51

Suggestions / flag Dog Crate as a Utility

« on: January 12, 2016, 05:50:58 am »

Probably the earliest encounter a new player has with Utility slot items is Bret's Hopper Roundup. Taking a bunch of Throwing Nets and Dog Crates out into the field, the player finds they can activate them by right-clicking them. The Throwing Net can be equipped in a Utility slot. Mysteriously, the Dog Crate can't. Instead, the player needs to keep the Inventory window open while chasing Hoppers. This can occupy a significant proportion of the Underrail window at minimum resolution.

If the Dog Crate were flagged as a Utility item, it could go in a slot beside the Throwing Net leading to a much more streamlined experience.

52

Suggestions / Re: Trading system improvements

« on: January 11, 2016, 11:55:24 pm »

1) Add junk dealers. They should buy more item types in greater quantities but at a much lower price.

I like it.

Why to not have it a bit abstract?

This is certainly a clean implementation; people picking up the game would "get it", without needing to flag various barrels as "stash" etc.

In Torchlight, the player has a pet. Most of the time this is a combat buff / offensive weapon, but the player can forgo that for a time by loading up the pet with all the junk items accumulated in the dungeon and send it off to the shops to sell everything. After a time (proportional to how many maps away from the settlement you are) it returns with the cash.

Now, if you were able to use Hacking to reprogram a robot encountered to fill such a minion slot (my preference would be the remote-control bot from the battery recycling plant), you could right-click its inventory icon to deploy it to the ground; pack its bay with a "to stash" basket and a "to sell" basket; then it can trolley off and do your shopping for you while you remain out in the field (or in your character house, while you make dinner IRL, etc.). This would need balance limitations: you couldn't accumulate more than one bot; it wouldn't do anything in combat if you did deploy it during combat; etc.

That would give you delayed access to cargo hauling, because the map where the bot is would become accessible once you've cleared the tunnels, but not so delayed as to be end-game exclusive. It's also an area that two of the SGS NPCs already explicitly tell the player to go to (fetching battery plans; helping Camp Hathor) so it rewards players who check in with the NPCs to follow the progression of story, rather than just running off in a random cave the moment they can.

53

Suggestions / Re: Various Suggestions

« on: January 10, 2016, 05:37:29 am »

- Attacking out of stealth should automatically grant initiative to the player for the following combat round

Maybe this is implemented differently for firearms or has changed in a patch. The only means of killing things (even the hopper tissue sample) I've used is psionics because I find the arbitrary diversity of ammunition bewildering overkill. Rather than just "bullet" or "poisoned bullet" there's incompatibility between a 4791 bullet and this pistol or a 903 bullet and that sniper rifle. Maybe people with a military background get a thrill from the level of detail, but I think it's got quite carried away.

That being said, when I run v1.0.0.0 and stealth up to an NPC and keep an eye on their detection progress and whack the Enter key as soon as it turns orange or I'm in position, I always get initiative without fail, and can stun them and execute them at my leisure. Maybe this has been nerfed in a patch I haven't got. Or maybe you inadvertently Bump! into your target on your way to delivering a melee attack. Or maybe you are waiting too long to press Enter to engage turn based combat too late, once their detection progress has already turned red, in which case it's reasonable and fair that they get a chance to roll initiative against you.

- Add a separate slot for goggles

Given the focus on crafting in this thread, would it be enough for crafters to be able to build +crit, +night vision, +perception, etc. into the Visor of helmets or the Lens of goggles / balaclavas to make combinations that aren't ever looted (such as a Metal Helm of Nightvision, or a Black Balaclava of Special Attack Damage)? That could address two of your concerns.

- Double points allocated to crafting skills

If crafting skills had more synergy bonus to non-crafting skills, people might take them just to raise their non-crafting skills to 10-20% above the skillcap... and then find out that crafting is useful in its own right.

Edit: looks like the forum can't handle unicode characters.

54

Suggestions / Re: More transparent mechanics

« on: January 10, 2016, 03:06:55 am »

Secrets (hidden passageways etc.) can only be found with the appropriate Perception score; Detection is not considered there. Everything else (stealthed enemies, traps, etc) is dependent on Detection.

Alright! See, this is the kind of mechanics opacity that leads to players wondering, "is it as simple as just..." and never being sure until enlightened by a more experienced player. While I'm all for building community this way, Tribal Knowledge means some people miss out on fun they've paid for and played for but not known how to engage.

