Base View

[Guest drewid]

Here is a first draft of base facilities. the sizes are probably wrong.

Baseview_design___Facilities.doc

[red knight]

I agree with you... 100 square meters look a little small for all that stuff...

 

Greetings

Red Knight

[Deimos]

I'd agree with RK the room sizes are on the small side. 10m is roughly 30ft so the facilities are 30x30ft. Taking the medical bay as an example the staircase to the second level would have to be at least 2m wide and possibly up to 5m long. With that in mind it might be better to expand the sizes to 60x60ft or even 90x90ft which would give more room to play with.

 

For the hangars, taking the spec of a YF23 http://www.voodoo.cz/yf23/info.html the craft wouldn't physically fit into the hangar so again triple sizing it would I think give enough room. After all the base staff would have to work on the craft as well.

 

Which has given me another idea. When a craft is damaged it gets auto fixed, instead of this why don't we have to buy aircraft technicians to repair the craft. That way the player can choose how fast the craft gets fixed, so it'd be more expensive to have technicians hanging around the base but it would be up to the player how fast the craft got fixed.

[Guest drewid]

Bigger it is then though that might make some of the things too big. Maybe we should have rooms that are one two and three blocks big rather than the two sizes we've got already?

 

I like that tech idea, I'd always figured you diverted engineers from their everyday tasks, but I like the idea of having specialist aircraft-techs.

 

Lets face it combat aircraft need a lot of maintenance anyhow, even when they're out on a mission the techs can still be servicing hangar systems and fixing missiles and stuff.

 

I'm just about to throw an idea for the craft equiping screen which might work with that....

 

 

More anon

[Breunor]

As for the aircraft techs, I figured the maintenance and repiars is where your monthly expenses went towards each craft you had. That covers parts and labor, right? So rather than having to deal with extra units and their room and board, just give an option where a craft returns damaged to spend extra money on repairs depending on how quickly you want it ready. Say 1 shift, 2 shifts, or 3 shifts of repair crews per day (as an example). If it takes 1 week on average to repair (1 shift), you increase the cost by 50% to drop that to 4 days (2 shifts), and by 100% to drop it to 3 days (3 shifts). This rounds down and provides a little diminishing returns. If the length of time to repair varies based on the amount of damage, you have a screen pop up when the craft returns to base that asks how many shifts you want to fund towards repairs, and show the reduced number of days as a result.

[Breunor]

My math is obviously off a little... that should be 100% increase for 2 shifts and 200% increase for 3 shifts. Meaning if it costs $50K a month to maintain the plane, a 2nd shift is a $50K surcharge, and 3 shifts would cost $100K. Pretty much does the same thing as paying $50K a month for each extra repair crew, without dealing with housing and all that. The cost or time for fast repairs would be adjusted based on the amount of damage to the plane. So if it's 20% damaged, either the cost would be 20% or the repair time would be 20%.

[Guest drewid]

We need to com up with new names for some of these facilities as well - probably

[mikker]

hmm......... Instand of missile defence, what about missile extendsion?

 

Crew quarters.....Personell extension

 

yada yada yada

[mamutas]

My math is obviously off a little... that should be 100% increase for 2 shifts and 200% increase for 3 shifts. Meaning if it costs $50K a month to maintain the plane, a 2nd shift is a $50K surcharge, and 3 shifts would cost $100K. Pretty much does the same thing as paying $50K a month for each extra repair crew, without dealing with housing and all that. The cost or time for fast repairs would be adjusted based on the amount of damage to the plane. So if it's 20% damaged, either the cost would be 20% or the repair time would be 20%.

But sometimes you craft returned undamaged and with full arm, but you still spend $50K to maintain it, right? Adding this additional maintenance routine does not bring anymore fun to the game, but it just adds dull thing you would need to do everytime your craft came back from the mission.

 

I would imagine, that your leased craft maintenance would average $50K/month with technicians coming and leaving every day (no living quarters for them). This is automated, so it does not divert your attention from the play.

 

If you would like to be more realistic, then it some maintenance cost ($10K/month or so) should be added to X-Com built crafts. That would cover all parts and labor.

