XCOM EU Repair Weapons Fire

[D3VL1N]

I really feel we are in need of a mod that will stop the shooting through walls bug.

Unfortunately I'm not a mod maker and would have no clue of how to go about doing this.

Hence my request to the community.

 

Thanks for you time.

 

D3VL1N.

[Amineri]

Do you mean the visual bug, where XCOM units and enemies appear to shoot through objects, or is there a game logic bug I'm not aware of?

 

If you are referring to the visual bug, it could be poked at in a few possible ways.

 

First, some background ----------------------------

In the X-COM OG, units did not have the ability to "automatically lean around corners". A unit had to spend TUs to move around the corner, spend the TUs to shoot, and then spend some more TUs to move back behind the corner. While out in the open, the unit had no cover against any opponent reaction fire. If you forgot to reserve enough TUs to get back into cover, you were stuck in the open. Since you couldn't see around the corner, you couldn't reaction fire around the corner during your own turn.

 

With the simplification of the TUs into the "two-action system" (which is very much reminds me of the system in a lot of Games Workshop games, where you can shoot, move/shoot, or move/move, rather than the TU-based system in X-COM OG), there was a need to allow units to shoot from cover / lean around corners.

 

This works by allowing the sighting mechanic to treat a unit as if it was "stepped out" if the character is behind high cover and the step doesn't go up/down in elevation. For symmetry, the unit can also be counted as being in the "stepped out" adjacent square in order to determine if it can be shot at, although for purposes of cover it uses its 'real' position. If this were not the case, it would be easy to generate situations under which the unit could shoot at an enemy but would not be in LOS to be shot at in return.

 

Unfortunately, this leads to some animation difficulties. The unit is only animated as "stepping around the corner" when it shoots, not when it is shot at. This often leads to cases where the unit is "shot through its cover".

 

I can think of a few ways to try and address this:

 

1) Make the shooting rules asymmetric, so that units do not count as having "stepped out" for the purposes of being shot at. This would apply to both aliens and XCOM, and would require a "45 degree flank" on a unit in high cover to be able to shoot at the unit, although the unit in cover could shoot out with a 90 degree field of view. This should reduce (though likely not completely eliminate) the visual appearance of shooting through objects, but at the cost of a significant change in the game rules. It would often be the case that Unit A would have LOS to Unit B, but Unit B would not have LOS to Unit A.

 

2) Trigger the "stepping out" animation if a unit is shot and hit while in cover. The unit can shoot from around corners, and is visually represented doing this by stepping around the corner, which graphically moves the unit into the adjacent square. Rules-wise, the unit can also be shot at in that square, so to prevent the shooting from appearing to go through the cover, the unit would graphically have to move out into the open before the shooting animation triggered. This would have the appearance of the unit "deliberately" stepping out in order to be shot, which seems unsatisfactory.

 

3) Disallow "stepping out" entirely. Units behind high cover cannot lean out or step around corners in order to shoot. This would limit the firing arc to 45 degrees around a corner instead of 90 degrees, but shooting would be symmetric -- if a unit A has LOS to unit B, then unit B has LOS to unit A. Two units both in cover would almost never be able to see each other. Either they would not be able to see each other, or one position would be superior, in that one unit would have LOS and the other wouldn't.

 

-----------------------------

 

I'm not sure that any of these would really be an improvement over the current issue of appearing to shooting through walls. I think fundamentally the issue stems from the game being turn-based, not real-time.

 

That said, I'm definitely open to ideas or anything I haven't considered.

Edited April 7, 2013 by Amineri

[Jeffman12]

There are some instances where aliens can pull of some stupid shots that ignore cover that would otherwise be completely obstructive. The Iron Man Impossible youtube series by Beaglerush shows one such shot in one of the early videos.