Lancer Tactics

[alpine sorrel]

(not, like, all of them, to be clear — only ones where I could hypothetically look an auditor in the eyes and justify how it connects to LT's development)

[worn tiger]

"Shadow of the Erdtree was a business expense, I swear!"

[rain cipher]

oof my credibility 😂

[tepid cipher]

it's fine, we're lancer players

everyone makes mistakes with the rules

[smoky glacier]

^^^^

[alpine sorrel]

OK chat, I'd like to poll the room about two different turn-flow treatments for protocols:

• Option 1 is to have an explicit "phase" at the start of a unit's turn. Activate all the ones you want, and then press a button to end it. It'd automatically end/skip if you have no protocols available or no more you can activate.
• Option 2 is to have a highlighted section alongside your other actions at the start of the turn. As soon as you take a basic movement or activate a non-protocol, the section will go away.

Option 1 would help ensure you don't forget to take them and makes the turn flow more clear, but gets in the way of you taking your turn esp. for frames that will almost always have a protocol available like activating Nelson's CP. Option 2 runs the risk of the player missing/forgetting to activate protocols, but melds into the flow of a turn better.

(and "make it an option" isn't an option lol)

[flint portal]

What about 2 but it brings attention to the protocols before you commit to it, like have them be highlighted or something?

[spring ermine]

I would say that the first one sounds better to me, since forgetting protocols is both common and frustrating, but the point about protocol cores that you're going to use once but get a notification for every single turn is a good one. I would not like to have to press the "skip" button every turn until I finally wanted to use it.

[flint portal]

But if that isn't a thing tbh I think option 2 is better strictly because of corepowers

[near linden]

The rules purist in me says option 1. The part of me that has played MTG online says that blocking the turn flow with a question where the answer is mostly "no" is bad

[pastel flax]

Option 1 only prompts you when it's possible right?

[pastel flax]

I was just thinking of mtgo.

and how the starter guides tell you to tweak your Stops

[flint portal]

Also imo option 2 is a better base to build off from if you (or others) ever get to add frames with efficient core powers

[frigid shale]

I’m gonna second this, sounds smoother

[flint portal]

But imo option 1 would make sense to me if you controlled one mech, but for every mech?

[near linden]

I'd rather have a "Protocol" section in my action bar that gets inactive when I do something else than be asked "do you want to use your core power right now" every time

[wraith cradle]

Yeah, I do think the second would work more smoothly.

[alpine sorrel]

Aight I think I'll move forward with 2 and look for ways to highlight them.

[tepid temple]

May I ask what you’re going to do for end-of-turn actions?

[alpine sorrel]

I was planning on having them go through the normal triggered-action flow. Initially they'll happen in whatever order they're queued, but we have some ideas for how to let the player order rxns if multiple with the same priority queue up at once.

[molten mulch]

Wildcard throwaway idea: Could protocol be selected when selecting a mech?

[shy spruce]

kneejerk-ly I want to say 1, but know I've been playing games that essentially operate with option 2, so I'll lean toward it.

[neat wolf]

how are you planning on handling EOT trigger chain nonsense like autogun raleighs

[shy spruce]

would it be feasible to have a end-of-turn/phase message that says something to the effect of "you have X unactivated protocols, are you sure you want to end turn/phase?" as a middle ground, akin to something for unmoved units?

[near linden]

problem is that that introduces a dialog that you're going to click "no" on most of the time

so the game stops you making the interesting decisions because there's some bookkeeping to do, more or less; this doesn't really feel great

[shy spruce]

ahhhh

[little jetty]

is it possible to have an additional bar of actions on top of the action bar just for protocols, and they disappear if you take a non protocol action?

[alpine sorrel]

lol that's exactly what I'm doing

(that no-panel icon list above the protocols is where "situational" actions show up that come from something outside of your mech like picking up jericho cover or searching for hidden units)

[alpine sorrel]

Just found a funny bug that gives a peek at how responsive the rxn system is under the hood: the beserkers were doing too much damage for some reason, and it turned out the nelson's momentum frame trait was triggering and giving bonus damage to anyone who boosted.

[tepid temple]

Universal Reload real???

[alpine sorrel]

once again, the prophecy will be fulfilled lol

I'd forgotten about that

[tired aurora]

This an underrated and genius UI decision

But yes, I do think you should make the protocol area highlighted. Like giving the buttons golden aura or something

[little jetty]

What's the left/right split?

[alpine sorrel]

we're not confirmed on that yet, but the thought was maybe splitting basic vs nonbasic

[crimson merlin]

Maybe sources should be logged? I know if prefer to be able to check logs when something unexpected just happened

Elite Berserker attacked with Chain Axe. +1 accuracy for attacking prone target, +1 accuracy for lock
Rolled 17 plus 5, 3 vs Nelson (evasion unknown): Hit
Berserker does 12 kinetic (7, +4 retribution, +1 (1d6) deadly) damage

[sleek bronze]

does anyone happen to know if i were to buy the $90 version would i still get the coin or has the ship sailed on said item?

[tired aurora]

This is nit picky but “Midnight” is the name of the Nelson right? I think it’s best if these indicators are consistent in their naming.

[alpine sorrel]

yeah I noticed that in the screenshot too, already fixed it

[quiet leaf]

i thought of something that might be an idea to help protocols be remembered. generally when i forget something like protocols it's because i automatically clicked on an action. if the protocols move the space in the screen where the actions are placed, that would break that automatic reaction. it'd get me to think, "wait, actions not where it usually is" which would be enough to make me remember protocols.

so maybe if the protocol bar "physically" moves the action bar lower, or if it hovers over the action bar and i gotta press a button to switch, it'd be a lot less intrusive than a dialog window, but intrusive enough to force players to remember protocols

idk how viable that would be though

[tired aurora]

Alternatively, you could incorporate animation. Movement draw people attention. So perhaps on Turn Start, you could have the protocol buttons appear with some attention capturing animation/audio cue.

[alpine sorrel]

added to the list

[worn tiger]

Oh number 2 is GENIUS

[agile lagoon]

My thought for how I wanted to handle protocols when I was thinking about building a lancer adaption was to have them be only available to select in the action bar when they could be executed, and greyed out or removed when a different action had been taken, same for Full Actions if QAs had been taken. So long as they were obviously delineated as being Protocol by colour and iconography and the mouse over / error messages explained that they were Protocols when selected, it would be okay (and I was going to have the ability to Undo everything until a Dice had been thrown so accidentally forgetting to do your protocol wouldn't have been a huge issue)

I was going to have the UI section have short-cuts for most common actions and that be user configurable during mech construction, and an openable window for everything else (so you wouldn't have to see Improvised Attack or Hand Control to NHP in the UI most of the time).

But all that's theoretical design. Didn't get beyond scribbling all this down on paper and planning out class structures.

[tired aurora]

Like in Baldur Gate where there is a window for "Favorited" actions?

[glad lotus]

Being able to undo deterministic actions can be a really nice feature for tactics games. Works best for fully deterministic games (e.g. Into the Breach), but even partial undo is helpful if you're leaning into the "tactical puzzle" subgenre.

[little jetty]

baldur's gate 3 is definitely a tax write off game for lancer tactics

[crimson merlin]

Being able to undo moves is really good. Mis-clicking for a move is one of my twitch reflex's favourite things to do

[alpine sorrel]

Proud that I got this working: during overwatch, you can pick a weapon, change its variants, and back out and pick a different weapon. And when picking, Overwatch can set some mandatory-to-target tiles that if you have an AOE attack, the area needs to include at least one of.

it could have been SO much hairier, but the event-queueing system was flexible enough to allow for that kind of activate weapon-abort-reactivate another weapon processing

[tepid temple]

The aoe overwatch always struck me as a potential issue!

The heavy mount Nelson though

[little jetty]

oh hell yeah i can attack myself with mrack overwatch to tick up gunslinger

[sharp smelt]

Missile Raleigh is a menace

Bonus points if it shoots the team’s viceroy for even more buildup

[shut horizon]

Oh that sounds super complicated to implement, nice job getting it done!

[grand notch]

How does "this move will provoke overwatch" work, especially if you combine it with the ability to go "whoops, lemme back that up"? Ideally I'd do it as "if you get Overwatched or step on a mine or anything that provokes a die roll or damage or whatever then you can't walk it back, otherwise yeah we all misclick." But I have no idea how hard that is, for all I know it's "if I were Sisyphus I would simply finish pushing the boulder up the hill."

[alpine sorrel]

I haven't implemented an undo-move function yet, though it's on my list. My starting thought is to have some kind of stack of gamestates on hand that you can undo to (a stripped-down quickload) which gets cleared at some to-be-defined points like someone spending an action on something.

For overwatch, all mechs in the game have a hidden piece of "overwatch" gear that check when a move or boost event get initiated if the mover is within threat of any available weapons; the standard reaction pipeline, same as anything else in the game that needs to respond to an event.

[grand notch]

Is there a "you're gonna get Overwatched, are you SURE" thing, or is it a "well pay better attention next time, dingus" situation?

[alpine sorrel]

ah yeah there's gonna be a warning, haven't implemented it yet though

that'll have to be hacked into the system as a special case

likely something in the UI that goes through all the AI units, gets their overwatch gear, and asks if they would respond to the hypothetical movement, and then pops up a confirm box

[grand notch]

Okie-doke. I still do not understand the technical end, but the important bits are "you're warned about overwatches instead of just eating them" and "you can undo a move," or at least those are planned, so hooray.

[alpine sorrel]

Aight I was already working in the overwatch world and you got me thinking about it so here we go 🙂

[grand notch]

Rad, that's exactly the kind of thing I was hoping for.

[final onyx]

you will suffer

[worldly violet]

Lightening Reflexs walks in:

[tepid cipher]

Unsure if you're an xcom fan or if this is a reference to the veteran trait

[glad lotus]

Pretty sure it's the veteran trait, because that will add yet-another-check in the overwatch logic sequence

[alpine sorrel]

since lightning reflexes doesn't require any special player input, I think it'll be pretty trivial? Just goes on the stack and resolves like any other rxn/pseudo-invisibility status? Unless there's a complication about it that I'm not seeing.

[alpine sorrel]

today's task was getting size 2 pathfinding / movement costs / increased reach working. I'd done a lot of foundation work making it so units that took up multiple tiles didn't break the game, but hadn't handled a lot of the details yet. E.g. now difficult terrain only applies once when you first move onto it, you can't end on uneven ground, and the "where can you move" ranges expand to show all the tiles where you can occupy (as opposed to where your origin tile can end).

Still gotta add in the "did this unit end up in a legal spot" checker; you could jumpjet onto uneven terrain which is valid while flying but should stop being so after you land.

[tepid temple]

Not that you're beholden to this, but for what it's worth being able to stand on uneven ground is RAI

[flint portal]

Yeah you can stand on top of unneven ground you just can't end "in it" if its obstructions or objects

[alpine sorrel]

Yeah... it might end up being a change in LT from RAW. It raises questions of "how uneven is legal" and "which ground height should you count as". And letting you hang way out off ledges or clipping most of the way through geometry feels wrong?

[tepid temple]

I actually have answers to that first question, as I asked Tom in a voice chat

I asked if a Size 3 mech can stand on Size 2 terrain, to which he said yes. I then asked if it could stand on a Size 1 terrain, to which he ruled that the majority of it must be standing on solid ground. Please ignore how these two answers contradict eachother.

[alpine sorrel]

And what's "majority"? 2/4 ok?

