Ryan_001

(1 - index) * texture0.Sample(sampler_state, location) + index * texture1.Sample(sampler_state, location)

 

i never use if statements in a shader

From what I understand, on any modern card that'd be much slower than a series of if statements.  In that case every texture would be accessed regardless, at least with multiple if statements every texture would be accessed only when every texture was accessed simultaneously on a given warp.

I played the original and loved it, but I have issues with XCOM:EU too.  Though I think I disagree with you on a few accounts.

I like the new non-TU system.  Micromanaging TUs, while effective, wasn't very realistic and made it too easy in many cases IMO.  The current system is definitely coarser, but it does add more tension and suspense.  Doing a movement means you have to make sure you really want to do that movement.  And I like cover, it adds alot to the game IMO.

That said....

LOS and cover IS broken.  I have an idea why, but unless I could look at the code I can't confirm, but its not really important why as a consumer.  I can post screenshots and replicate the errors easily, but it is straight broken.  Its exceptionally frustrating to lose a soldier because of these bugs.  And since the entire combat portion of the game centers around LOS and cover, the fact that these core systems are broken is a joke.  These bugs alone should've been enough to warrant poor reviews/scores, they occur so often and with such consistency, on such an important game mechanic, that it baffles me at how it got such high scores/reviews.

The game is very buggy.  A large number of the maps have dead-zones that can't be fired through or will prevent LOS despite nothing being there.  Explosions don't always affect things above or below them (but still within the blast radius).  Aliens are not always drawn at the locations the game thinks they are, causing all sorts of weird bugs like accidentally blowing up aliens on the other side of the map with a way-ward rocket, to aliens clearly hit to emerge unscathed, to bullets firing off in the weirdest of directions, to aliens magically spawning, to groups of aliens being 'activated' on the other end of a map and then slowly 'pathing across the entire to map to where they actually should be.

The alien AI is terribad, and like many things in this game broken as well.  Aliens out of your men's LOS don't do anything but sit there waiting for you to find them, which alone seems lazy to me, but that's not the worst of it.  Aliens out of LOS will periodically teleport (not the same bug as above) around the map.  Get a few snipers and throw battle scanners around and watch the sheer nonsense of aliens magically warping all around.  This throws out a lot of tactical options, and leads to a lot of frustrating encounters.  It makes things like flanking an enemy with an assault or heavy much riskier because often they run into aliens that could not or were not there, but warped in 1-2 turns ago with no way for you to know.  They still will occasionally (though not as much as at release) warp in right on top or under your men.

There is a large 'disengagement' between what happens in combat and what happens in the over-map gameplay.  Your performance in combat is pretty much an all-or nothing.  You can't complete 1/2 a mission and pull out when men are low.  Rescue an escort but can't clear out those last thin-men sitting way at the back, well too bad, you lose the escort if you abort the mission.  Many missions don't even have 'landing areas' to get your men to if things go south, you abort the mission you lose all your men.  Which makes everything beginning to end an all or nothing endeavour, either the missions are too easy, or too hard.  Rarely are they fun or challenging, just boring or frustrating.  On top of that how you perform in missions seems to have no effect on the strategic over-map gameplay.  You can completely stomp the aliens at every encounter and still bleed countries left right and center.  In fact the only reasons you really need to keep your men alive is that for the final end level you need 6 colonels.  Thats it, the rest of the time you can lose soldiers willy-nilly, and as long as the map is completed, who cares.  The two sides of the game-play need to actually work and complement each other, but at the moment its basically two separate games duct-taped together.  In this regards even the original was better (which is kinda sad because I felt it was one of the biggest weaknesses of the original).

There are also a number of design decisions that seem lazy/boring to me, but if they could fix the above, that alone would go a long way to making the game decent.  What's sad is they didn't even bother to patch/fix these bugs post release.

I think what bothers me most is the glowing reviews.  These bugs aren't minor, they directly effect the core gameplay, and in many cases can't be easily worked around.  There's no way an astute reviewer who played the game through once would miss these, and yet not a single review that I read even mentions the buggy mess.

I use UTF-8 stored as a String<unsigned char> for all localizable strings and it works pretty well, given that I have a StringIterator class specialized for unsigned char which handles all of the special cases and outputs a series of full-width UTF-32 characters. Performance is never going to really be a problem unless you're doing tons of string manipulations or need random access for characters, in which case I'd suggest UTF-32.

 

And if you're using anything other than UTF-8, you'll have to handle endianness marker code points to read generic text.

Good idea, I think that's similar to what they used in the D programming language.  I wish boost or the standard library had UTF-8 and UTF-16 iterator adaptors.  When I get some time perhaps I shall build me own.

Well even if it wasn't the problem its good to know Corn/SiCrane.  Its something I will not do, despite not making much sense IMHO.

I found it, a silly oversight on my part (as usual).

I compiled the library with the /vmg compiler option, and I didn't do the same with the program, I had forgotten it.

Thank-you very much for your time and insight.  I know I checked my compiler and linker options repeatedly, I'm not sure how I had missed that.