[[[Micah]]]

My math is obviously off a little... that should be 100% increase for 2 shifts and 200% increase for 3 shifts. Meaning if it costs $50K a month to maintain the plane, a 2nd shift is a $50K surcharge, and 3 shifts would cost $100K. Pretty much does the same thing as paying $50K a month for each extra repair crew, without dealing with housing and all that. The cost or time for fast repairs would be adjusted based on the amount of damage to the plane. So if it's 20% damaged, either the cost would be 20% or the repair time would be 20%.

But sometimes you craft returned undamaged and with full arm, but you still spend $50K to maintain it, right? Adding this additional maintenance routine does not bring anymore fun to the game, but it just adds dull thing you would need to do everytime your craft came back from the mission.

 

I would imagine, that your leased craft maintenance would average $50K/month with technicians coming and leaving every day (no living quarters for them). This is automated, so it does not divert your attention from the play.

 

If you would like to be more realistic, then it some maintenance cost ($10K/month or so) should be added to X-Com built crafts. That would cover all parts and labor.

I also think that the repairs should be included in the monthly maintenence fees and left to the computer to deal with. I don't want to bother with hiring techs and having enough on hand to deal with repairs. I think the way UFO Defense dealt with it was good enough.

[[mindstormmaster]]

I like both ideas, although i think that having to have techs around just adds more micro-management to deal with. Perhaps we could have it set up where repairs are included in the monthly fees, but also give the option of hiring a tech to speed up repairs.

That's just my opinion.

[Guest drewid]

How about the when you lease an aricraft it comes with a couple of technicians. They can have sleeping bags n the corner of the hangar there's plenty of space . The monthly cost covers wages, you can divert an engineer or two in from manufacturing if the techs aren't fast enough.

[Breunor]

"Little did Sally the office assistant know, how much the phrase 'and other duties as necessary' would apply to her internship at the new Xenocide facility..." :alienlol:

[Guest drewid]

OT. but that reads completely differently if you replace "sally" with "Monica"

[Guest drewid]

We now have three sizes of rooms most are 10 or 20, hangars are 40.

Baseview_design___Facilities_v1.1.doc

[Deimos]

OT. but that reads completely differently if you replace "sally" with "Monica"

Especially when they mentioned 'clean up'

[Guest drewid]

OT. but that reads completely differently if you replace "sally" with "Monica"

Especially when they mentioned 'clean up'

noooooooooo. stoppit nowww

[Breunor]

Missile defense is listed as 20x20 while the other defenses are 10x10. Is this correct, or should they all be 20x20?

[Breunor]

For the hangars, we could just make all the shipt full vtol capable. All the ufo-based craft could do it easily enough, and the XC11(skyranger) has thrust nozzles on it already. I can modify the XC1(interceptor) model to have them as well.

 

If not, I believe the FA-18 Hornet can climb straight up when using afterburners, so if it could take off from an elevated launch jet like you describe using it's own power and no booster rockets. Another option would be a platform lift that each plane could taxi onto, then it lifts them to the surface. The aircraft could then take off and land on the surface using normal means, taxi back to the lift, and be lowered back into the hangar. This seems more feasible IMO than having a blast-proof hanger and shooting each plane out of them.

[Guest drewid]

I'm not sure a harrier can do VTOL with a full weapon load, I think it needs a bit of a rolling start. hence the "ski-jump" on Harrier Carriers

 

I figured the XC11 nozzles would be more use for slowing a landing, being as small as they are, rather than for take off which would use a lot more power.

 

I just like the idea of launching the interceptors like that. I think it must be the Thunderbirds fan in me. It would look like a ship-launched Tomahawk going up. :devilsmile:

 

I'm quite happy to go with the concensus tho, whatever.

 

BTW Maybe it should be XC for carrier and XF for fighter or XI for interceptor?

[Guest stewart]

I think we should avoid anchoring the room sizes to ACTUAL realworld sizes. We may think we are getting more reality but it will destroy the emersion when we either think of how large the rooms are or what the range of vision is in a brightly lit large room. Just leave them with the vague unit of say "squares" or "tiles".

