You can use movement points for movement only, action points for movement or anything else. Once you perform a hostile action, such as shooting or invoking a psi power you will instantly deplete all your movement points and won't be able to move even with action points. I might remove this restriction later depending on how well it plays out. It's primary intent is to prevent hide-shoot-hide and similar exploits.How will separation of movement and other actions work?
My primary concern is to balance the turn based combat. Real time combat will be reserved for npc vs npc interaction only. As for the AP costs, in some areas it is closer to being proportional to it's RT time cost (such as AP required to use the weapons) while in some areas it's been more custom tuned to fit TBC better (abilities, psi); but no, I'm not planning to use some time-to-AP conversion function when determining the AP cost of an action.What's your approach to the point costs? Eg. are you going for a gamist abstraction with minimal concern for time consistency or do you intend to nail down costs as they would in real-time and translating those into point costs that scale well with each other?
Yeah, you're right. I thought it was fine until I was taking the screenshot.I'd decrease the size of the shadow blob though.
What exactly seems off with the rocks? The rocks themselves or their placement in the area?Those rocks around the pillar looks a bit off too.
I think the shading is off.
If you compare it to other objects on the screen, I'd expect it to look more like the one on the left of these two rocks I threw together.
TB Combat Stealth
Last week I worked on more graphics for Lower Underrail areas.
I also added pistol and crossbow blueprints and some basic parts to be used to create "lower tier" weapons.
But most importantly I went back and worked out the remaining real-time to turn-based combat conversion stuff, including stealth. You will now properly detect stealthed characters during your turn as well as be detected.
So to explain in a bit more details: previously the detection checks were performed every 0.5 seconds against all the surrounding characters.They added or subtracted from your stealth buffer for that particular detecting character (your stealth value is being tracked against each individual NPC, it's not a global thing) depending on your stealth skill and their detection value (which is based on their level and perception). These mechanics have been retained for the real-time mode, and in turn-based mode this check is performed after every 10 action/movement points you spend, but the stealth buffer change that it causes is halved. This is because in turn-based mode while you are playing out your turn you are both detecting and being detected. So basically you are being detected both during your turn and your opponent's turn, unlike in real-time when everything is happening simultaneously; hence the halving of the stealth buffer change value.
So all that stuff that I explained in the original Stealth update way back still applies to the turn-based combat, but the detection checks are a bit more granular.
Since the character movement speed is reduced when in RT mode, it's movement points are reduced in TB mode.
The actual steath/detection levels still need tweaking for both RT and TB mode, though. Currently, you can unreasonably hard to detect with enough points in stealth even at very close distances and that's not the idea. I'll be fixing this at some point soon.
I also fixed other various problems with TB combat, so I can say that it is now pretty much fully functional with all the features that were present in the RT mode.
One technical limitation is that I cannot really afford to produce all the separate crawling animations for all the actions and weapon/armor variations, etc. So the character will visually appear to be standing even when inside the ventilation ducts. I think this is acceptable compromise considering how much this gameplay element will be adding to the game.
This game looks better and better with every update.
I hope you don't forget sweet quests and character interaction though.
This game looks better than most of the Kickstarter projects I've been throwing money at over the last few months.