[tepid temple]

I think he didn't realized that Size 2 is just shy of half of Size 3, I myself didn't realize it until I told someone else later

I guess the most sensical answer would be treating this as the one weird exception to the "always round up" rule, so 4.5 squares = 4 squares = majority of spaces?

But also like, you still have to sort out weird movement stuff

[alpine sorrel]

Semi-related but I love how hase bonuses are worded in such a way that you don't realize they're also an exception to that rule

[worn tiger]

If I had to guess i'd say he misunderstood your question as "can a size 3 mech balance on a single hex of size one terrain" rather than "can a size 3 mech captain morgan a size one rock"

[tepid temple]

I'll admit that is in fact how I phrased the question

[alpine sorrel]

I'm now realizing how dangerous a combination "no uneven ground" is with destructible terrain. What happens if you destroy a ground tile under a size 2 unit. Do they get shunted to the side?

[tepid temple]

Is... Is this another avenue for fall damage that has to be patched out

[crimson merlin]

Shooting out a bridge so they fall and take damage sounds fun though

[sand goblet]

or what happens if you shoot out the middle space(s) from a size three, etc. etc.

[shy spruce]

https://tenor.com/view/coyote-gif-19601526

[hollow oracle]

have you considered putting Ordnance weaponry into the same bar or a similar one? I'm always finding myself forgetting to use it before other stuff.

[alpine sorrel]

I have not... my intuition is that that's too many bars (and they shouldn't mix with protocols bc an ordnance weapon locks out the rest of the protocols), so maybe a eye catching highlight border is a better solution for that.

[alpine sorrel]

Since the engine is secretly 2D still, there's not ever gonna be overhangs like bridges.

For the alpha I might just leave this as-is (no enforcement of uneven ground rules beyond where you can end normal movement). This'll be inconsistent but not sweat having to do weird stuff for the edge cases that come up.

Depending on playtests I could see removing or refining how we handle it

[tepid cipher]

your drake tokens looks like such a polite young lad

[grand notch]

What's the status on "make the grid lines always visible"? Already in but off for the purpose of the gif, planned, actually a Herculean task in Godot, or what?

[alpine sorrel]

Hadn't thought about it. Would need to hear a problem that someone has while playing the game that a grid toggle would solve.

[little jetty]

I don't think it's a huge thing but it makes it easier to read
like counting between 5 spaces or 6 spaces and it gets pretty hard to guess

speaking of which, sometimes you have to count between 10 or 11 spaces or 15 and 16 spaces... is there an easy way to do this?

well that's more for having the grids than having a toggle option, tbh
personally I don't like having grid off so I'd have to hear from those folks

[quiet meteor]

I would very much appreciate the ability to have a grid on. It helps a ton with proper positioning relative to enemy threats. Indicating which enemies can theoretically hit you from a position with icons or w/e might be way to much for the UI clutter wise but can be satisfied by simply having a grid overlay. Knowing whether I'm 12 or 11 spaces away from the melee dude with threat 1 and a movement of 5 is a pretty big deal.

[alpine sorrel]

Something we'll probably try first to solve that is making a measuring stick like you get in VTTs; I don't think anyone wants to be carefully counting 10 spaces manually, even with a visible grid.

[alpine sorrel]

sneaking in some terrain brush sizing + modes between this day-job week and my mandated weekend time-off

[teal flame]

have you considered making an isometric map creation tool

[alpine sorrel]

Like, for VTTs? Hm I guess it'd be possible to like rig up an export button that stitches together one big image of the map.

[lone cliff]

[feral veldt]

Pretty sure if you don't make that, some madpersona gonna make that

[teal flame]

can’t wait for the hex grid total conversion mod

[little jetty]

just recently signed up for a game jam few days ago, having never used godot before. This engine feels really good to use!

[agile lagoon]

Godot is great fun

[loud dove]

Godot is on my list to learn when it is funally time for me to batten down the hatches and dig into game dev

[little jetty]

I just impulsively joined a game jam while on holidays haha

[agile lagoon]

Godot works a lot like how Unity does, albeit a bit more consistantly and a bit less polished

[torn kite]

I need to learn it too

[uneven mortar]

crying screaming throwing up itch.io is down so i can't download the demo

[teal flame]

It anymore it shouldn’t

[uneven mortar]

Yeah it’s up now

[uneven mortar]

This shit is insanely baller

[little jetty]

is there a new demo or is it the html version from a while back?

[teal flame]

demo i think

[uneven mortar]

I just played the web browser thingie

[teal flame]

wait no the HTML

there's a downloadable one too in the page that's slightly better

[uneven mortar]

Oh that’s cool

Is it a kickstarter thing or a straight up download

[final onyx]

Isn't that download from 2023?

[uneven mortar]

I’m certain that this question probably has been answered somewhere, but what is the possibility of this being a pseudo-VTT for lancer?

[final onyx]

I don't think there's any intent for multiplayer features

[little jetty]

what if it's hotseat multiplayer with steam play together 🤔

[quiet meteor]

The only hope for a VTT gamemode would be a monstrous mod which while that would be really cool it is way to much to ask for.

[uneven mortar]

good to note, I wanted to temper my expectations if that wasn't a possibility

[alpine sorrel]

Some snapshots from today's blitz of bugfixes and last-minute UI features (statuses on tokens, tuck the sitrep + log up into the corner). I'm not 100% sure that we'll be able to get an alpha at the end of the week but that's what I'm still shooting for. I'll likely be posting a temporary link to the build here for a final "does it work on other people's computers" test before sending it out to the whole list, so keep your eyes peeled thursday or friday!

[little jetty]

alpha at the end of the week?? truly

[crimson merlin]

Excite :3

[sharp smelt]

yahoooo

[shy spruce]

[uneven mortar]

Incredible

Possible tactics and dungeon meshi day

[alpine sorrel]

lol which day is dungeon meshi day is also how I've been marking my weeks

[little jetty]

so is "end of the week" the day before dunmeshi

[teal flame]

oooh hey, is that a hornet in the first picture?

how's flight planned to work again?

status effect or elevation?

[alpine sorrel]

Yep. It's a status effect that puts you +3 spaces over the ground wherever you're standing.

[teal flame]

honestly i should probably run it like that too

[little jetty]

hmm that's within threat for a lot of the shotguns and some long melee

[alpine sorrel]

yeah, I think it's about the only sweet spot for inaccessible to normal melee from size 1 units, but it doesn't completely prohibit dusk wing from using e.g. deck sweeper.

that's an adjustable number depending on how playtests go

[uneven mortar]

What tier of the kickstarter (if at all) do you have to get access to the alpha

[alpine sorrel]

$20

[little jetty]

oh i was more thinking from "can i fly over the shotgun guy" angle
i haven't considered the other way with the flyer using the shotgun

it would feel pretty bad to fly with a shotgun and people just walk right under you

[teal flame]

expect a lot more backers in the near future once you release said alpha

[uneven mortar]

shit expect me

[alpine sorrel]

puppet systems -> overwatch DMR thumper -> knockback -> aggression -> chain axe (crit, shredded) -> aux pistol -> puppet systems finishes movement 😵‍💫

[crimson merlin]

Spicy

It took a few watches to figure out exactly how things went down in the visual because all the units are color coded as the same team. Are they all hostile to one another in it?

[fickle pecan]

I think the death's head just chose violence

[little jetty]

maximizing dps (what's "ally")

[crimson merlin]

Based on the icons at the top; death head and goblin are players, the zerker and other are enemies

Biggest numbers in a turn is winner

[alpine sorrel]

Yeah we have a list minute todo to manually color code PC vs NPC mechs until we get the recolor shader in. Probably will be red vs blue as placeholders

[tired aurora]

Yugioh-level of action chain Would be neat to have smt to visualise that but damn, it is awesome

[little jetty]

are there a lot of reactions that interrupt other actions? I know overwatch is one of them, but that's pretty much it, right?

[crimson merlin]

Mirages like to teleport themself or allies about. Sniper can do hot shot/reload

[alpine sorrel]

hold on I made that meme about this

[little jetty]

alright yeah there's probably a good value in having a visualization for reactions and other effects

[frigid shale]

Reactions were a mistake

[crimson merlin]

Reactions are great. I always forget them though

[alpine sorrel]

and there are a lot of things in the game that are reactions but not Reactions i.e. anything that triggers when another thing happens, like Shrike Armor doing damage before incoming attacks resolve

I agree there needs to be way better visualizations for clarity, but for the moment I'm just glad the whole thing runs

[little jetty]

very important (not really) question:
do y'all have a shrine to computer gods to ward off bugs

[alpine sorrel]

even better; a test suite

slash I guess that's what a shrine to the computer gods is

it's honestly the only thing keeping me sane. whenever there's a bug we can replicate, I add it as a test case before fixing so if it crops up again I'm automatically notified. it's a bit like how an immune system keeps you from catching the same sickness twice

[little jetty]

i should learn to do that
I've regretted so many times from not writing robust tests

[loud dove]

It literally is for my work schedule, it's the best feeling

[ashen kindle]

So, what if the knockback from the thumper rounds/overwatch makes the tile you wanted to walk to out of movement range?

[worthy holly]

For visual clarity I wonder if some kind of popups for reactions might be useful?

nvm im blind thats already a thing in the gif

[alpine sorrel]

It turns the path you choose into "DDR steps" before running reactions, so should just walk as many of those steps as possible. You'll note in the gif the berserker doesn't walk to the original tile chosen

[sand goblet]

ah, so you don't get to change your movement once you see how reactions resolve? that feels reasonable from a design perspective I suppose, it might be clunky to ask the player to confirm or reinput every time

[alpine sorrel]

For voluntary movement that you're spending move points for, it'll abort if it sees you'll end up somewhere besides your original target (or something got in the way).

[alpine sorrel]

added basic fx for smoke grenades/mines

the 1.0 that put the smoke at all affected voxels was less ideal lol

[tepid temple]

I like the Drake’s portrait 😅

[alpine sorrel]

Is Big

[neat wolf]

barb portrait is just the gun

[little jetty]

GUN: GUN

[uneven mortar]

I'm safe to say that the alpha isn't shipping today?

[little jetty]

it's not end of the week yet!

[uneven mortar]

i perhaps cannot read

billions must read

[little jetty]

oh I see the message was updated to "thursday or friday"

[uneven mortar]

yeahg

[little jetty]

well thursday isn't over yet

[uneven mortar]

also, the lich coins

how exactly are those going to be rolled out

[teal flame]

You haven’t already gotten yours?

Mine came with the stickers

[alpine sorrel]

At this point in the campaign, for later orders, I've been sending out batches of stickers+coins about once a month because it takes about a day to pack everything up and bring it all to the post office.

And yeah, I really shouldn't have mentioned the possibility of thursday 😅 there's always something. I've spent most of the day tracking down problems that only show up on the production build.

Everything between "audio doesn't work at all" to "spawning in a unit with an NPC template causes a crash"

prod-only bugs are the worst because to narrow it down you have to make a change and then go through the entire build process to test it manually

[crimson merlin]

I love environment specific bugs. Something broke... but only in acceptance testing env.

[alpine sorrel]

it's taken me about two hours to narrow that last bug down to this function in the NPC templates.... I think there's something about those .get calls the prod build does not like, because it crashes on both grunts (use the override to 1 HP) and RPVs (uses the increase for +5 HP)

wild. I tweaked the get to something slightly more explicit with enum values, and now only in production the grunts have 2 health and 2 structure. Something deeply cursed is going on.