 

Is this the thread with the actual facilities list or does that exist elsewhere? Because I, of course, have some facilties ideas as well. Someone explain the admin facility to me please.

 

Oh dear I just read the second version, let's be a little sure about turning things into 2 by 2's.

[Guest drewid]

I've just assumed that the grid squares are 20m, to keep it consistent with what we have already. That woud make a base 120m square which seems reasonable.

 

The smaller facilities could go back up to 20m, or perhaps they have corridor around them, if people think it necessary. (would make base defence a bit harder which is no bad thing. These facilities tend to the sort of thing that would benefit from having a "safe zone" around them, weapons and detection system mainly.

 

The reason I'm using real-world sizes is because I think we should use the same base that we use in the Battlescape base defence missions. It'll save building stuff we don't have to, It'll keep it consistent and make the base more of a "real thing" rather than an abstract construct.

 

Admin is where officers sleep, where briefings happen, and where people can chill, hence it raises morale, maybe speeds up transfers, or enables transfer queueing. can automate some re-ordering of ammo n stuff.

 

Any facility has to earn it's place, and make an improvement to the working of the base management and running. (not too much though, we don't want to break anything).

 

That having been said this would be a good place for making suggestions, so lets hear 'em. If people agree they can go in the doc, (I'll make a section for suggested new stuff and put admin and sickbay into it).

[Guest stewart]

I think I see where you are going with the admin thing but I'd like more out of it before I'd see it as legit. Good idea though but needs more dev. On the other hand maybe I'm wrong, whatever.

 

With the squares @ 20 m then the soldiers bedroom which can "Hot Bunk" 50 people (ie has 17 beds) is 670 feet by 670 feet with single beds which are 70 feet by 140 feet. Whereas in "real" Xcom, in brightly lit space the soldiers range of vision is 16 squares (in this case 320 feet). If the Reaper is 321 feet away you can't see it. You see where I'm going with this? By "real worlding" the dimensions, you actually make it "less" real.

[Guest stewart]

Actually, this is going to be a problem, if we use first person views in the base. In first person views the layout would look best @ 1 meter per square but then the limit of vision in a bright room is 16 meters (54 feet). With third person views you can get away with funky geometry. In warcraft a guy on a horse is almost the same size as a farm and nobody blinks an eye, for example.

 

Now if we make each square a lot greater than 1 meter then we can have distances for viewing enemies make more sense but then your facilities will look rediculously huge.

 

Something's got to give so I'd suggest using the 1 meter per square and live with the foreshorttening of vision inaccuracy.

[Guest drewid]

He he... more dev is what we're here for

 

erm ok. dimensions are up for grabs all round.

 

So real x-com sighting is 16 squares, which is 16m about 60 feet, Is that right,?doesn't seem very far to me. bearing in mind that an interceptor has a 13m wingspan.

 

Ah, grid squares are not the same as the battlescape squares which are ,IIRC, 1m square.

 

the base grid is 20m so the soldiers room is 20m, 63ft. which is big, but not excessive and the beds will be 2.5x1m with some space in between.

We've got to fit in kitchen and stuff as well.

 

discuss

 

[Guest stewart]

In the real game the beds are 1 "meter" by 2 "meters" which sounds right to me. Remember, though the facilities are placed @ 10 metre intervals they are actually 9 by 9 since there is a 1 meter perimeter of dirt. Meaning the bedroom is 9 meters by 9 meters or 30ft².

 

We can't have everything. What do you think of having the world "look" right geometrically but range of vision being a lot shorter.

[Breunor]

It's true that fully loaded Harrier can't do a vtol, but if they're only carrying air to air missiles of limited quantities, why not? Also, our planes are more advanced than current day Harriers, right? Really, if we assume the Xenocide version of reality is just a little bit further ahead of today, this isn't much of a leap. I agree with you that the nozzles on the transporter are a bit small for liftoff with 12 soldiers or a mini tank, but with a dose of Xenocide reality (and larger nozzles) would it be impossible? I can modify the nozzles to make them larger and still sit flush on the model without affecting the look much I think. They've been looking a little small to me anyway.

