I personally can support being unable to tell just how badly you've hurt something, although in the interest of fairness I'd go with having it in anyway. Preferably with a sort of toggle in the options so that people can see if they're actually hurting their enemies if they so choose.
Yeah, I'll certainly go the same route as Cogmind and have lots of features be optional, probably including extra damage information. I'm not sure exactly how detailed I'd want it to be, however, since then there are the players who would prefer not to have it, but feel like they're at an unnecessary disadvantage unless they turn it on (assuming it's available), so they feel obliged to do so and aren't as happy as a result... Hard to please everyone, I guess. I personally liked not having precise damage information even in Cogmind, though more than a few people complained until I added the option.
Perhaps rather then a damage announcement per-say, what about something that gives you an indication of how bullet-riddled the enemy is? You might not know if its doing much actual damage, but it would let you know if you've already opened fire on it a few times. It still gives you some information, but doesn't break the suspense of not knowing whether the last volley resulted in minimal or almost fatal damage. It may have made holes, but it might not have hurt it too much. Alien physiology is a strange thing after all. Perhaps just with a descriptor for different weapon types. Slightly singed, burnt, melted, completely fried for plasma, some bullet holes, shot up, completely riddled, etc for bullet type damage. Maybe with just the most prevalent type of damage listed in the description.
Rather than "The sectopod is completely unscathed."
"The sectopod has been shot up with bullets" or "The sectopod has been melted with plasma."
Keeps it simple, descriptive, but doesn't really give away too much. It allows for those types of enemies, especially when modding is introduced more, that can be completely fried by plasma without it affecting them too much. It should also give a bit of an idea when an enemy is highly resistant to a particular type of damage. Completely riddled with bullets for the last 3 rounds and it's still alive and kicking? Must be fairly bullet resistant then.
Plus it would be pretty easy to code (1xshot=first descriptor, 5xshot=second descriptor, add damage type to end), just a simple string parsing. Being easy to code is very important 
I like the idea of resistances being hinted at indirectly in the text. Reporting enemy status rather than doing the standard damage announcement seems like a cool idea, too, though some players might be opposed to favoring status over damage. I believe the standard way to handle a status report would be to have it after the damage text (so they're
both shown), but that might get a bit cluttered.
For low end testing, I've got an old 2Ghz Pentium 4, 1Gig of ram, laptop running XP sitting in my room. I'd be happy to pull it out and give X@com a test on it when the next version is ready (or have a crack at R5 on it) if you'd like. It should be crappy enough at refreshes to spot any gui rendering problems (or I'll just start a virus scan and load a few flash web pages and it definitely should slow right down).
Today I tried R6 (it's a lot more resource hungry than R5) on a 2.8GHz athlon (far slower than my own comp but still not too shabby), and it was using a max 20% of the CPU and everything worked fine. I also tried it out on my own computer using BES as suggested by Frumple. It's a neat little program that pretty much proved what I knew: The UI will not render properly if the game doesn't get all the CPU time it needs. I guess I just have to specify a minimum CPU requirement (RAM should really not be a problem, since the game doesn't use much).
So the questions become:
1) Exactly how slow is too slow a CPU? I'd say the requirement is probably a pretty reasonable 1.6~2.0+ GHz.
2) What the heck is happening to cause BishopX's game to actually slow down over time.
#2 is the troubling one, if that is what's happening here...
I'm pretty sure your 2GHz would still be able to run it without issue, though feel free to try R6 on it some day if you happen to have it out for something else. Can
anyone else report experiencing actual performance degrading over time? And BishopX, does your game also have the UI rendering issues immediately on startup, or is that only after some play time?
Author
Topic: X@COM - Where ASCII and X-COM Collide! (Read 122766 times)