[crimson merlin]

That is amazing

Game dev bugs are sometimes the best

[tepid temple]

Is there ever a point where it goes from "I could have programmed that better" to "Programming is deeply stupid"?

[glad lotus]

Prod-only bugs are the absolute worst. 😩

[little jetty]

is it a potential solution at all to ship a dev version game? feel like it's probably a bad idea but idk enough about the engine so

[crimson merlin]

When I was in high school I was working with a friend to make a Operation Wolf style shooter, but over the top gory. When you shot the enemies in the head it was supposed to fly off spinning, spraying blood everywhere. What we got: The head turned into a TIE figher, and drew a line of blood accurately on the ground directly below its flight path. Resulted in us rolling on the floor laughing

Nah. Then we'd all have full access to the source

[alpine sorrel]

since godotscript is a scripting language, there's no really avoiding leaking source. It's like how Balatro is written in .lua, so it's pretty trivial to open it up and just look at those plain text files.

we could like encrypt it and stuff but that's ultimately just obfuscation

[glad lotus]

The issue with a dev build is that people would need to install the Godot editor to open and run it, right?

[crimson merlin]

You don't install the editor. It's just an executable

[glad lotus]

Like, a dev "build" probably isn't a thing that can exist?

[alpine sorrel]

yeah there's a holy trinity: the godot engine, the godot editor, and the game's project files. You only need the engine + project files to run it.

Making a dev build would just be also including a buncha debug tags in it... would probably be fine, just slower? I'm not totally clear on how dev+prod builds are different.

There's a checkbox in the export window for if you want to bundle the engine + project files into a single file or if you're fine leaving them separate. The thing you're ultimately running is the engine and the only difference between games written in godot are the project files that engine is chewing on

(unless you've compiled your own version of the engine, which I think might be fairly common to leave out e.g. 3D components if you're making a 2D game)

re: source-availability, because keeping it secret a losing battle ++ we'd need to release a lotta the source to enable modders to make stuff anyway, we'll likely ultimately put some sort of asset-less version of the project up on github for reference under a proprietary license.

That feels in keeping with Lancer's original 3rd party license, anyway.

[uneven mortar]

I just ordered mine (without the coin) I was just wondering where they were coming from

[teal flame]

Ahhh right

Yeah, wait a few weeks and it should show up

[uneven mortar]

didn't know you could get a whole ass coin minted as a commercial thing

what do the stickers look like lol

I just got the veteran thing

[crimson merlin]

... I want an ass coin >_>

[uneven mortar]

to put McCarthy in the game

McCarthyite sweep

[crimson merlin]

Omg. A coin with head on one side and butt on the other for heads and tails

[alpine sorrel]

lol it never occurred to me that someone would back it without also looking at the campaign page; the stickers are in the project description here https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/wickworks/lancer-tactics

[uneven mortar]

oh shit!

thanks

these are nice

i can put them on my laptop

thanks for all this stuff

[alpine sorrel]

I finally figured out the problem with that grunt thing. The reason the grunts got 2 HP & 2 Structure is that it was somehow applying the override statblock to the increase stablock as well. When I tried printing out what it thought stats_override and stats_increase were it would crash, so I started initializing them a different way (explicitly in their resources instead of by default) and now it's working in both dev and prod. Wild. Games are impossible.

[crimson merlin]

I enjoy hearing about dev problems, work and solutions. Would like to hear more often :3

[worldly violet]

jesus fuck call the exorcist

[crimson merlin]

A weird question: Can you apply templates during a mission - after an NPC already exists? Ask because in Lancer Enhanced Combat has a scenario effect that tuns an extant NPC into an elite on the fly

[alpine sorrel]

not without fully repairing the NPC, which is when the stats get calculated.

we could probably modify the engine to allow for it, but making those kinds of tweaks for specific use-cases is a much-later sort of change

[alpine sorrel]

ok but like for real. I fixed portraits not showing up at all in mac prod, but now only the eyes are missing.

[worldly violet]

Where we're going we don't

[mild jay]

I swear programming is an arcane art. Sure, there’s all this underlying computer science theory that supposedly works on math and logical statements. But then you try to make something more complex than a quick script and fixing bugs feels like being a cartoon character stretching to plug up leaks all over a ship with their fingers as things break down in increasing hard to track down (and sometimes annoyingly interconnected) ways

Basically anyone who can make anything even halfway functional is pretty much a wizard

[crimson merlin]

The exorcist failed :<

[worldly violet]

Whenever a computer breaks something and then gets fixes itself I get very spooked

and I'm a (novice) electrical engineer

[little jetty]

science is just magic but we understand enough of it to make use of it from time to time

[glad lotus]

To quote a former co-worker: I'm surprised any of this crap we rely on works, ever.

[worldly violet]

(The secret is that it works worse than you think most of the time)

[alpine sorrel]

new everest sprite from Gen!! we're gonna have a number of variants for the base model, plus potentially let players pick from NPC sprites to represent its widely varied appearance

[near radish]

Neat, looks kinda like a Nasa EMU

[tepid temple]

Spaceman

[uneven mortar]

They so blue

Color…….

[tepid temple]

Can I ask if you're including the design from OSR?

[alpine sorrel]

which design?

[tepid temple]

The Peyton Gee one, on page 17. I spent far too much time editing this transparent version of it so I'm getting my mileage out of it

https://x.com/Gee0Man/status/1606741502356787200/photo/1

[alpine sorrel]

hadn't seen it! I'll add it to our refs tho

[tulip peak]

I've been a fan of Peyton's design. It rocks

[uneven mortar]

very full armor gundam

https://tenor.com/view/gundam-mobilesuitgundam-gif-5044346

it may just be the missile rack though

[alpine sorrel]

Alllllright, here's Lancer Tactics 0.1.0!
https://1drv.ms/u/s!AnAwMq4UEVgtkZEdAsaEJxxgLjsAzA?e=L2q8Mv (link expires in one week)
Here's our alpha release plan: today we just have this small windows-only release for y'all who have been following closely. We'll let it bake over the weekend as folks play it and report bugs, and then do a round of fixes before sending an updated alpha out to kickstarter backers early next week.

You can report bugs via this google form: https://forms.gle/BCg6QhB4UMqwVb829

[uneven mortar]

incredible

[little jetty]

let's ducking gooooo

[subtle sandal]

excited

[wintry egret]

Let's Gooo!!

Please report any bugs and let us know what you think 🙏🏼

[lone cliff]

woo!!!!

[uneven mortar]

mmm something to note: you can get hunter 2 right off the bat for some reason

[little jetty]

time to attempt to break the game in the strangest ways possible

[alpine sorrel]

ha you sure can huh

[uneven mortar]

oh is this intentional

cool

[alpine sorrel]

no it's not, logged

[wintry egret]

not intentional 🙂

[uneven mortar]

not taking the bethesda route

cool

[wintry egret]

Post your picrew creations here pls-- I'd love to see what everyone comes up with. We have plenty more things to add there, too

[tepid temple]

Should this maybe be pinned? Or maybe you just want this real exclusive

[alpine sorrel]

oh good idea!

[tepid cipher]

YEAAAH BABYE

[flint portal]

Wait are people able to use the character creation?

[shy spruce]

https://tenor.com/view/gunbuster-noriko-mecha-noriko-takaya-cockpit-gif-20738501

LET'S PARTY

[tepid cipher]

you're cooking olive, amazing work!

[flint portal]

How do I find it?

Ooooh wait it was a backer tier wasn't it

lmao

[flint portal]

So it turns out it isn't and i'm just blind and didn't see the message a few steps above

[tepid cipher]

already made my blorbo

[teal flame]

uhhh

are you not meant to be able to stabilize?

[alpine sorrel]

It's not in yet 😅

so loading weapons are a one time only sort of deal

it's near the top of the priority list

[teal flame]

ahh right, good to know

also, is the mourning cloak's extra damage trait working?

[sand goblet]

oh that explains it! I was just about to ask the same thing

[alpine sorrel]

mm it should be

that could be a bug if it's not

[teal flame]

i'll do some further tests

how should it work?

[neon swift]

hype

[alpine sorrel]

if you hit with a melee weapon while you're the only one adjacent (or nobody is), it adds +1d6 bonus damage

[teal flame]

should it show up in the preview of the attack?

[shy spruce]

oh the export is smol

[teal flame]

right, ok then

i think it's working

[alpine sorrel]

oh whoa! I didn't realize you could do a half-hair color, that must have been something mark added recently!

[little jetty]

it would be hilarious if this was a bug

[shy spruce]

yeah, some of the hair options have neat stuff with the highlight color

[wintry egret]

not all the hairstyles have highlight options yet, but those that do are 😘

[flint portal]

Oh something of note i wanna ask about

[wintry egret]

@alpine sorrel should it show up in the event log?

[alpine sorrel]

Actually it does look like the MC hunter bonus damage might not be working, I'll make a note

[alpine sorrel]

Yeah also let's have bonus damage be listed there

[flint portal]

Currently bringing an autopod in a fight leads to being prompted about using it every time anyone consumes lock on

allies or not

[alpine sorrel]

oh that's funny. another bug for the list

[wintry egret]

lol

[flint portal]

That's fine to be clear because technically you can do this in Lancer, but I think it should maybe tell you who triggered it against who maybe?

unless that's in the event log and I missed it

[alpine sorrel]

wait really?

wow

[wintry egret]

yeah, the current reaction format is pretty opaque at the moment

[alpine sorrel]

I think I might make the designer decision to have it only trigger on allies in LT to avoid prompt spam.

[flint portal]

Tbh that seems like a fine idea

[alpine sorrel]

But also yeah let's have the lockon prompt give more info

[flint portal]

I don't think people would lose much lol

[crimson merlin]

How... do you stabilize?

[teal flame]

that's the neat part, you don't

[crimson merlin]

*mashes the overcharge button

[sand goblet]

I found it was very tricky to figure out how to use overwatch sometimes, I'm not sure if it was an interface thing or a bug but there were a few occasions when the game prompted me to overwatch but I couldn't figure out how

I'm leaning closer to an interface issue since it was clearly working sometimes, but others I couldn't figure out how or where to click to target whatever was moving

[alpine sorrel]

good to know — usually the steps are to pick a weapon from the available ones, and then click the target (second step is relevant for overwatching with aoe). Were you not seeing that flow happen?

[sand goblet]

the flow happened each time, it was the clicking a target that wasn't always possible (or might have been but I couldn't figure out how to select and had to back out to continue)

[crimson merlin]

I had weird targetting on the impact lance for a reaction attack. I had to click behind the enemy to get it to do anything

[alpine sorrel]

interesting, could you send me a screenshot next time you run into that?

[sand goblet]

sure thing

[crimson merlin]

I screenshotted it then accidentally overwrote it with copying some text v_v

[sand goblet]

one thing that is worth mentioning is that sometimes it wasn't clear to me what was triggering overwatch when there were a lot of enemies clustered in an area

that might well be me not being used to the interface but I missed how to tell which enemy was actually active at a given time

[alpine sorrel]

great, ty. This trello is getting so many notes

[crimson merlin]

I keep expecting to see callsigns/NPC class listed when I click on unit ribbons across the top and just not getting them

[mild jay]

Did the alpha just drop? I was reading then mobile shenanigans happened and I lost my place in the r thread

[alpine sorrel]

yep, check the pins

[mild jay]

Oh, I see, the mobile interface has buried the pin interface

Looking forward to checking it out after tonight’s lancer session!

[tepid temple]

Welp. I load up the map editor, try to put it in 5 x 5, and it crashes when I pressed enter

[alpine sorrel]

no teeny maps it seems

larger dimensions work OK?