 

I think it would be a good idea to not worry about details like, 'where do they all eat, use the toilet, have conjugal visits, and all the other realities', and decide on something like a 20meter by 20 meter square for the version 1 baseview layout. If a large room is 40 meters to a side, then line of sight is effectively infinite inside this well lit area. I think people are mixing up the squares in the battlescape (1 meter) with the squares in the base layout screen (20x20 meters, etc) I don't like the idea of losing line of sight after 16 squares/ 16 meters, if that's how the original worked. I can see that at night, but not during the day or in a base with lighting. If somebody were to design a base with every room lined up so that there were actually 16 base view squares equalling 320 meters in length, then I could see that being an issue. But I think you'd lose line of sight before then. Even though a lab is 20x20 meters, that doesn't mean the battlescape version can't have several bays with divider walls and panels, things that break it up into something other than a big square. So you can make each facility a 20x20 block or 20x40 block or 40x40 block etc for the outer dimensions. Maybe give an option to rotate a facility before placing it if it isn't square.

 

As to the details in the models, living quarters can have some bunk beds, but it doesn't have to be exactly 50 or 100 of them. You could put a model of some card tables or TV or pool table in their as well. It doesn't need to have every single feature, but just enough for the player to say, 'ah, this is the laboratory or the living quarters'. I like the admin facility idea, it could be a required part of the base like the access lift is. It could include a galley kitchen, medical bay, and any other function that would be needed to operate normally, within reason. You could even include the access lift into this section if you wanted, make it all 1x2 squares total (20 meters by 40 meters) and 2 stories tall. You wouldn't need anything else in the game regarding this, just that it's there in the battlescape and represented by taking up a little space in the base design. It covers all the 'basic needs' of the base. This could be expanded on in later versions of the game, where the facilities have an effect on gameplay.

 

There would need to be a sperate model for the base design view compared to the battlescape version of the base, perhaps all the props are pulled out of the room when you're in the base design screen or only some of them are kept in there. If you want to have lots of zoom in the base design screen, you keep more models in each room for detail. If we use a background animation when you're within a screen, those models could be static and displayed when in the overhead base view main menu. For example, when in the research screen you zoom down to the lab and some scientists animate and go through some motions in the background. You could zoom down close to a first person angle so you don't see the floor plan layout. That way when you're in the battlescape defending your base, you don't think to yourself 'my laboratory doesn't look like this in the base view'.

 

Just some thoughts...

[Guest drewid]

Hmmm I'm getting to complicated, lets use the KISS principal. Resets brain.

 

I agree about the plane, it can be lifted up to ground level and the take off however, like in an aircraft carrier.

 

20 x 20m seem too big for most facilities really, 10 x 10m is a little small for some.

 

If we make it 15m for a small facility then you can see across a room. The hangar is then 30m, which is big enough to fit a plane in comfortably, even have it take off (carefully).

 

As to detail - we can make the detail lowish by being crafty. For instance bunks are capsules, so are basically textured boxes. A pool table needn't be much more than that etc. I like the idea of the camera angles being different, Not sure about going "first person" tho. That really calls for more detail. We can try that when we have some mockup objects to play with.

 

 

The 16m sight limit is something we should be wary of changing very much, being a key game mechanic. Originally it would have been set because of the limits of screen resolution. We should try it in the battlescape with weapons ranges up as well, and see how it feels. I certainly don't object in principal, but we need to approach that one with our eyes open. That need discussing elsewhere.

 

?

[Breunor]

What I meant by first person angle is best described by the camera angles used in Warcraft 3. While you don't go all the way down to a face to face view (nor that close), you go from bird's eye view to 'bird in a small tree' view I guess. It's true that changing line of sight could affect game play and should be discussed somewhere else. If the lifting platform is OK, I was thinking it could be a scissor lift design, that would be reasonable mechanically.

[Guest drewid]

That was the sort of angle I was thinking of too. so the room fills the screen, (or the panel surround).

 

Technically it's 3rd person, but no longer isometric. first person is where you take the viewpoint of a particular character, so "tomb Raider" is 3rd person, "unreal" is 1st, (till you get fragged anyhow).

