Lancer Tactics

[quaint yoke]

my recent pilot, sadly there's not animalistic options for my other main one

[alpine sorrel]

non lore compliant cat ears on on their way, I'm assured

but I'm really looking forward to the wild asset packs that'll be able to be modded in

someday

[quaint yoke]

my friend said she'll paypall 20 dollars if we find out how to do animal ears so i think we know what we gotta do

[thin lark]

Just give us a function to load a Godot resource pack in the console and we’ll start, btw :)

[thin lark]

I have been trying and failing to get reflection to do something useful on the loading more content front, so I gave up for a while, but as soon as there’s any reasonable path to loading custom content that isn’t messing with the base pack people are going to try their best to add some. Even if it’s just additional pilot portrait elements or alternate graphical styles for the Everest or whatever.

Personally I’m going to try for at least pieces of some third party licenses, especially the ones that don’t need any new code compiled and are just numbers.

[quaint yoke]

also, anyone has a sueful guide as to how to use the map maker stuff in terms of convos and whatever the 4th tab is?

[thin lark]

Various animal ears are statistically likely to be first, though :)

[thin lark]

No guide I’m aware of, but you can load up some examples and see how they do it. The tutorial for example can be loaded into the editor and it has lots of conversation, and if that is too much you could load the demon artillery mission that Inconveniencestore made, it has some simple conversation and a few triggers

(Although the damage zone triggers only hit one unit per zone, known issue right now)

[glad lotus]

People with cat ears are canon last I checked, so I'm super curious what non-lore compliant cat ears are like. 😆

[alpine sorrel]

last I heard there were no catpeople in lancer

(as a jest)

have things developed since then?

[quaint yoke]

how o di that

[quaint yoke]

nope, modified peoples is one of the most huge things in lancer. Feathers, tails, additional limbs etc. One of the cannon npcs is a person who has no head

[glad lotus]

oh lol

CRB p376 for reference

Tom is a chronic shitposter, I struggle to take those posts as non-shitposts. 😛

[alpine sorrel]

oh yeah they 100% are

shitposts

I was wondering if the joke has evolved since then where catpeople had been reintroduced somehow (perhaps a MONIST-2 intervention)

[glad lotus]

hahaha

[old pivot]

My understanding/headcanon is that the FCA prevents like... Hereditary catboys. But individuals can get cat ears installed

[burnt frigate]

the FCA actually doesn't care about hereditary biomods

the FCA, broadly, cares about two big things (and probably some other stuff beneath that which don't get expounded upon)
1). No uploading your brain to the cloud
2). No bringing the dead back to life

The big gist of the FCA is "dead equals dead," you can't do an Altered Carbon and endlessly upload yourself to a series of bodies, you can't do a Mass Effect 2 and bring someone back from the dead from a handful of goop

anything that isn't that? RA doesn't give a shit. Put your brain in a cyborg shell, mess with your genome all you want, give yourself animal ears, gills, four arms, doesn't matter

SSC currently believes there's a loophole within the FCA in that it doesn't say anything about lifespan limitations, and so because they can no longer legally research decorporealization (which they were pursuing prior to the FCA) their big thing is now longevity and life-extension modifications, the idea being that it's fine to live forever so long as it's through "classic immortality" of the "simply doesn't die of natural causes" variety

[gilded kindle]

Y'know the FCA seems like something you should not try and exploit loopholes in and skirt around the edges of what's allowed

Seems inadvisable

[burnt frigate]

People make a big deal about JCH2 getting vaporized, but the thing is that he was very explicitly and deliberatly flouting it in a very blatant and obvious way. RA by and large seems a lot more chill than the fandom tends to present, they aren't a hypervigilant micromanager, and the FCA is presumably pretty explicit insofar as what it doesn't allow

Like people in Lancer's setting can already live to like 200-300 years old with the right medical treatment, so if there IS some sort of enforced upper limit on lifespan, RA hasn't stated as much

[stable smelt]

also, ra doesn't personally punish every instance of decorp. like the maw is(was) just there, having a great time, and RA did not personally intervene to turn him into a nanomachine smear despite that explicitly being noted as a violation of the FCA.

[mild jay]

Fuck around; RA finds out? So will you

But if you’re under the radar you might be fine*
-# possibly some generous definition of “fine,” the maw didn’t strike me as a good time

[old pivot]

flying under the RA-dar, if you will

[magic cave]

on the topic of the Maw, while it's possible RA didn't know (not being omniscient seems reasonable), it's also possible that RA knew and let it happen, for unknown reasons
we literally just do not know

[teal sundial]

Breaking News: RA/MONIST-1 breaks silence on The Maw, confirms no plans for divine punishment
"idk I thought it was pretty cool"

[hidden jetty]

I can do you one better :D
(I spent most of my evenings this week working on this)

the modloader itself is working as far as adding frames/licenses, but I still need to add support for adding more mech and pilot images, allow mods to have dependencies, and I need to replace the hardcoded enums in lancer.gd with something I can modify using mods (so multiple mods which need to change that file don't have to replace it outright and thus break each other)

unfortunately this system's fatal flaw is that you need the game's source code to write mods for it - this wasn't a problem for me as I had to decompile it anyway to write the modloader, but I doubt the authors are going to want people doing that

[thin lark]

You did the thing!