[crimson merlin]

Map editor crashes on clicking add objective

[alpine sorrel]

dang that was working like just yesterday, noted.

[crimson merlin]

Can't type anything in round limit. Changes itself to text <null>

[alpine sorrel]

ok something's odd. have you saved your mission as something yet?

[crimson merlin]

Not yet. That did it

That cleared the objective button crashing too

[alpine sorrel]

cool, I'll make it so you have to save your mission to start editing it, or something

[crimson merlin]

It's hard to click out of the text boxes for the dimensions and round limits to enable map panning too

[tepid temple]

It crashed when I put in "15 x 15" though it just occurred to me that maybe I shouldn't have left the round number blank

[alpine sorrel]

I bet it's the same issue; try saving your map first

[tepid temple]

It's not letting me hit save. Also when I put a number in the round limit, it was replaced with an undeletable <null>

[alpine sorrel]

ah looks like you have to hit "new" out of the gate, not save

[tepid temple]

Okay, after fiddling around trying to figure out how to get a valid file path, I've managed to get the editer working

[alpine sorrel]

what was the key that you had to figure out?

[scenic ridge]

Is the option to take a protocol supposed to go away once you click on an action and then back out of it before committing?

[alpine sorrel]

Nope, good catch

[tepid temple]

I thought I had to manually put a filepath here, but no it's just I was forgetting to append .json to the end of the file name

[flint portal]

I think it would be nice to be told what npc type you're looking at when hovering them in a fight
I also wanna mention that figuring out who already went in a round wasn't all that clear from the interface

But also also, god this is so cool

Small note which i'm assuming is an intentional decision maybe, but the Nelson Momentum trait doesn't seem to ask if you want to use it

[alpine sorrel]

You can't save momentum, right? It says "next melee attack", and I assume people want to always have more bonus damage if available

But even if you could save it RAW I'd probably have made that call to reduce decision points again

[flint portal]

Oh right i was thinking about the use case of boosting but not attacking during the turn and using it later

you're right that you have to use it

[tepid temple]

Though that should mean that if you don't attack on your turn it can apply to a melee overwatch

[flint portal]

Yeah

that's a big play with it with the War Pike

Oh I entered a bug report but I figured I should mention it here: Singularity Motivator seems to trigger on heat as well as damage

Which speaking of Singularity motivator, I think it might be nice to have the diceroll number show for it somewhere

[tepid temple]

I didn't seem to notice any way to cancel out of actions? Like deciding to fire a different gun, or staying still from lunge, or even just deciding to take a different unit's turn after you've clicked on them but done nothing

[alpine sorrel]

Right click

Can't cancel the activation of a unit yet tho, it gets complicated to roll back start-of-turn triggered effects

There is an autosave every time it becomes your turn tho

[uneven mortar]

What’s the funniest bug found yet

[little jetty]

ooh loading screen tips!

ooh found my first crash! exciting

went into map editor, and without a map, if you try to add an objective, the game crashes

will send it up

[little jetty]

how do I select throwing mode for knives?

oh jk, I see it. They don't seem to be working with the throwing knife talent though

man I don't know if I'm just unlucky but I rolled 1 damage on frag grenade 6 times in a row

reporting it as a bug for now

[little jetty]

turns out I was just very unlucky?? that's wild
rolled a 2, 4, 4, 2 on the next grenade

[neat wolf]

thats a lancer moment for sure

[glad lotus]

Yahtzee!

Thus are the wiles of fickle probability

[little jetty]

wait maybe grenades are coded as doing same damage to all targets affected, like aoe/multi target attacks? is that actually how it's supposed to work?
I'm suspicious that 2/4/4/2 damage was from exposed

I did send up save file so hopefully that clears things up

[glad lotus]

I'm pretty sure all characters in the blast are supposed to use the same damage roll, yes.

[little jetty]

oh, just 3 1's in a row then. just regular unlucky

Also just found out grenades can hit flying. I think this is probably intended though

I think this is correct RAW but still a bit silly

halved rounded up (from passing save) then doubled (exposed)

[feral veldt]

Looks good so far- silly question, but are beards planned?

[tepid cipher]

So gonna quickly note some issues before i go to bed ( i will elabourate in forms)

• Ram didn't knock an archer prone when a nelson made use of it
• A goblin was able to autopod an ally when lock on was consumed

[little jetty]

you can also lock on and consume lock on on an ally I found

[crimson merlin]

Working as intended...?

[little jetty]

can't consume ally lock iirc

[frigid shale]

this is correct

[little jetty]

I see that crb has mixed messages on this, but I'm pretty sure it was clarified elsewhere
page 78 says "hostile characters can choose to consume ... lock on"
page 70 says "any character making an attack ... may choose to ... clear the lock on"

[frigid shale]

the specific Lock On overrides it usually

like how Tech Actions are made in sensors because that's how Sensors are defined (instead of any other Action mentioned)

[wintry egret]

Beards are planned but didn't make this release's "cut" 👍🏼. Both stubble and full-on chin wigs

[alpine sorrel]

oh huh, I've been playing this wrong. There goes our squad's go-to defense against scouts that lock on + shred and then never consume the lock, leaving our tank perma-shredded.

[frigid shale]

Oh yeah, Scouts are just bullshit, but that’s another bag of cats lol

[crimson merlin]

If enemies consume the lock ASAP then it's not so big of a deal

[frigid shale]

The thing is that a human GM can choose not to do so, to keep Shredded up. But if the AI is compelled to consume lock on, that’s a more “expected” gameplay loop in Lancer Tactics than many tabletops

[crimson merlin]

I think LT will be overall more brutal because it's never going to forget to apply those reactions and bonuses

[little jetty]

you can technically stabilize but that's not really a good solution

[alpine sorrel]

our white witch just took shadowcloaked as well to help with it

[crimson merlin]

Stablize can clear Lock-on?

[little jetty]

it's a condition, which can be cleared by stabilize

[frigid shale]

Having stabilized off Scout lock on twice or thrice last lancer game only for it to be reapplied next scout turn, yes, correct

[crimson merlin]

Yuuuck

[little jetty]

would you do it again in the future

[frigid shale]

Depends on who has already gone this round lol

But yeah, that’s for another channel lol

[worthy holly]

I feel like it may be useful to have more indication of which weapons share a mount? either grouping them together in the action bar or something else

Not sure if theres a way to easily reference that in combat? I may have missed it

I also noticed I wasn't able to select the one IPS-N CB with 2 LLs of Nelson and 1 of Vlad, not sure if somebody's reported that already. That and the map creator crashing bug already reported was the only weirdness i ran into

[wintry egret]

Correct, I think we only have one core bonus in the game at the moment 👍🏼

[tepid cipher]

Are allies supposed to proc allied mines?
Is hunker down supposed to affect an autopod proc?

i don't know if it should so i'm not sure if this is a bug or a feature

Agression proccing before death is ... i' mnot sure on that either

Like these could be bugs or they could just be the gmae

[subtle canyon]

Pretty sure most of those are intended behaviours of Lancer, yeah

I know allies proc allied mines

Mines proc when any character enters an adjacent space unless specified otherwise

[fickle pecan]

this is so awesome

[fickle pecan]

mainly ask since the gms catalogue seems to be otherwise complete, is shotgun just not around yet or has it been missed?

[toxic badge]

Can anyone explain why the top path works but the bottom path doesn't? I am very confused about height movement costs
(+1/+2 is elevation change)

[crimson merlin]

Hard corner doing its thing?

[toxic badge]

what's a hard corner

[crimson merlin]

The cliff might be stopping you from cutting diagonally

I don't actually know though

[toxic badge]

Hot damn, this game rules. This game kicks ass. The 3d map / rotation / top-down toggle / los view / movement stuff all wrecks face. This shit rocks. This is my jam. 😄
I've already submitted a slew of bugs to the google form, sorry for the deluge.
Here's a collection of other miscellaneous notes, curious if other people agree or disagree.
A lot of this is obvious or repeated stuff, sorry 🤷

General
  - no performance problems. Looks great, runs great.
Loadout / Pilot Roster / Portrait Editor
  - being able to duplicate pilots is awesome
  - some way to organize the pilot roster would be nice (by LL, or even by name, or by assigning them to a team, etc.)
  - petition to add sortable columns to the weapon kits popup in the loadout screen, I don't want to read through aux weapons when picking a weapon for a heavy mount
  - more weapon info in the popup would be nice (e.g. blast / cone / etc.)
  - some of the smiles look a little too much like vampires to me
  - having the back button in the bottom left for the portrait editor feels weird when it's in the top right for the loadout and pilot roster screens

Combat
  - The extra little menu for optional weapon / talent stuff is awesome (walking armament / hunter / etc). It feels very quick and easy!
  - 4 everests in the top-left squad banners is very confusing, even a "what's in the heavy slot" icon would be helpful in distinguishing.
  - it would be nice if acted/not acted this round was also visible in the top banners / more clear in general (for both pcs and npcs)
  - more enemy info would be nice - on hovering the foe without any character active, or hovering the top right enemy banner, or hovering during a turn while not contemplating any specific action, etc. I think "add more variety to mech appearences" is an inevitable request (or mod goal) for both players and npcs, and it will be good to be able to ask for text about a character rather than relying on visuals alone.
  - Some way to distinguish between grunts and non-grunt versions of npcs would be great, prevents accidentally wasting my one and only cpr shot lmao
  - You have to wait for the zoom to finish before you press the "change zoom" button again, and that's very annoying. Spamming the zoom in button would ideally zoom you in very rapidly. Same goes for wasd movement.
  - Being able to view loadouts without starting a turn would be a big improvement, I don't remember what I picked and starting a turn is the only way to find that out :(
  - aoe weapons should highlight the characters they're going to hit, especially given the 3d presentation of a 2d reality. Thermal lancing a flying hornet does not look like it will hit an ally on the ground beyond the target, but it does.
  - overwatch should probably automatically attack the target provoking it instead of making you click on them with non-aoe weapons

Map Editor
  - undo / redo would be wonderful
  - a way to get back to the main menu without closing the app would be nice (nvm, it's the escape key lmao)
  - Custom opfor group editor seems sick as hell, can't wait to see that fleshed out
  - I spent like an hour trying to create Control as a sitrep just by guessing at what event_mission_set_objective does, but I have no idea what the fuck is happening or how to add to an existing score using triggers. A video tutorial walking through how the holdout configuration works would be great!

Sorry for the walls of text, I had a wonderful morning messing around 😄

[crimson merlin]

That's a good looking map!

[flint portal]

I can't seem to make maps that are bigger than 30x30, is that a limit of the map maker?

I tried to make a map from Solstice Rain and ran out of space while it indicated a bigger value but it seems to just be 30x30

Map making feedback for me would be that i'd like to be able to have a way to tell the height of stuff at a glance, as well as being able to see the grid

the other thing i'd like but I would imagine that's a hard thing to implement, would be to be able to have some form of sketch layer or a way to import an image as a sketch to then draw over on the map itself (a bit like a reference layer on image editing softwares)

[tepid temple]

For the map editor, having to right click to delete feels a bit clunky and unintuitive to me. I also haven't figured out how to delete objects

Okay, I've figured out that ramps and objects need you to be in their mode as to delete them

[alpine sorrel]

I think that lower path is through mud tiles, which may be difficult terrain?

[alpine sorrel]

It should be in, I remember adding it.

[obtuse delta]

For just a second i thought i was dreaming, cant wait to try it out asap!

