KickStarter Phoenix Point - the new game from X-COM creator Julian Gollop

[Grotesque]

Hi UnstableVoltage , sorry to see you here. I really am, try to keep your sanity intact.

Also congratz on landing PR job with Snapshot! Well deserved, you and FWG probably did most of CR promotion through yt gameplay.

Do you sense the smell of shit?
It's coming from this guy's nostrils filled shut after all that brownnosing.

You do realize some games have communities and people know each other from that? Other than that - carry on edging.

I am sorry to see you here too. And I'll try to keep my stomach fluids intact and not to puke.

On the other hand, another poor schmuck with the name of Infinitron shits where he "works". Do you also feel sorry for UnstableVoltage like the other retard for getting down and dirty with us the insufferables?
But in the end, Pecunia non olet I guess.

 

[Mazisky]

ehy UnstableVoltage , i was a bit worried of seeing all industrials environments because the game could be visually boring after a while.

Is there a chance that we'll see many other environments with no industrial theme or maybe different color palettes?

 

[UnstableVoltage]

ehy UnstableVoltage , i was a bit worried of seeing all industrials environments because the game could be visually boring after a while.

Is there a chance that we'll see many other environments with no industrial theme or maybe different color palettes?

The only environment in the current build is the offshore oil platform. The finished game with have a veriety of locations and tilesets. Maps will also use procedural generation.

 

[Israfael]

I hope it'd be possible to make 'implicit' TUs, as Julian has said, more explicit - I honestly don't understand why people fear them (there could visual aids for math-impaired + reserved TUs for shooting like in SMK x-com clone).

 

[UnstableVoltage]

I hope it'd be possible to make 'implicit' TUs, as Julian has said, more explicit - I honestly don't understand why people fear them (there could visual aids for math-impaired + reserved TUs for shooting like in SMK x-com clone).

While I am personally a big fan of Time Units, they were a bit clunky. Surprisingly, a large number of people actually like the 2AP system. I think this is one of the reasons why Julian decided this one had to be a bit of a compromise. Streamlining the TU system while not having the strict limitations of the 2AP system.

 

[Jaedar]

Ballistics could be simulated with a solid line portraying the bullet path from the weapon to the targeted position, no? Then color the line depending on how much stuff it has to penetrate to get to its goal.

The bullets can travel anywhere within the cone of fire to simulate bullet spread. Obviously, the more accurate the shooter/weapon, and the closer you are to the target, the smaller the end of the cone will be. So you won't know the path of the bullet until the shot has fired.

I hope this is poor wording! After all, the cone would not be smaller because you are closer to your target, but the "hit volume/area" is bigger because there are more paths for the bullet to take that intersects the enemy. :rules lawyer:

So how will cover work in such a system anyway? Please no automatic leaning/getting shot on your turn while you're behind a wall because "you peek out!"(that would be a reaction shot for the enemy, not regular).

I've actually thought a bit on how you would calculate a hit% for the gui in a ballistics system, couldn't think of anything better than "run as many simulations as you can within the space of one frame and draw that number, update while hovering".

I hope it'd be possible to make 'implicit' TUs, as Julian has said, more explicit - I honestly don't understand why people fear them (there could visual aids for math-impaired + reserved TUs for shooting like in SMK x-com clone).

Imo open X-com does it really well. Never have to do your own math (I suppose it could use indicators for how many of each shot type you can do as you move).

 

[UnstableVoltage]

I hope this is poor wording! After all, the cone would not be smaller because you are closer to your target, but the "hit volume/area" is bigger because there are more paths for the bullet to take that intersects the enemy. :rules lawyer:

You're quite correct. Aim+weapon accuracy would make the diameter of the cone smaller. Distance would not, however, the closer the target is to the point of origin, the smaller the cone's diameter will be at that point.

As for the cover, beyond it being part of the physics simulation, I haven't seen/heard any of the other fine details yet. It may be one of those things that will require some trial and error after implementation.

 

[Israfael]

Surprisingly, a large number of people actually like the 2AP system.

Well, things can be clunky, but if you replace them with something completely different, than the whole mechanism becomes something else (not a simulation but a board game). This, for me personally, was the biggest affront of the modern XCOM. It's like if you replace the wheels on a truck with the tracks - it may look same-ish, but the control scheme and principles of movement would be totally different

 

[Zombra]

Implicit TU is fine. You can see how far you can move before you fire, you can make little moves and correct based on new information, reserve TUs are already built in, you can choose to keep moving and not fire, it's all there except the little casual UI helper telling you a number. Elite tough guys like us don't need helper numbers.