To the best of my knowledge, the crate can only be used to capture two things: Hoppers and a small critter you meet in Foundry.

Aww so the misnomer got my false hopes up and wasted my time. Ah well, now I know. Again, misdirection made the possibilities unclear. In an exploration game, a certain degree of DIY investigation is expected, but in this case a misnomer detracts from fun rather than adding to it.

I think opening up the Wiki to allow more edits would indeed be a good idea. It is a great resource but still doesn't have everything it needs yet.

Indeed. And there are a number of typos just itching to be corrected. Maybe once a user has reached X postcount or Y applause they are automatically granted wiki write access? Dunno. Just an idea to keep spambots off the wiki.

55

Suggestions / Re: A suggestion to make entrances more visible

« on: January 10, 2016, 02:51:53 am »

I agree. Maybe all exit grids should be rendered visible through walls?

What about if the exit grids were a translucent 3D block from floor to ceiling (like a warp field) instead of a translucent parallelogram on the floor (like a teleport tile)? Then even if the "exit grid" is a stairs escalating toward the camera, the top of the red block would still be visible.

By "block" I am talking about the effect produced by the Force Field psi ability: but probably only half or a third of the thickness even though it would remain full height.

56

Bugs / Re: Zone Transition Failures

« on: January 10, 2016, 02:23:03 am »

Do you still encounter the errors going between the mentioned maps after you disable Autosave?

57

Suggestions / More transparent mechanics

« on: January 09, 2016, 11:39:41 am »

Detection
At the moment my character has Perception 8 with a +1 goggles. I keep coming across goggles in shops with +40% detection. I don't know which one is better for detecting mines, Lurkers, hidden passageways, etc. Does it simply come down to looking at the Combat Stats page and comparing "Detection" while swapping gear? Or are there other things changing at the same time?

Shields
Energy shields have a lot of attributes. Capacity is self-explanatory, but Conversion is a bit mysterious, Dissipation makes sense, and the Shielding block baffled me until I found this explanation page. Is there any way of educating the player about this unobtrusively?

Armor penalty
This seems to reduce my Movement points. Does it affect anything else? How does the player know what it applies to?

Skills training qualifications
When asking the SGS trainers to teach a technique, it seems that it's the base number of skillpoints invested in the skill from levelups that matters; wearing a +8 headband and having oodles of synergy won't impress the tutors. Not such a big deal, but it did have me scratching my head why they were refusing to train me when my character sheet said my effective ability was sufficient.

Surprisingly, I can equip various firearms which have Strength and Skill requirements both of which I fail to meet. This might be a bug; it might be fixed in a patch; it might be more mechanics I haven't understood yet.

Items
From its description, it seems the Dog Crate can capture a number of small critters. I have frequently tried to use it to capture a Dog on multiple maps, first by netting it or incapacitating it, and the capture keeps failing. I'm hoping to have my very own Dogmeat, even if I have to carry him in a can. Am I missing something here? Or are Dog Crates programmed to be incapable of capturing eponymous Dogs? If so, please could the crate be renamed to Hopper Crate?

58

Suggestions / Re: Tolerant patchers

« on: January 09, 2016, 10:58:20 am »

Fantastic - very good to know how it is done. I will take this up with GOG.

I haven't tried GOG Galaxy, no. Steam / Origin's tray executables tended to make simple things complicated, slow boot time, hog resources, download updates for the client itself silently, wasting monthly data I couldn't spare, and generally be all pain and no gain. Maybe GOG Galaxy is better :-) but I have no say in our monthly cap.

I might have to load up a USB hub with all my wifi dongles, install Connectify Dispatch, and hope the library throttling / shaping system (which limits each device to 60kbps) believes my laptop is really six separate users  Guess I'd better bring a good book! 

59

Suggestions / Re: Edge scrolling toggle

« on: January 09, 2016, 10:34:21 am »

You are my hero!

60

Suggestions / Re: Touch Typing feat

« on: January 08, 2016, 03:20:06 am »

All feats are situational and useless for some builds and useful for others. This is no different.

A variation would be to say while using a computer terminal, your Stealth skill operates at a -10 penalty or something rather than dropping you out of Stealth entirely. How can you hack an electronic lock within stealth but can't use a computer? I'm just suggesting dev/s (re)consider this particular intersection of Stealth mode with non-verbal dialogue. And a feat is just one way of handling that but by no means the only way.