[alpine sorrel]

The max size should be 60x60, if it's not getting that big that would be a bug.
A reference layer is a very interesting idea, hmm. There's no reason we couldn't leave it on the map for play as well; it would be a way of adding some extra custom texture across the entire map (though vertical tile edges would get very warped).

[flint portal]

oooh! Well if i can figure it out then i'll see if I can make some of my maps

60x60 is plenty to work with

[alpine sorrel]

Fun fact: that limit comes from 64-bit numbers because I use a single number to store bit flags internally for an entire row of the map when I have yes/no information for each tile. Stuff like "is this tile in range with the current weapon"

[flint portal]

OH

its because you have to press enter when you put in the new map size

i'm dumb, i thought it applied when I pressed "create a new map"

or well, this

[alpine sorrel]

Maybe the interaction should have a little "apply" button next to the dimensions

[flint portal]

I think that would be nice yeah

okay whenever i'm done with my prep for tomorow i'll start making "its not the fall that kills you" in Lancer tactics

[tired aurora]

Update: After try ing out the map editor and finally understand how to make sitrep, I have managed to make 2 team of Lancers fight while I watch (bc I am a curious lol). Good job on the AI system!

The fact that allies wont consume lockon without permission is very neat

Also, is it intentionall that the railgun can destroy terrains? which is sandblock in my experience

Finally getting to play Lancer as an eternal GM is very fun, and I love the Puppet System Mourningcloak

[alpine sorrel]

Oh wow! I have not tested the ai_ally faction nor ai-controlled PC mechs almost at all. I'm glad they just work!

[tired aurora]

they work very well in fact, the AI Mourningcloak somehow picked up the Puppet system + overwatch trick immediately (ormaybe this is just coincedence idk)

[alpine sorrel]

Right now all AOE damage also applies to the ground tiles it passes through. I'm not convinced this is the right design, so wanted to see how it played out.

[wintry egret]

I coulda sworn it was in.. maybe something didn't get wired up correctly 🤔

[tired aurora]

It would not be how any GM does this, but hey! This is why being a computer game is so cool! Destructible terrrains that does not overload any GM's brain

and I have to say that my inner child is very sastified watching the deathhead carve a huge line of destruction on the ground

[alpine sorrel]

Oh you know what, I bet I added the file but forgot to add it to the gms license

[wintry egret]

There's also some tuning we can do here to make some weapons (like the 10 AP ones) feel more like the dirt movers they are meant to be

[tired aurora]

Some more custom VFX and Audio would be awesome additon, but I gotta say the game at its current state is already pretty fun!

[frank temple]

I'm aware this is slightly off topic, but is this referring to lock-on applied to an ally or by an ally?

[fickle pecan]

oh, yep! You can add shotguns to stuff in the map editor

[tired aurora]

I am tinkering with custom mission sitrep rn but something got me stumped. How do you make dialogue? or is this something that have not been implemented?

[little jetty]

the one I found while testing were two different cases, but I was able to apply lock on to ally, and able to consume a lock on on an ally that was applied by an enemy
I assume you can consume your own lock on if you lock on -> skirmish, but haven't tested it yet

raw it's just a condition so it shouldn't matter what the source is
(with the exception for scout's Marker Rifle, of course)

[alpine sorrel]

It's not fully fleshed out yet but you should be able to set up conversations + speaking characters in the rightmost tab in the map editor, then trigger those conversations via the trigger editor.

[tired aurora]

Hmmm, I am trying that right now but I do not understand the part about "character", are they required to trigger dialougue? and how do I set them up?

[quiet leaf]

actually, i've been gming like this! went through some trouble to prep things on fundry to avoid overloading my brain, but otherwise it's been going well!

[alpine sorrel]

Below the list of conversations there's an add character button or something. These are kind of like glue that figure out which unit on the map should speak; it could be a 1:1 with a pre-placed unit, but might someday also be stuff like "the unit in this zone" or "the third PC" or "an NPC not present on the map"

[quiet leaf]

which is to say, i am pro AOE targeting terrain, just gotta keep it in mind when adding a lot of bombards

[tired aurora]

oh, I test it out, it crash the game whenever a visual novel style chat is initiated and speech bubble style does not appear at all.

and if I have the trigger initiate a string type, it only give this. I like the layout of it, the static effect is real cool!

(btw, 4 HMG Everest Sweep most of the other teamp comp)

[uneven mortar]

that is kinda expected tbh

[tired aurora]

I love the custom trigger system so far, I have been able to do stuff from having enemy reinforce only if their number is below a value. Have enemy spawn immediately if an unit die, etc. LOVE

[final onyx]

I'm busy today but tomorrow I'm gonna stress test the hell out of those text box inputs

My character name is the entire script of the bee movie

Or maybe just spaces

Or maybe some attempts at code injection

[tired aurora]

Btw, I have a question, how does the AI interact with siterp? It seems like they do move inside the nearest space in the sitrep zone, but what happen if I change sitrep type? Like would enemy AI still try to get inside the sirep zone, or can I make them not do that?

[alpine sorrel]

Right now no, they just always want to hang out in sitrep zones if possible

[tired aurora]

Having hidden zone
And
Being able to assign custom zone priority to enemy AI should be on the to-do list
I think

[alpine sorrel]

So far we've gotten away with zero AI state or settings beyond what actions they have available... I don't have a strong idea of how to structure designer control over their behavior. Something to figure out.

[flint portal]

:)

Let me find the file

where do I find the files?

[alpine sorrel]

Go to the settings menu and pick the "data" tab. There should be a button with the user data path that you can press to open windows explorer to the folder. Maps are in /custom

[flint portal]

here!

[alpine sorrel]

I'm ostensibly not supposed to be touching computers to do LT stuff on weekends so I'll check it out on Monday 🙂 v cool to see such an iconic map greyboxed, I see the fallen statue head

[little jetty]

we love to see work-life balance

[flint portal]

Yeah I wanted to see how making maps felt in this

I think it works very well but yeah this has more or less confirmed that i'd like a way to tell what height stuff is at at least while making the map

oh also I had to use the trees but they're difficult terrain and I don't know if they provide soft cover, having a way to get a zone of soft cover might be nice

[alpine sorrel]

They should be providing soft cover, it's a bug if not. We do currently have them as destructible as well which is another design I think is interesting but am not set on.

There is technically an elevation numerical readout in the bottom right next to the tile coords, in the brackets, but I mostly put that for my own troubleshooting reference than a real UI solution.

[pastel flax]

is there a way to quick draw boxes?

I was trying to build the map from my last prep session

[toxic badge]

do you mind sharing? I would love to see an example of how to use the sitrep system.

[tepid temple]

Would trees and other terrain features ever be decoupled from terrain effects, so they can just be used for the visuals?

Or have their effects adjusted

[tired aurora]

Just load in the default Holdout sitrep. Then it will be easy to reverse engineer

[toxic badge]

I have, but I did not find it easy to reverse engineer at all 😆

[alpine sorrel]

we have a "doodads" layer in the works that's basically setpieces but without terrain information — for stuff like debris, ground cover, etc. I bet a tree or two will make it in there.

[alpine sorrel]

what kind/size of box? We have a line tool planned, but were hoping that the normal brush works for most other shapes

[pastel flax]

like a box tool - it can be a single layer

this is not helpful sorry

this brown bit on the right

[alpine sorrel]

Sorry I still don't understand. You can restrict painting to a single layer with the second layer mode though?

[teal flame]

i realize it's not that big a deal right now, but perhaps some way of indicating if you're in cover would be nice?

[flint portal]

I've messed a bit with my map in instant combat and oh my god this alpha is still so cool to see

Genuinely cannot wait for more because this is just extremely slick, the way the talents work especially is something I have to point out as so clever

[alpine sorrel]

You mean that variant action panel where you pick WA ammo, etc? I'm also pretty pleased with how that came together. It's gonna be such a flexible way to give a lot of control without too much prompt or action bar icon spam.

It does have limitations like only being able to pick a single movement type (so hunter + pre-skirmish movement or something won't work)

[little jetty]

oh yeah the attack profile menu is really slick UI, big fan of that call

[flint portal]

Yeah! Its really good!

Oh I assume it isn't in yet but this is missing prone right?

I tried to ram a berserker to turn off their resistance but it didn't seem to work lol

[alpine sorrel]

I think someone else mentioned that too — prone should have worked, so that's a bug.

[flint portal]

ah gotcha!

[alpine sorrel]

I refactored how on-hit effects and statuses worked to make WA shock a few days ago, and must have not had a test to catch that ramming lost prone application

[alpine sorrel]

That's a tough one -- soft cover zones fine, sure. But hard cover is so context-based it's hard to give a single y/n answer about.

[uneven mortar]

not really a bug, but what happened to the old art style in the demo?

was it a design choice/preference for disometric stuff?

[alpine sorrel]

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/wickworks/lancer-tactics/posts/3996281

[teal flame]

mmm fair

actually, i swear i've seen a neat directional indicator before

[flint portal]

oh also holy shit does the top down view work really well btw

super useful to see LOS and whatnot

[teal flame]

wait how do you do that?

[alpine sorrel]

It's almost distressing how much working in 3D makes alternative camera angles like that trivial. For a 2D game changing the perspective would double the scope bc you need new assets.

(press R)

[teal flame]

righto

[pastel flax]

i'm sorry. I'm just trying to quickly draw a box like one would in photoshop or paint using the Square tool. you might be able to.

[alpine sorrel]

Ah I see. No I don't think that's planned

[pastel flax]

i see

[glad lotus]

An idea for this - maybe a button that toggles drawing a height number on each square? Or some other type of height overlay... coloured topographical regions?

[alpine sorrel]

This is bells and whistles territory, but it would be cool to have top-down mode be able to switch to topographic map mode, kinda like how in Homeworld you can switch to that blue tactical view.

[glad lotus]

What about something like the XCOM cover indicators near your cursor? Probably bells & whistles territory too, but I think that could be a helpful indicator that some terrain gives hard cover in a certain direction.

[teal flame]

Sensors manager mode would be incredible

[ripe radish]

Having played the current alpha, I feel like more talents would go a long way, more so than any other content.

builds get weird when you are required to take hunter after a certain LL

(Saying this with no knowledge of programing or how difficult certain things are) Brawler, gunslinger, crackshot, tactician, and vanguard 1 seem like easy additions (all just being +1 accuracy on some sort of attack, like the already implemented dualist 1)

[wintry egret]

We've played a lot with UI ideas for this, and we've got a few tricks left up our sleeve we want to test run

[round hull]

small bug: backgrounds on pilots don't save unless you edit another item on their sheet afterwards (eg. changing the weapon on their mech)

[round hull]

LOL

you can consume autopod on your allies???

honestly i'd say that's a feature, it's funny

[teal flame]

You can consume it on yourself

Can’t do it on your own shots though, which is probably how it’s supposed to be

[round hull]

yeah, it is

[fresh dagger]

that interaction does perfectly match rules as-written, though

doesn't specify hostility from either side, just "a target within range 15 of you" and "consumes Lock-On"

[round hull]

mhm, it's funnier that way

but also like, enemies lock on enough that it's kind of annoying to always have to click "no" when the autopod prompt comes up

[alpine sorrel]

Seems like another place where it's a good idea to deviate from RAW. Noted.

[worldly violet]

Literally the only place I can think of where you would want to autopod your team is like, a white witch?

[tepid temple]

Or anyone else with Retort Cannon

[minor trench]

The vertical slice is pretty damn sick, but jeez the map editor? That's quite a treat.