 

[7h30n]

I've actually thought a bit on how you would calculate a hit% for the gui in a ballistics system, couldn't think of anything better than "run as many simulations as you can within the space of one frame and draw that number, update while hovering".

How about setting a plane perpendicular to the shooting direction at the distance of the target. Then, cutting the plane by the sides of the aiming cone and taking the percentage of the area occupied by the target as the hit chance? Hope you understand it, that is if I managed to explain myself well enough.

Edit: Technically, this could be easily done on the GPU. By creating a perspective from the weapon with the aiming cone as the FOV and drawing to the depth or stencil buffer. Then getting the portion of the target rendering from the rest of the "picture".

 

[Jaedar]

I've actually thought a bit on how you would calculate a hit% for the gui in a ballistics system, couldn't think of anything better than "run as many simulations as you can within the space of one frame and draw that number, update while hovering".

How about setting a plane perpendicular to the shooting direction at the distance of the target. Then, cutting the plane by the sides of the aiming cone and taking the percentage of the area occupied by the target as the hit chance? Hope you understand it, that is if I managed to explain myself well enough.

Edit: Technically, this could be easily done on the GPU. By creating a perspective from the weapon with the aiming cone as the FOV and drawing to the depth or stencil buffer. Then getting the portion of the target rendering from the rest of the "picture".

Makes sense to me!

 

[thesheeep]

I've actually thought a bit on how you would calculate a hit% for the gui in a ballistics system, couldn't think of anything better than "run as many simulations as you can within the space of one frame and draw that number, update while hovering".

How about setting a plane perpendicular to the shooting direction at the distance of the target. Then, cutting the plane by the sides of the aiming cone and taking the percentage of the area occupied by the target as the hit chance? Hope you understand it, that is if I managed to explain myself well enough.

Edit: Technically, this could be easily done on the GPU. By creating a perspective from the weapon with the aiming cone as the FOV and drawing to the depth or stencil buffer. Then getting the portion of the target rendering from the rest of the "picture".

That would probably work, though it would also be a bit demanding, even when using GPU. Certainly faster than running a number of simulations, though.
And also, this is just for a bullet, or generally things that fly more or less in a straight line. What about grenades?

I don't think there is an easy and very fast way of doing this accurately, though there are certainly many ways.

It's also not clear (yet, UnstableVoltage ?) if they are even going for a perfectly accurate % display or just do it in an easy & "good enough" way.
Just something along the lines of "how likely is the soldier to execute a perfect shot?" would probably suffice in most situations, but might be somewhat off occasionally.

And this is just one of the many things to deal with when pulling the full ballistic simulation stunt. I really hope they know what they are doing...
As much as I'd love to see a well done bullet simulation including, as a developer myself, all of that complexity, work and the large tail of things that it requires to make it work just sets off my alarm bells.
I'd constantly be thinking "isn't there a good-enough approach that only requires 1/10th of the work so we can put more resources into more important stuff?"

 

[7h30n]

I've actually thought a bit on how you would calculate a hit% for the gui in a ballistics system, couldn't think of anything better than "run as many simulations as you can within the space of one frame and draw that number, update while hovering".

How about setting a plane perpendicular to the shooting direction at the distance of the target. Then, cutting the plane by the sides of the aiming cone and taking the percentage of the area occupied by the target as the hit chance? Hope you understand it, that is if I managed to explain myself well enough.

Edit: Technically, this could be easily done on the GPU. By creating a perspective from the weapon with the aiming cone as the FOV and drawing to the depth or stencil buffer. Then getting the portion of the target rendering from the rest of the "picture".

That would probably work, though it would also be a bit demanding, even when using GPU. Certainly faster than running a number of simulations, though.
And also, this is just for a bullet, or generally things that fly more or less in a straight line. What about grenades?

I don't think there is an easy and very fast way of doing this accurately, though there are certainly many ways.

It's also not clear (yet, UnstableVoltage ?) if they are even going for a perfectly accurate % display or just do it in an easy & "good enough" way.
Just something along the lines of "how likely is the soldier to execute a perfect shot?" would probably suffice in most situations, but might be somewhat off occasionally.

And this is just one of the many things to deal with when pulling the full ballistic simulation stunt. I really hope they know what they are doing...
As much as I'd love to see a well done bullet simulation including, as a developer myself, all of that complexity, work and the large tail of things that it requires to make it work just sets off my alarm bells.
I'd constantly be thinking "isn't there a good-enough approach that only requires 1/10th of the work so we can put more resources into more important stuff?"