 

Scissor lift would be cool, with a big chunky mechanism. I wonder how aircraft carriers do the lift thing? Anyone out there know?

[Guest stewart]

If you want realism WRT sight distance, as long as it is open we /should/ be able to see clear across the base.

 

Regular base facilites being at 10 meter intervals is fine (making Hangars 20 metres per side).

 

The other option to accepting the foreshorttening of sight is simply to not have forshorttening of sight. But in open maps, say farmland without tall hedges and buildings each battle is going to be about 3 rounds @ most since every warrior will be able to see every other warrior.

[Breunor]

I was thinking about that sight range and the fire fight that follows, but why not have accuracy decrease the further you get from the target? Say accuracy stays at 100% of the base amount up to 5 meters/grid squares away, then starts dropping by 5% for each meter after that. If my base accuracy is 80% with a rifle, at 5 meters it's still 80%, but at 10 meters it's (80-(5*5))=40%, and I have a minimum chance of say 1 or 5% to hit at 22 meters and beyond in this example. As your accuracy increases, your effective range does to, but even 120% base accuracy drops to 65% at 16 meters. You can create a maximum base accuracy that a soldier can reach, so people don't train forever to get accuracy of 300%.

 

Allowing this really helps out when you get to terror sites, and can see a lot of area and can react better to what used to be just out of sight. You can't site at teh ramp of the transporter and hit everybody, but you get a better idea of where to head towards.

[Guest drewid]

Seeing further might diminish part of the spooky atmosphere.

It will certainly change the game mechanic and should be approached with caution.

 

Other stuff might have to change to rebalance the game, accuracy with distance, movement speed, weapon splash radius etc.

 

Worth bearing in mind for v2, when we have a game to try stuff in.

 

my 2p

[Guest stewart]

Reducing accuracy even more might have to be done to the degree where it is obviously fake. In this case some part of reality gives way, firing accuracy.

 

We MUST give-up on SOME component of reality.

I'd say go for foreshorttening of sight.

 

Or . . .

 

Xcom and Alien Bases are 60m² with no forshorttening of sight or further reduxion in accuracy. Since these things are full of hallways and corners it might just work anyway. Of course then we have to work on movement speed.

 

Anyway for outdoors maps, they don't have to be 6x6 they can be, oh, 36x36 or something. Of course urban maps will be a problem. And I'm not sure about memory issues.

[Guest drewid]

Anyhow. who said anything about well lit?

 

In come the alien ships and EMP the place.

We are stuck with dull red flickery emergency lighting, and sirens going off everywhere.

 

Dark corners smoke and confusion.

 

oh yes

[Breunor]

Oh yeah! That sounds very nice. Does anybody remember the original Doom? I think it was the second or third area that had flickering flourescent lights. The area was simple, but with those lights you could barely see anything. But you could hear the monsters coming... very nice!

[mamutas]

*drooling*

Flickering red emergency ligts! That is so cool idea.

 

And who said that aliens need light at all? Their bases could be lit with X-Rays for example.

[Breunor]

Alien: "I can see through your clothes, with my x ray vision!"

 

Soldier: "I can see through your torso, with my heavy cannon!" :uzzi:

[Guest drewid]

The sound in doom was god like.

 

And anyone who had the privelige of playing "aliens doom" will know just how scary good sound can be. I remember playing a long session ending sometime in the middle of the night, then having to walk home through unlit woods with my nerves still on edge. :erm:

 

Anyhow. sound is really really important. and I don't just mean music. We can do that too.

sending a trooper out into the darkness, then somewhere is the hiss of a chyrssallid.

[Deimos]

The sound in doom was god like. 

 

And anyone who had the privelige of playing "aliens doom" will know just how scary good sound can be. I remember playing a long session ending sometime in the middle of the night, then having to walk home through unlit woods with my nerves still on edge.  :erm:

 

Anyhow. sound is really really important. and I don't just mean music. We can do that too.

sending a trooper out into the darkness, then somewhere is the hiss of a chyrssallid.

Aliens doom. I remember that. Ok so I was stupid enough to play it alone and late at night in a dark room so that probably intesified the effect it had on me but it was pretty intense all the same.