[alpine sorrel]

Yeah. Imo not being able to do that is an acceptable casualty

[alpine sorrel]

Thanks! It felt like making an entirely extra game on top of the first one, esp the trigger and dialogue systems.

[little jetty]

iirc white witch doesn't get armor buff from friendly damage

[tepid temple]

Even in its incomplete and unpolished state it’s still a marvelous thing to behold

[flint portal]

I mean i guess lancer tactics is cool I’m just confused where the ranger, magician and rogue are

(The map editor is so slick)

[sharp smelt]

having trouble targeting characters on top of cover rather than the cover itself

I might just be mistaken, I'll try it again in a bit

[fickle pecan]

playing around with making the ai fight each other and there's a kinda interesting thing where allies need your permission to use lock on

which does make sense, really, but it's kinda funny

[minor trench]

I'm still hoping that NPC AI will be moddable enough to make make scenarios such as certain enemies fleeing after taking enough damage.

[stable smelt]

you can't consume lock-on on allies, though.

[mild jay]

That doesn’t matter, autopod isn’t what’s consuming lock on, the enemy consuming lock on is triggering autopod

So autopod targets your ally if you use it

[gaunt plume]

sorry i just looked over and saw this in the forums, is the alpha build out in some way? ive only been looking at the kickstarter page

[uneven mortar]

is the testing before the alpha release proper still going on?

[fickle pecan]

check pins!

[stable smelt]

oh I see - in the class of 'technically correct behavior but largely useless/bad to be prompted about'

[gaunt plume]

thanks!

so happy to be able to try this out. been following it since march/april of last year and have been so excited to see it and its development

[little jetty]

lancer roguelike

[tidal tulip]

How do i stabilize in the latest demo?

[fickle pecan]

not implemented yet

[little jetty]

oh that's hilarious
I've been overcharging every turn to try to find all the broken stuff and didn't even try to stabilize

[tidal tulip]

Me with several loading weapons...

thats a funny discovery

[alpine sorrel]

It'll be included in the backer release later this week; I just implemented stabilize today with this whole new choose-your-own-adventure multiple-choice quiz interface before realizing I probably could have done it using the variant action panel instead, which would also let other actions add their own options >_< oops. something to refactor in the future

(don't ask how that deaths head got impaired and slowed)

[little jetty]

lancer visual novel is real!!

[gaunt plume]

i mean im in a similar boat rn

[little jetty]

friendly fragsig is my guess

idk i did that intentionally to make those stress rolls

[gaunt plume]

i just used puppet systems to walk a berserker into a mine that i completely blanked on the fact that the deathshead and drake were in the blast radius. so on the bright side, the exposed debuff works correctly when friendly fire is mixed in

the Ordnance tag doesnt seem to work properly as ive moved and am in engagement range and can still fire the railgun

[alpine sorrel]

yeah it's not implented yet

[gaunt plume]

gotcha!

[alpine sorrel]

I dunno how to signpost what is in and broken vs just not done yet

[gaunt plume]

alrighty, its already a ton of fun. makes me wanna play XCOM 2

[little jetty]

would it make sense at all to have a public "to do list" perhaps

I feel like that could easily get stressful though

[gaunt plume]

yeah i tried to think of a possible suggestion but any sort of list i thought of would take a ton of time to confirm, write down, and update

[little jetty]

how many bug reports have you received?

[alpine sorrel]

I've mostly been paying attention to the ones posted here; @pine anchor is gonna be doing the QA work of combing through responses and turning them into trello tickets (🙏). Looks like we have 27 reports via the form currently.

[little jetty]

oh really? I remember putting up a ton of them and thought "okay maybe this is too much"

but I guess it wasn't too much so sounds like I'll get on it again

[pine anchor]

Not too many at all! And I'd also love to thank you all for the fantastic steps you've given me! It really helps me investigate!

[fickle pecan]

[quiet leaf]

dateable blackbeard when

[tepid temple]

Actually, how will NHPs be portrayed? As in their portraits. Just the normal ones but all hologram-colored?

[alpine sorrel]

TBD; that's an active internal art discussion

mark wants to make em weirder and I agree if possible

[tepid temple]

Casting an official 👀 vote on that direction

[teal flame]

Stuff like this?

[gaunt plume]

ok so im not sure if this is an issue or if im missing something but this enemy triggered my overwatch but wont let me select it despite supposedly being a valid target?

if i try and click on the target nothing happens

[pine anchor]

If you haven't already, submit a bug report for us! This way we have it in our log to be tracked.

[fickle pecan]

I think ive seen stuff like this happen when the target is occluded? and you can if you use q and e to rotate camera. usually more occluded than this but the bunker is clipping the bottom of its square

[gaunt plume]

Will do! Just wanted to make sure I wasn't missing something so I didn't put in a false report

[alpine sorrel]

I think someone else also mentioned a problem with impact lance overwatch and it's kind of a funky weapon so I bet something breaks when it's used as a rxn

[outer trail]

Was there an itch update to play in the new isometric maps? Or is this something else?

[tepid temple]

#1079952007915376711 message

[gaunt plume]

if you mean from how the game used to look, they decided to change the look of the game from 2D top-down to 3D isometric

and mlister just linked the message to the download for the open prealpha

[outer trail]

Didnt know about the alpha, just heard that was the plan

Thanks for the link

[alpine sorrel]

Test suite just saved me from a serious bug as I was compiling the 0.1.1 alpha, drink.

[alpine sorrel]

Alright, I've uploaded the 0.1.1 alpha to Backerkit's backend; could someone who's filled out their survey go to their backerkit and see if there's a digital download available somewhere?

There's a big "blast 5000 emails with the download" button but ideally I don't have to send out a big email every time I upload a new version.

Additionally, does anyone have a mac they'd be down to test the mac build on? It works on my machine™ but I got some warnings about Gatekeeper not letting it run because it's unverified, so I'd like to know if that's for real or something that can be overridden by an end user.

[worn tiger]

its there, yeah
backerkit, profile, "your pledges and surveys", past surveys tab, lancer tactics

[alpine sorrel]

thanks! what's the URL for that page?

or does it have a unique one?

[worn tiger]

I believe you need to be signed in to backerkit for this link to work - it prompts me for the email address I pledged with if I try and go to it in an incognito tab
https://lancer-tactics.backerkit.com/backer/digital_rewards

[alpine sorrel]

Sweet, I assumed so, but it'll be nice to be able to give people a url with that as a note.

[frank temple]

Oh, BTW

Macs can run programs made by nonidentified devs, you just have to either right-click to run it or go into the security settings and run anyway

[alpine sorrel]

That's what I believe, but also trusting that has burned me before so I wanna get confirmation that someone has actually gone through that process with this export.

[frank temple]

Fair enough

But that's what I do when I download programs onto my mac and I've never had an issue

[alpine sorrel]

Iffff I dm'd you a mac build, would you mind running through that?

[frank temple]

Oh yeah for sure

Otherwise I was gonna run it through WINE

Good news, it worked

If I may make a suggestion re: character creator? Add a "confirm" button when you're done

Only having a back button made me think for a sec that it wouldn't save

[torn kite]

no, windows, it's okay, the program is not a virus

[alpine sorrel]

Wild that I'm still learning Lancer rules this deep into this process. TIL grunts take no damage on successful saves aka they have dnd evasion.

[teal flame]

Well I mean the thing is 90% of the time they’d die otherwise

[frigid shale]

Honestly can’t blame you, there’s a lotta rules

[teal flame]

Actually, how’s the NPC editor coming along?

I don’t think there is any way of editing them atm?

[alpine sorrel]

it's not really, we haven't thought through how to modify them from baseline beyond adding new kits to their loadout like you can with any unit

Modifying their stats and stuff will likely fall into the realm of modding

something I just realized: strictly RAW, you'd technically take doubling levels of burn each time you fail your eng save because there's nothing there that says the new burn damage doesn't also mark additional ongoing burn damage

(I was checking what type the damage is on failures, and realized I couldn't just call it burn again without a special flag 'cause that's what would happen)

Ah unless the "Burn from additional sources adds to the total marked burn" in the next paragraph implies that that's the only way new burn stacks up?

[frigid shale]

Yeah this

I’m not sure how it interacts with Resistance though ; my impression was that the “persistent damage” ignored the typical damage algorithm (since it already went through the algorithm once already!) but that’s a concern for #rules-questions I suppose

[alpine sorrel]

Oh right, I think I've heard that too. I'll add a no-reduce flag to it until strongly informed otherwise.

[muted bone]

Word Of Tom is Resistance is only applied to the initial application of Burn, not the Persistent damage
#rules-questions message

[teal flame]

oh i just meant messing with tiers/templates

[alpine sorrel]

templates you can add; there's only RPV and Grunt atm. Checkboxes at the bottom of the panel that pops up when you have them selected in the editor

tiers are yea a WIP

[teal flame]

ahhh right

[lone cliff]

hot take: they should just straight up die. They still deal full damage so a bunch of grunts can end up being harder to kill and way more deadly than an ultra

by rules grunts are not expendable minions theyre just glass cannon versions of the enemy templates

and that trips up newbie gms way way way too much especially with how the book explicitly states you should have 4 grunts for every PC

[alpine sorrel]

Wait are there really only 3 things that give overshield in the core book? Invigorate, Aceso, and Dispersal shield?

wild that a mechanic that gets that much space has so few actual instances of content

[tepid temple]

I remember it not having a lot of sources, yeah

[teal flame]

it got added as a last-minute thing iirc

[tepid temple]

Then you get into what Shield hooks into...

[teal flame]

wasn't till the emperor that we had a mech that really used it

[alpine sorrel]

is it just napoleon core? and maybe something to do with sal?

[lone cliff]

yeah theres like no shield tag stuff yeah?

[little jetty]

I still don't know why Ronin's Rebound has shield tag on it

[tepid temple]

Literally just the Napoleon haha

[lone cliff]

which means napoleon doing its thing also means it basically cant do anything

and gms can just ignore the napoleon to kill the rest of the team lol

[tepid temple]

Not even Houseguard hooks into it! It's literally just the Napoleon and now its alt

[lone cliff]

when i did my magical girl homebrew version of the napoleon i added way more shield stuff

and a weapon that counts a shield device

so it could be used while the meguca napoleon is doing its signature thing

[teal flame]

your what now?

[lone cliff]

big project ive left on the backburner because of motivation, but i was planning on a magical girl total conversion of lancer

with a ton of licenses and a revamped NPC system

[alpine sorrel]

amazing

[lone cliff]

as well as addressing some stuff and jank that core lancer was missing or glosses over

i really had fun with one of the faction's naming schemes

also one of my favorite fluff descriptions

[sharp smelt]

🧱
🫴

[sand goblet]

serious answer: futureproofing

leaving mechanical hooks in a game that you intend to continue developing is a good thing, because it gives you space to work in later

you can see this with overshield

[alpine sorrel]

And I guess you can seem them having not done that with Intangible

[sand goblet]

right, exactly

that's actually a really good example (alongside the Exotic tag which is probably the most prevalent example), since it runs into repeated issues where if the mechanic is reused the entire supporting rule structure needs to be reprinted alongside it because it wasn't included in the core rule book

this is why every single release has to re-include the Exotic rules

in an ideal world you know what you intend to publish later and you lay the groundwork ahead of time, but obviously you can't always predict things

[alpine sorrel]

oh that's interesting, yeah.

