Thanks, I'll paste that in today.

Can't say I agree with the premise of that thread. Accurately firing an accurate, scoped rifle is not all that difficult. I rather think it'd be much better to get rid of overpowered snipers by including a penalty for moving targets, if that can be done, and reducing the AimBonus of scopes. Making the majority of mercs, even the relatively high statted ones, completely useless with sniper rifles is a crappy solution.

No problem. Let me know if there's anything else I can do to assist.

I'm being consistiently thwarted from finishing the game due to CTDs in Meduna, BTW. It's pretty frustrating. http://www.ja-galaxy-forum.com/cgi-bin/ubb...c&f=42&t=000425

To make hydrogen chloride?

To expand on that, chlorine gas is a bad weapon. It has a very distinctive colour and odor, and is famously largely neutralized by a damp cloth across the mouth and nose. Hydrogen chloride, in contrast, is not poisonous as such, but is a whitish gas that ionizes upon contact with water into hydrochloric acid. The effects of this on skin, eyes, and the respiratory tract are left for the reader to imagine.

That said, what was used in World War 1 was indeed straight-up chlorine gas. If you want the HCl nastiness, you'll have to change the item description.

~J

Well, I've downloaded the JA2 map editor so I'll try removing those tanks and see if it makes my game more stable.


You know what JA does really well, being a computer game, that I wish I could do in my SR games? Throw loads and loads of enemies at the player characters. In the 1.13 mod, they fixed it up so that when enemy soldiers engage you they can call to their friends for backup from adjacent sectors. I've been in situations where I had a group of enemies pinned down and was picking them off only to be blindsided by reinforcements coming in from the edge of the map. I've also gotten quite a thrill from massive battles where I had 3 player characters and their NPC militia flunkies battling it out with 40 enemies.

In Shadowrun, because of the paper and pencil nature, it can be hard to have really large scale battles. I used to run games over IRC and we didn't have a tactical map or miniatures, and there was quite a lot of abstract information which we had to keep track of. As the GM, I had to keep each NPC in mind...I effectively had to remember his health, his gear, his ammunition levels, and things like that. Since I had to store each entity in the game in my RAM, so to speak, it made it very hard to field more than 10 or so complex NPCs in a battle in addition to the full party of PCs. Once I ran 100 NPCs attacking the PCs but it was a record keeping nightmare and it broke my brain and took forever.

If only when playing Shadowrun I were able to routinely throw 20 soldiers at the PCs and then have an additional 20 come in as flanking reinforcements, I think that would be totally kickass. Firstly, it would be insanely intense, and second it would finally make it more apparent how the PCs, being a small team, need to get in, do their objective, and get out. If only my pencil and paper games were able to have the tactical complexity of a computer game, I think they would be the best experience ever.

AE, where are you going to host your custom XMLs? I can hardly wait to play with them.

Items.xml hasn't (which means you shouldn't use the Magazines.xml file either, the others work fine however), and the current version there isn't compatible with the revision ~533+ builds. I really need to put your armor descriptions in there and update the whole thing. I've been too afraid to even open the file because there's such a huge amount of stuff I "really need" to do still.

Hey, I know I said I get in on this and help, but I am having a lot of problems at home right now with trying to not be homeless. I'll get back to you when I can.

http://www.ja-galaxy-forum.com/cgi-bin/ubb...30;t=000088;p=1

Is this thread relevant to making xml updating compatibility easier?

Don't forget to remind me when your XMLs are done, AE. I'm still eagerly waiting to try them out.

Felt like doing some .xml editing all of a sudden, so I redid all reload AP costs, BurstPenalties and AutoPenalties. Once I'm sure it'll work realistically and is reasonably balanced, I'll increase autofire RoFs again so that at least all the 500+rpm guns can fire off 30 rounds per turn.

I was doing some description tweaking too, and was going to insert your armor descriptions, but apparently I've accidentally overwritten your file when I've been backing up, updating, tweaking and renaming the main Items.xml, and it appears rapidshare.de has taken it offline. I hope you still have the file somewhere?

I uploaded the latest xmls to wikispaces anyway. They are compatible with the latest SVN revision (and backwards several revisions too, I think). These are all from the Data-1.13\TableData folder:
AmmoTypes.xml
Armours.xml (Note: This is, AFAIK, now being distributed as the standard 1.13 Armours.xml file. So if you've DL'd the newest files from SVN, you probably already have this.)
EnemyGunChoices.xml
EnemyItemChoices.xml
Explosives.xml
Items.xml
Magazines.xml
Merges.xml
Weapons.xml
Dedicated armor piercing ammunition for 5.56x45mm and 7.62x51mm weapons (M995 and M993 respectively) still uses the "Cold Loaded Glaser" magazine graphics, since I haven't bothered to create my own for them. Just so you know that green-banded mags with stars = tungsten carbide AP.

I believe this is the Items.xml file with my descriptions:

http://rapidshare.de/files/36033769/Items.xml.html

Phew, good thing I still had a copy.

Alright, I pasted all of that in there, and updated the file at Wikispaces. The above link now works for the new file.

How are the NIJ ratings in my items.xml? Earlier I remember you said something about wanting to adjust them.

Also, don't forget to pimp your XMLs on the Bear's Pit.

I changed a few things, to standardize the short/verbose/BR names and to match NIJ ratings with Armours.xml ubProtection values. Nothing big.

I don't think I'm going to say much about them until I'm happy with them myself (I have to give a once-over to ranges and accuracies, and preferably reliabilities as well). I rather they be mostly finalized, so that I'll only have to tweak them item by item at that point.

Sounds good. Well, I'm looking forward to the revisions.

[Self-censored.]

Not going to bother "finalizing" any of this. I'll just do edits as I feel like doing them, and putting them up over at that site every now and then. I will also try to avoid the Bear's Pit Forums in the future, at least until such a time as their mod team changes.

I'm really enjoying the burp guns and the Carl Gustavs that the redshirts are equipped with!