 

Doom used to make me jump out of my skin on a regular basis until I'd finished it. Another game that had 'that' kind of atmosphere was Alien vs Predator in the marines missions with the music on. That was one scary game.

 

From what I gather alien bases should be dark with little random flashing lights in places. Maybe the plants could emit some kind of red light and other than that the only light available is what the troopers bring with them.

 

"Out of the blackness they came, firing thoset awful smelling plasma rifles. The only time we ever saw them was in the glow of the bolts. I hate alien bases."

 

I think that would a very cool idea, make alien bases not only tough but psychologically tough too. Get a player scared of clearing alien bases and and it'll be tougher for them even if the actual gameplay isn't harder.

[Guest stewart]

Lowering the light is a bandaid solution. We could problably get away with it for Xcom base though I'd rather not go that way. Besides with fires and flares you're back to the same-ol'-same-ol'.

[Deimos]

I was thinking an xcom base should be well lit with flouroescent or equivilant lighting and alien bases should but dark, clammy places. I wasn't thinking badly lit more atmosperically lit with the light bleeding from the walls or as I suggested before the plant life which could be scattered around the base. The idea for the alien bases is that they should incite fear into a player by playing on the base psychologial fears such films as Ridley Scott's Alien or Pitch black where darkness was used to great effect but also lighting (not so much in the second film) was instrumental in setting the chilling overtones. It wasn't the alien itself that was scary it was the mood created by the lighting and music that got the old adreniline running, well it did for me anyway.

 

Alien bases always held that same fear for me when I first played xcom and I hoped that we could recreate that forboding tension of going somewhere truly alien.

[Guest drewid]

uplighting stuff from the floor works well for added spookiness

[Breunor]

I agree with Deimos' idea of light effects here. I can see a dull red or dark green glow in areas, perhaps there could be some type of 'aquarium' device in alien bases (and larger ufos), which is designed to provide the proper atmosphere for the aliens. Yes, they can breath our air, but it's not what they prefer, these things help adjust regular air for them. In game, their main purpose is give off a weird glowing light, and of course you can shoot them by accident and lose what little free light you had... 'Alien Atmospheric Lava Lamps'

[mamutas]

It also applies to alien craft, right? They should use the same lightning system as bases.

[Guest drewid]

Human bases

perhaps we don't kill the lights on every base invasion, just every nth, or on later ones.

[Guest stewart]

Before we venture too long on this segueue and forget why the he11 we're talking about it. Why don't we just have

 

* the xcom bases be @ most 60m² with regular lighting, no foreshorttening of distance, no artificially reduxion of accuracy. considering all the hallways and such I think this will probably work anyway.

* the alien bases be @ least as big. They can be bigger though. But have THEM have a lot of darkened rooms (not completely though).

* open outdoor maps be huge.

* Cities (uh . . help me on this one folks)

[Breunor]

That sounds like a good layout for version 1. Cities could be similar to bases, in that a base is 6x6 squares, make a city 6x6 blocks. How big's a block? Good question! The limit is going to be based on the polys in the scene. My estimate is that an average building will eat up 4K-6K polys each, plus all the other objects out there. Toss in the transport, and things start slowing down. A city block could be a square holding 4 houses or 1 business for example. So you could have 75 buildings easy.

[Guest drewid]

I still think 10m sounds too small for a small room.

15 would give us dark corners, but still be able to see everything.

 

Outdoor maps huge = good, but we need an "alien finder" or the x-comutil "mop up" thing to find that last alien.

 

Breunor. Don't worry about poly count too much. It doesn't matter what's in memory so much, what is being drawn is much more important to the speed, which will be reasonably consistent, depending mainly on zoom.

[Guest stewart]

I think I'm starting to see things your way about the base facility size drewid. But rather than 1.5m² "tiles", I'd still prefer 1m² elements therefore making the facilities 15x15 squares and 30 x 30 sqaures (in the case of Hangars) respectively.

 

For the alien base though let's keep them at 10meters but say make the alien bases 9x9 or something, with intellegent design behind them (alien chokepoints for sure)