[little jetty]

harder to patch things if you're printing on paper

[sand goblet]

salient example from SOTW: the new pilot armor has the shield tag. it does literally nothing, since it doesn't interact with the Napoleon or Kutuzov. But it is an energy shield, so it should have the tag, so that it doesn't cause weird dissonance when someone decides to add something that interacts with shields in a funky way somewhere down the line

[alpine sorrel]

An example of this being done intentionally this reminds me of is that one Magic release where they had something namedrop Planeswalker as a card type before there were any examples of them, as a way to tease the upcoming release. A lot easier when you know what's coming down the pipeline

[little jetty]

I've only heard of future proofing in the context of not breaking stuff, so this was cool to learn. thank you!

[little jetty]

there's another example from magic, where in Future Sight, there's a card that references "cranking a contraption"
they had no plans to actually make that mechanic initially, but later put in the mechanic in one of the joke sets

[alpine sorrel]

haha that's right, I'd forgotten about that

oohh is a narrative version of this namedropping "the clone wars" in the original movie? like nobody had a solid idea what that meant at the time, but it leaves threads you can hook things off of later

[sand goblet]

yeah that stuff happens all the time in movies and especially in literature, some times it's intentional, but often it's just authors trying to make it look like they were playing 5D chess when secretly they're just making up stuff that happens to fit their old work

SOTW has some of that in its narrative too, like stuff that I either have vague plans for or can expand on if there's ever a sequel 🤞 EDIT: to hypothetical future people looking at this comment: ||it was planned when I first wrote her, I have the receipts.||

something I learned when I used to write LARP is that leaving dangling plot hooks is one of the best things you can do as a writer to make life easier for future-you. You might not know which plot hooks the players will pick up on, or which you'll be inspired to develop, so you don't want to detail all of them. But if you can bet on your ability to improvise a story you can set yourself up for success by leaving those options open

I think it's also important to remember that Lancer is quite a large game that was developed and iterated on over a fair period of time. It's very easy for us to look back with hindsight at a system that's been out for five years and see the rough edges or missing pieces, but when you're developing you have to contend both with the hysteresis in your own design and with your plans for the future and it isn't always possible to get everything perfect

[alpine sorrel]

oh for sure

I think it's a masterpiece in how well it hangs together, all things considered.

its tendency to leave blank spaces and hooks and unanswered questions, in both mechanics and narrative, is one of its biggest strengths?

they're like invitations for us to come in and color in the lines

"How Lancer is a coloring book. In this essay I will..."

[tight cargo]

game's fun

I like the interface a lot, and it plays real nice for an alpha, although the isometric pov is giving me flashbacks to xcom only having diagonal camera directions and long war mercifully adding cardinal camera directions to make everything way easier to see

[alpine sorrel]

oh yeah? I'll put that on our list to experiment with. I think we thought we'd stick with diagonals for style, but a big increase in useability would trump that.

[tight cargo]

I'm sure it varies from person to person, but for me and a few others I know, isometric is a royal pain and having all eight angles is just magical

been sendin' in my bug reports too, I've never actually really playtested a game before, this is kinda fun

though alas, it seems my quest to make the world's first lancer tactics mod has been foiled by files too hidden for me to find and also me not knowing how to program lmfao ive got to be the only transfemme on earth who can't

(columbo voice) OH, and uh one more thing, more in the suggestion department and supremely low-priority and minor, but I noticed on the credits screen that the names were going by way too fast to read, and I also noticed that my framerate was like 160 fps cause this game is super low memory strain, which leads me to believe that the speed of some things is tied to the framerate. A framerate cap option would be a nice tiny feature and might futureproof some other potential jank in the long run

[gaunt inlet]

Hi there! I'm playing alpha 0.1.1, and its super fun!! its so cool to see this become real!!!!

I'm running into a weird issue, I did post it in the bug report google form.

Basically in the map editor I cant seem to figure out how to save my map? when I make something and go to save as, I type in a name, usually "test" and then hit save. a popup appears and says "invalid extension or empty filename" I go to the file type drop down and then change it from "all Recognized" to "all files" and hit enter. the map then gets deleted and the file cant be found??

What am I doing wrong or how do I do it properly?

[tight cargo]

that's gotta be caused by something specific, cause when I saved my test custom map, it gave me options for .json and for .(something else I can't remember)

[gaunt inlet]

yes! thats the "all recognzed" one

whe i hit save with that one it gave me the pop up

and i have no clue why

like I'll stream it if that helps to explain lol

[alpine sorrel]

Ah yeah that's confusing! you just have to type out ".json" at the end of it

Mark mentioned he got tripped up on that as well

it'd be really nice if that default file modal was able to put two and two together and add it automatically for you

[tight cargo]

that's odd, there was an option in the dropdown to save as a json for me

[gaunt inlet]

huh ok! ill give that a shot! thank you so much

[alpine sorrel]

ooo looks like there is definitely a bug in the save-as where it gets confused as to what file you're editing after you save

and it also looks like if you have the file type as one of the two available options, it will put the extension on for you automatically, but if you have it as "all" it doesn't know what to do

[tight cargo]

I did notice that part too, it loaded a fresh map after I saved my test

though I figured it was just alpha jank

[gaunt inlet]

Ahhhh i see, so i have to specifily check the ".json" file type

I think I was a dofus and just manually typed "test.json" and it deleted it lol

WAIT NO IT WORKED

but when you save as it just,,, disapeares and then you have to open it again

[alpine sorrel]

yeah that part's a definite bug, looking into it now

[gaunt inlet]

wooo shark found their first bug :) this is fun!

[alpine sorrel]

I'm glad! It really helps a lot.

[gaunt inlet]

another question, in zones, what does sitrep mean/do?

[alpine sorrel]

it's kind of a catch-all for zones that sitreps care about. The only inherent effect currently is that AI units will try to stand in them. More effects can be applied via triggers ("spawn X units in a sitrep zone", etc)

oh also it makes them a different color

[gaunt inlet]

ohh ok cool!

[alpine sorrel]

once we figure out designer-controlled AI you'll probably be able to have more nuanced control over how AI interact with the zones

[gaunt inlet]

sounds exciting! good luck!

oh another potential bug? I set it to only be ten rounds. and now some how im in round 11? is there supposed to be a "force end" at the 10th round?

[alpine sorrel]

oh nope, that's just as an indicator right now

to get it to actually end, you'll need a trigger that looks something like this

you can load sitrep and look at the holdout triggers if you want a more complicated example

[gaunt inlet]

Ok thank you!

[outer trail]

am I blind or is there no stabilize action?

[alpine sorrel]

there should be for 0.1.1

purple heart icon in the action bar

[outer trail]

is that from the free download or the patreon(?)

I dont remember what site you have your pledge on

ah I think I found it

[alpine sorrel]

https://lancer-tactics.backerkit.com/backer/digital_rewards will be the link once you sign in to backerkit

[outer trail]

how long does it normally take to get the item?

[alpine sorrel]

are you getting some kind of "it's not ready yet" thing? somebody on kickstarter ran into something like that:

[outer trail]

there we go

am I able to export my pilots to the new version?

[alpine sorrel]

yeah. that's not a promise for all future versions but there wasn't a breaking change for this one

they should be available automatically

[outer trail]

nice

[alpine sorrel]

Also it seems I also have to manually press "lock orders" on the backend for freshly-finished surveys. Not ideal lol. I should get the downloads over to itch or something

[outer trail]

that would be beneficial. Regardless I look forward to the finished product

[gaunt inlet]

After some messing around, how would i made a terrain feature instantly kill a unit if it enters the zone? (like a lava lake)

currently this isnt doing it?

[alpine sorrel]

try filling in the boolean field in the effect

I should update the desc; the boolean is whether it leaves a wreck I think

[gaunt inlet]

Ah ok

[alpine sorrel]

Did that end up working? I've not tried doing anything fancy like that yet, and it looks like it should work.

If it doesn't, I bet within isn't quite behaving right.

nvm looking at the code, it wouldn't because I don't have it support checking tiles within zones yet — it would work if it was like "is this specific zone within this array of zones" but not unit/zone tiles. I'll add this to the todo because it's a cool idea

[alpine sorrel]

I've been nerdsniped lol. Just added a new fetcher type called Zone Tiles that'll allow us to do the thing you had it mind. It'll be available in the next alpha release, whenever that is.

[teal flame]

Ok so actually a major issue

Does heat count as “damage”?

Because I don’t think it does, and that means the mourning cloak’s expose singularity reaction shouldn’t trigger off taking heat

Because atm it even triggers off self heat, like overcharge

[alpine sorrel]

yeah, that was reported yesterday. the fix is already in the can 👍

[teal flame]

Good to know

It’s hilarious, but does feel a tad too strong

Also I’m not 100% sure but it feels like LoS isn’t ever really blocked for the purposes of attacks and tech attacks

Which is to say I don’t think I’ve ever had cover be actually useful

[gaunt inlet]

THIS IS PERFECT! thanks!!!!

[gaunt inlet]

it just disappears. (also i know this is like the earliest version of the game so like, no rush, im sure theres a bajillion other things to toake care of lmao)

well ive done something lmaooo
I made them all explode on a turn start

[gaunt inlet]

oh wait im very silly i didnt read the very important line of "you fixed it and itll be in the next update when that is" my bad

[pine anchor]

Doing QA on this has absolutely taught me the Lancer Rules better.

[flint portal]

Los is very permissive in lancer because it just requires corner to corner rather than center to center

So i wouldn’t be surprised if you never ran into los being blocked especially if npcs move in cause they don’t want to be out of los either

[fickle pecan]

game definitely has los

[alpine sorrel]

It unfortunately doesn't match 1:1 with RAW LOS because I needed a faster algorithm than the number of raycasts that would be required (voxels ^ 2) x 4 and you can see that in things like single-tile los-blockers or 1-width diagonal walls.

Line of sight is a thing you might think would be trivial with computers but it really isn't

It's actually using an algo sourced from the roguelike community; like the old dungeon crawler-y ones

[sand goblet]

LOS algos my beloathed

Out of curiosity which one are you using?

[alpine sorrel]

http://www.adammil.net/blog/v125_roguelike_vision_algorithms.html#permissivecode

that page has a lot of great visualizations of the differences between the different techniques; the permissive vis seemed like the closest to what Lancer expects

[alpine sorrel]

Just ran into a fun edge case. So the half-damage-to-shielding-unit of argonaut shield usually doesn't inherit tags like AP. But it seems like it should inherit some properties of the originating damage in the case of Burn. If the burn damage was applied from an external source, it should be marked as ongoing as normal. But if the burn damage came from ongoing damage due to a failed eng check, the half-burn damage should not be marked as ongoing... right?

ie if the unit you're guarding biffs a burn check, the burn damage you take from that doesn't increase your own level of burn

[tepid temple]

I… didn’t realize you could use the argonaut shield for ongoing burn damage

[alpine sorrel]

I mean "resistance to all damage" is resistance all damage, right?

[tepid temple]

Wait, doesn’t this mean you can use it for self damage?

[alpine sorrel]

like manticore's stuff? I don't see why not

[flint portal]

I've always assumed it was meant to work on incoming damage

[glad lotus]

I thought that in general resistance doesn't apply to the ongoing ticks of burn damage. It would reduce the initial burn damage and therefore future ticks.

Same deal as exposed - getting hit with burn while exposed and then still having exposed when the ongoing damage ticks shouldn't make make the tick deal 4x the original damage.

[frigid shale]

The rule of Tom mentioned earlier says that the persistent burn damage isn’t meant to be reduced right?