Yep, I agree. That was just a 5-min idea I had.
On the other hand, Valkyria Chronicles didn't even bother with displaying percentages, instead it had a nice visualization of the potential to hit. It displayed a circle from the character's perspective where his bullets could go, so the human player would calculate the probability in their head (using the similar method I proposed above). Perhaps that is the 1/10th solution which is satisfying... though the perspective changes may get annoying during gameplay.

 

[UnstableVoltage]

It's also not clear (yet, UnstableVoltage ?) if they are even going for a perfectly accurate % display or just do it in an easy & "good enough" way.
Just something along the lines of "how likely is the soldier to execute a perfect shot?" would probably suffice in most situations, but might be somewhat off occasionally.

To be honest, pretty much anything related to the UI I have little to zero information on. The UI is more of a polish aspect that won't really be finalised until most of the mechanics are in.

We've heard a lot about tactical layer mechanics. That's very important, but it's not the only thing. Not enough has been said about Gollop's vision for the PP strategic layer. I was deeply unsatisfied with X2's strat layer, which is basically a just an RNG that draws cards from a deck. LW2 couldn't do much with that, so their attempt at strat layer simulation is limited and artificial, for example players are encouraged to metagame and deliberately fail unwanted missions asap in order for the RNG to draw a different card. I don't really see X2 WotC doing much to change this either. I am hoping that PP will take a more systems oriented approach:

Again, I'm sorry, but this is another area where I don't have much information at the moment. Julian has said that he wants the strategic layer to be more in-depth than the nuXComs, to the point where it is going to incorporate 4X elements. I was appointed as CM literally just as Julian was getting ready to leave for E3 - because of that, I haven't had a good chance for a development meeting to get more details on this aspect. As far as I am aware, a "first pass" if you like, of the strategic layer is going to be added to the build within the next 3 months. There has already been work done on the strategic layer, but thus far separately. It doesn't yet talk to the tactical layer.

 

[UnstableVoltage]

Is there a vision or design document broadly outlining what Gollop intends? I can understand if this area is largely tentative and up to revision but it's a major pillar of gameplay that is conspicuously vague.

There probably is, but I haven't seen it yet. All of my knowledge of the game so far is from a combination of the Q&As and a few candid conversations with Julian. I'll probably know more when he gets back from E3. That said, there will probably be a lot of stuff I can't talk about. Some things will want to be left as a bit of a surprise, while other things will be subject to change.

 

[thesheeep]

I've actually thought a bit on how you would calculate a hit% for the gui in a ballistics system, couldn't think of anything better than "run as many simulations as you can within the space of one frame and draw that number, update while hovering".

How about setting a plane perpendicular to the shooting direction at the distance of the target. Then, cutting the plane by the sides of the aiming cone and taking the percentage of the area occupied by the target as the hit chance? Hope you understand it, that is if I managed to explain myself well enough.

That would probably work, though it would also be a bit demanding, even when using GPU. Certainly faster than running a number of simulations, though.
And also, this is just for a bullet, or generally things that fly more or less in a straight line. What about grenades?

I don't think there is an easy and very fast way of doing this accurately, though there are certainly many ways.

Yep, I agree. That was just a 5-min idea I had.
On the other hand, Valkyria Chronicles didn't even bother with displaying percentages, instead it had a nice visualization of the potential to hit. It displayed a circle from the character's perspective where his bullets could go, so the human player would calculate the probability in their head (using the similar method I proposed above). Perhaps that is the 1/10th solution which is satisfying... though the perspective changes may get annoying during gameplay.

If one of these methods is used in the end, we can always claim it was ours and the devs read our posts

 

[Space Satan]

UnstableVoltage i do hope there won't be nuX-Com crap, promoting game restarts after team wipes and even after two team wipes it would be possible to make a comeback with significant effort. Or LongWar shit with soldiers going to hospital for a month after every scratch.
in fact I am quite worried about return fire and healing. With RF and the fact that most aliens cannot be killed a-la nuX-Com podwipe you are guaranteed to have at least half of your team wounded. And should healing act like classic and nuXcoms then completed mission will mean that your squad will go resting to hospital and next mission should be performed by another squad, which will drive some players(me) to have semi-expendable damage dealers to soak up damage and a main squad, who will always perform a killing blow.
Also, a question about leveling - what will be main exp source - kills, completed missions or shooting?
Because kills will mean I will level certain chars, making them perform a killing blow. Missions will repeat Long War crap where players showed billions of rookies and then leveled them at once. And if it'll be shooting then I will make everyone shoot with minimal damage and then perform a killing blow.
Ammo will be semi-infinite like in nuX-Com?