[alpine sorrel]

Ohh that's right

Hrm its almost like its own damage type that just doesn't go through the normal pipeline at all

[frigid shale]

Yeah it kinda just applies directly to the HP

[alpine sorrel]

Do you know if rxns like exposed singularity should trigger off of this ongoing burn damage?

[frigid shale]

Honestly not sure, but #rules-questions has probably discussed it at some point?

[alpine sorrel]

getting text-to-speech accessibility options working

[little jetty]

the last voice is so cursed

but it's cool that it exists!!

[tight cargo]

fuck yeah, accessibility

[sand goblet]

aeiou john madden

(this is great!)

[flint portal]

football

[gaunt inlet]

Question about Sitrep. When I put enemies on the field, they all try and enter that zone? is that intended?

[tepid temple]

It's probably this^

[dire ivy]

Will it be possible to add custom voices in the future? I think it'd be fun to voice the characters!

[alpine sorrel]

nope! they're linked to the OS, I don't control what's available

so I can't depend on them for in-story stuff either

[gaunt inlet]

lmao my memory retention needs some work, thanks

[gaunt inlet]

This is super fun! I got waves of enemies and allies to spawn and the game ends at round 10. I cant wait to learn more functions and see more added to it!

[tight cargo]

it's beautiful...

[gaunt inlet]

When the next update drops I’m makin the water deadly 😌

[ashen kindle]

Either way, burn is not doubled with exposed. Exposed states double kin, en, exp damage. Burn isn't listed

[untold prairie]

gonna submit this to the bug form as requested, but noting it here because I haven't seen it in anyone else's screenshots: there's a weird dark rectangle that hovers in the middle of the screen during Instant Action.

Only while PCs or NPCs are moving or carrying out actions; not when I'm selecting their actions.

[alpine sorrel]

This is so weird; you can see that it's the top-left round counter background that has migrated down there.

This is some freaky Godot basic functionality bug... we're not doing anything special there. Thx for the report

[untold prairie]

There was also a weird interaction between Overwatch, the Nelson's War Pike knockback, and the Nelson's Skirmisher that essentially left the Nelson under a Barricade at the end of the Barricade's turn. I didn't think to save the game but I'll see if I can replicate it or dig it out of the logs.

[glad lotus]

MONIST-2 easter egg spotted

[worn tiger]

Quick question: are there any plans to sell the stickers on their own at some point in the future?

[alpine sorrel]

No. I'm already spending more of my work days than I'd like still packaging up late orders, and doing so for just stickers isn't a good use of my time

But I released the designs and files under a CC noncomm license a while back if you feel motivated to get em printed yourself. I recommend Sticker Ninja.

[worn tiger]

gotcha, very understandable
where might those sticker designs be found?

[alpine sorrel]

end o this update: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/wickworks/lancer-tactics/posts/3791837

[worn tiger]

many thanks!

[grand notch]

Are there any rules for sharing footage of Lancer Tactics right now? Twitch, YouTube, that kind of thing? I'm not asking because I have plans to do that, but to know if I should bother digging around on YouTube for it. :V

[tepid temple]

Funnily enough I just read the answer earlier today

[grand notch]

Oh, well, there you go then.

Given its early state, I agree with the "yeah not much to see." But still.

[ripe radish]

Can I share the alpha with non backer friends?

[teal flame]

Is it just me or is it true that NPCs don’t deal heat unless their invade option says otherwise?

[frigid shale]

Are they actually using Invade or are they using their bespoke tech actions?

[teal flame]

They have the base fragsig

But it’s worse

Doesn’t do heat and only inflicts impaired

[alpine sorrel]

sounds like a bug to me

[teal flame]

No that’s what it should be RAW

[alpine sorrel]

oh this is a question about the ttrpg, not a notice of heat not being dealt in LT?

if so that's a #rules-questions topic

[teal flame]

Fair

Don’t enemies do heat in this with their fragsig?

Or do enemies not have fragsig here and I’m thinking of a different tech attack

[little jetty]

i haven't seen enemies do tech attack

[teal flame]

Really?

Even archers do it for me

[worldly violet]

I'm pretty confident that enemies do 2 heat and impair on their basic tech attacks

[frigid shale]

Yes, the universal NPC “invade” is a quick tech attack using their Systems stat and inflicts 2 heat and impaired on hit

[mild jay]

Player fragment signal additionally inflicts slowed, that’s the difference

[flint portal]

I can confirm, npc fragment signal deals 2 heat and impair

[molten hare]

Was wondering how much were allowed to share of the alpha? Was gonna stream some of it in the near future if that’s alright

[teal flame]

Streaming is fine iirc

There’s no secrecy

[molten hare]

Right on, I didn’t think so since I hadn’t seen it anywhere but wanted to be sure before I just went ahead anyway haha. Thank you!

[pure lynx]

a late reply since I was reading the backlog, but an approach I'd like would be to animate a red slash appearing over any actions that will be invalidated by the currently "considered" action (hovered and/or selected-but-not-confirmed). Like, you click the "move" button and your Ordnance weapon's icon goes "🚫" at you.

[alpine sorrel]

It would have to be on hover bc the bar goes away once you click something... but we were thinking of adding on-hover info like highlighting follow-up attacks on mounts or x-ing out the mine if you hover over the grenade, etc.

So if we add that system, ordnance would probably be included

[delicate chasm]

Hi friendly lancers, sorry if I am not knowing much of how BackerKit works but I did this late pledge on it hopping to test the latest Alpha of Lancer Tactics, but it looks like it is stuck at the first step "We received your order". I this normal like I just have to wait? Or did I miss something?

[delicate chasm]

I see that this happened to you Mr.Tree before, but I did the Survey Confirmation and got the email from backerkit for it.
Did you had to do anything else to have your order locked or just waiting did the trick?

[alpine sorrel]

Ah just waiting! I need to manually lock the orders; I'll do it now. For the next version of the alpha i'll configure the upload to not have to do this.

Done. @delicate chasm you should have access to it now.

[delicate chasm]

Oh thanks a million! 🥳

I loved the demo-one on itch.io, can't wait to try this 😃

Really sorry for the additional burden of adding a manual task on your stack of things to do, and congratulations for the incredible work 🙏

[alpine sorrel]

started work on the grapple system today. still a lot of edge cases to iron out, but the basic "a katamari of units can move around all at once" works!

[sand goblet]

trying to piece together what's going on in this gif

• the Nelson grapples the Berserker, hits
• skirmisher triggers, the Nelson drags the Berserker over to a cliff
• the Berserker immediately falls rather than falling at EOT
• the Berserker falls two spaces (breaking the grapple) and takes 2AP
• the Berserker falls three spaces (breaking the grapple), takes 3AP but has resistance due to Stampede Defense
• Aggression is triggered but no valid targets
• the Nelson continues to take its turn

very excited to see grappling working

I have too many Pankrati in my "characters to play" list

[alpine sorrel]

Yep! Is the general ruling that you get a "long live the king" moment as you look into their eyes as you hold them over the edge instead of them falling immediately?

[tepid temple]

Yep. "Falling is involuntary movement" also produces some funny levitation with the Drake's fortress protocol or pining spire

[frigid shale]

(Tbf the intent for “immune to involuntary movement” is not “immune to falling”)

[alpine sorrel]

hrm. this may end up being a place we diverge from RAW.

there'd have to be a weird flying-at-a-non-standard-height status otherwise

[tepid temple]

What's the height limit again? Because the "you fall 10 spaces per round" rule is something else that might push you in that direction

[alpine sorrel]

the terrain can go up to 10 spaces tall, so that plus whatever junk you can deploy/stand/fly on that

[tepid temple]

So that should be 16 spaces in total, if you're flying over a size 3 deployable at max height

[alpine sorrel]

It would be a good idea to test that limit, I guess. Some line of sight data might start getting screwy or capped at that point.

but yeah

falling will be immediate in that case too, regardless of height

[tepid temple]

Oop, it might actually be 17 spaces, because stasis barrier is 4 spaces high and an obstruction 😅

[sand goblet]

fwiw it's probably much better this way, there are very few reasons anyone would care about that specific rule (though hilariously one of those came up in a playtest I ran today, which is a very weird coincidence!)

[alpine sorrel]

Shot in the dark, was a Taraxacum responsible for it coming up? 🙂 I could see how a flying taxi could leave folks in coyote-time

[tepid temple]

Oh God, I just realized how cursed "Coyote Time in a Strategy RPG" is as a concept

[flint portal]

Thankfully as is in Lancer you can't just use Coyote time to move through a space as long as you don't look down

(since you can only move into spaces you'd otherwise normally could)

[tepid temple]

Unfortunately your sensors count as looking down 😔

[flint portal]

It does mean in theory that you can probably move off a cliff then move back on the cliff?

which is funny

[flint portal]

i'm curious now on why it came up

[sand goblet]

Haha I can see how that would come to mind. In fact it was a low-health Operator that got knocked off a ledge, and would have exploded on an ally had it hit the ground

[flint portal]

Oh that is actually so clutch

holy shit

[sand goblet]

so they killed it in mid air and saved their friend 😄 awesome to watch

[tepid temple]

I unironically appreciate how the process of making this game uncovers all these RAW quirks that are otherwise unnoticed or glossed over

[flint portal]

Its very fun to watch this system have to add in like

how do I put it, it shows just how much we rely on the human element for a lot of TTRPGs

[alpine sorrel]

yes 100%

I feel like my questions to the rules channel can feel like "how many angels can dance on the head of a pin" but it's always like directly applicable to a decision I need to make. e.g. today I needed to figure out who you make a contested hull check against in the event of a size-tie while grappling multiple opponents

[flint portal]

Oh actually I had a question

Do you think there will be some way to "force" npcs to behave a certain way for maps?

Like forcing a sniper to stay in a tower to sniper people from afar or something

[alpine sorrel]

yes, but I don't know what it'll look like yet. I don't have a good list of the types of behaviors we'd want to apply to specific npcs

movement restrictions like that are a good one

[flint portal]

That's fair

i think "Won't try to cross this zone", "wants to go to this zone" and "must hold this zone" might be good at least as far as sitreps and map dynamics are concerned

[alpine sorrel]

oo I like that

can give it a list of specific zones and a behavior towards them

I just talked about it with carpenter and I think we'll try to do something like that, calling them "zone behaviors". thanks 🙂

I like it a lot more than what I've seen in some other map editors where they just let you set a unit to like "aggressive" or "defensive", which is both opaque to the user, difficult to program, and too soft to be predictable. I like this because it's more specific and predictable

what do you think would be the difference between "wants to go to this zone" and "must hold this zone"?

[tepid temple]

Whether or not they'll try to remove hostile mechs from the zone?

[agile tinsel]

Maybe, one dedicated to “staying in the zone” and another to “kick people out of zone”

One would do more defensive stuff while other would push for more offensive stuff

[glad lotus]

Yeah, the latter says "get enemies out" to me

I also think an "attack targets in this zone" behaviour would be useful, especially for artillery NPCs. Focus on this fire lane, flush enemies out of this cover, etc...

[tepid temple]

The former could also be a "just needs to touchdown on this zone once but can do w/e afterwards"

[glad lotus]

"Hold this zone" would also avoid forced movement that would bring enemies into the zone, IMO. Pirate's boarding leash, Lurker's whip, etc...

[sand goblet]

if the AI system is modular enough you could use these behaviours with dynamic "zones" like "the spaces adjacent to a mobile objective"

[alpine sorrel]

something like

maybe a "push foes into" too lol