 

[thesheeep]

Because kills will mean I will level certain chars, making them perform a killing blow. Missions will repeat Long War crap where players showed billions of rookies and then leveled them at once. And if it'll be shooting then I will make everyone shoot with minimal damage and then perform a killing blow.

Of all of those I find the mission XP reward the least bad.
At least it does not force the player to pull off some gamey stunts that make absolutely no sense other than for maximizing XP (and are even opposing the logic of the setting, usually). It allows you to play however you want - as long as you win.

Though not the same type of game at all, the worst part about AoW 3 (and the parts before, too, I think?) are the absurd attack patterns you pull out of your hat just to level certain units.

 

[UnstableVoltage]

Firstly, let me just remind people that the return fire mechanic isn't final. Return fire is a passive ability that isn't available to all classes and weapon types. There will be ways to deal with RF, such as neutralising the enemies ability to return fire or methods to take down enemies quickly so that they don't get a chance. Even in our own prototype build, RF only does 50% of normal damage. In the final release it will be subject to the same ballistics system as normal fire - ie it will be possible for it to miss or hit cover (I'm also guessing that RF will have an aim penalty anyway).

Julian has said that soldiers can sustain both physical and mental injuries that they will carry through the game. There will be classes, equipment and abilities for healing out in the field. As for how severe these effects are, and if they can be healed or how long it will take - that's all going to be dealt with in the balance pass, and we're a long way from there yet.

As for ammo, I don't have a firm answer on that one yet. There will be a full inventory management system ala classic X-Com. There will be different types of ammo, and ammo conservation will play some part. Whether you will have a limited amount of magazines on the battlefield or not, I do not know.

 

[Israfael]

Why should there be classes with full inventory? Shouldn't the gear (well, and skills that can be modeled) define the characters rather than their abstract, gamey classes?

 

[UnstableVoltage]

Why should there be classes with full inventory? Shouldn't the gear (well, and skills that can be modeled) define the characters rather than their abstract, gamey classes?

Like many things in Phoenix Point, it's a bit of a hybrid system. A lot of skills and abilities will come from weapons and equipment. However, there will be some class-specific abilities too. Some equipment will only be usable by certain classes. The plan though is to give the player a lot more freedom than in nuXCom.

 

[Alienman]

I wish it didn't have this hybrid system, I mean I understand why, tapping in on both audiences but it just makes things a bit confusing.

 

[UnstableVoltage]

I wish it didn't have this hybrid system, I mean I understand why, tapping in on both audiences but it just makes things a bit confusing.

This is always the issue, "You can't please everyone". And when you're remaking an older game or the remake of a remake, what do you change, and what do you keep the same? At what point do too many changes move away from the fundamental core mechanics that made the original so good? And if you fail to change enough, why even bother? A lot of what is being implemented comes from answers given on the survey, as well as mechanics that Julian has used in other titles he has been involved with over the years. That said, at this early stage in production there are still lots of possibilities for ideas to be dropped or altered because they work well on paper but not in practice.

 

[luinthoron]

I wish it didn't have this hybrid system, I mean I understand why, tapping in on both audiences but it just makes things a bit confusing.

On the other hand, I see myself rather liking this system. One one hand, every soldier can use every weapon as always in X-Com, but on the other hand, they also can specialize more in some of them. Which actually makes sense, no one can be expected to master everything. Only three base classes also means that, unlike XCOM (or worse, XCOM with any class mods/LW2), you won't usually find yourself in situations where you don't have one or more of them available, or don't have the room for taking some of them (or more than one of a class) with you (admittedly, the lack of a tiny squad size limit helps here as well), while the specialist classes offer additional skills to use with any base class you want if you wish to train them, without forcing you into certain paths from the start.

 

[agris]

Hey UnstableVoltage

Can you speak as to why a classless system isn't under consideration for PP? I understand the comfort afforded to players by picking a class, but why not let players have access to pre-bundled packages of skills that define a 'class', while letting us (the player) have the option to assemble our own collection of skills and skill-focuses which we can then save as custom classes. Much like the saved gear loadouts of Xenonauts, but applied to skills. Such a solution would both keep the casual "let me pick from A-B-C-D" crowd happy, while enabling more play options/combinations that arise from a classless system.

It's understood not everything regarding mechanics in PP is set in stone, but please let us know your thinking. I think that a classless system would be a huge boon to PP in a certain crowd, and do no harm to it among others (provided the basic 'classic' classes skill packages were available to pick at the start).