Thankyou! I tried to do something but I hadn’t managed it, was trying to avoid decompiling it and go via the console.

We have some of the source code and much of the data structure for items revealed via dev blogs. I don’t doubt that the eventual plan will be different but we can probably work with some basics until then

[hidden jetty]

it works by running the game with --script to run some gd code, then that code patches in a modloader.pck and runs an initial scene stored in there. In that scene it then runs the code for loading mod pcks and adding their stuff to the various resource files that need references to them. Each mod pack has a mod.json file which tells the modloader what it needs to add. Then it switches scene to the actual game

[hidden jetty]

I don't think its possible to export mod .pcks without the full source code because the scripts reference class types defined there and thus won't compile

[lilac anchor]

The lifespan is 999, Ra never learned how to count past it

[lilac anchor]

oh my god this looks awesome?? Wheres the dragon from?\

[hidden jetty]

oh the dragon is my own homebrew

its an artillery mech which handles heat super well in exchange for catching fire if it ever stops moving

[lilac anchor]

neat!

[hidden jetty]

the token is unfortunately kinda jank because I'm no artist and so made it by tracing over the minotaur front/back tokens

[lethal leaf]

My headcanon is that RA intervened against JCH2 because if he succeeded in decorp, every shitty rich asshole would do it and result in a cyber gerontocracy. He didn't intervene against the Maw because no one is going to look at a swarm of devouring nanites that may contain someone's consciousness and go, "Yeah, I wanna do that."

I might even go so far as to say that the Maw serves as a deterrent to decorp. "You want immortality, huh? You sure you won't end up like this?"

[lilac anchor]

The maw therefore is an example yeah, you want decorp? Enjoy the maw

[alpine sorrel]

Holy wow!! 🤩 That's amazing!

[alpine sorrel]

My understanding of Godot mods is that if you wanna do anything code-related, having access to the decomped project will always be required. Part of the adding official mod support task is to figure out how to make said source code available in a safe/legal way, which I'm down to do because as you've found it's very possible to just do it yourself from the shipped game.

[teal sundial]

what are the legal challenges of making the source code available?

[fair pike]

I'm guessing still being able to own the thing

[alpine sorrel]

Not significant: I've seen other games do it by adding a license that says the code can only be used for informational/mod making purposes; please don't recompile the game for distribution. We'd need to write/pick one to say that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source-available_software

[fair pike]

As someone whose modding experience is fucking around with the JSON files, I am very excited to see where this goes

[alpine sorrel]

And a more game focused guide on it: https://drewdevault.com/2021/03/23/Open-sourcing-video-games.html

[hazy ferry]

Damn can't believe Lancer ripped off Warframe /j

[hidden jetty]

LT's most anticipated feature :P

[hazy ferry]

Max lifespan is 2³² because RA never updated to a 64 bit date system

[hidden jetty]

👀 I didn't even realise this was a possibility

[hazy ferry]

Although I assume the reason that the FCA isn't hugely enforced is because Ra doesn't want to enforce it unless it needs to

Ra doesn't seem particularly malicious

[lilac anchor]

This is true, usually the albatross are also in the area and happen to deal with it anyways

[stable smelt]

my own suspicion is that the FCA is much broader than what RA actually personally cares about, because then there's no obvious path to whatever it is RA doesn't want done.

[young sorrel]

Small thing: Rank 3 of Nuclear Cavalier isn't called "Fuel Rod Gun", it's called "Here, Catch!"

Also, behold my silly theme team

Featuring:

Rook the Railgun Drake. Can threaten enemies in a straight line

Knight the Torch Nelson. Can boost towards an enemy then Skirmisher to move laterally.

Bishop the Andromeda Hacker Manticore. Shouts about their god.

Queen the Pinaka Monarch. Can threaten several enemies from far away.

[proud dirge]

does scavengers ring have an intended OPFOR?

[hidden jetty]

it doesn't use the selected opfor but instead the ones built into the map

[lilac anchor]

map making hours, good to be back in the groove. How do we feel about boarding actions?

[small panther]

Very

I feel a lot about boarding actions.

(battlegroup boarding action resolved via Lancer Tactics sitrep. Imagine.)

[lilac anchor]

Oh that’s what this is about

The Endless Cosmonaut will be a fight in this

Once I figure allat out

The coding, sitreps, enemies, and how convos and triggers happen

[hazy ferry]

I want to do that sort of thing at some point but getting people to play battlegroup is very difficult

[lilac anchor]

Battlegroup is fun, I hope you find a group some day!!

Oh I can send what the endless cosmonaut is if some folks don’t know what I’m talking about?

This is the Endless Cosmonaut, an ace wing from Battlegroup

[small panther]

It can't be more than a veteran elite imo, 'cause it's actually very brittle for an ace. Also so you have a chance to actually see it die so it can respawn

[lilac anchor]

oh yeah

hes gonna be an elite Ace

[young sorrel]

Me with my squad of four Barbarossas

Indifferent

[lilac anchor]

horrifying

any idea how to make LT recognize if a unit is dead?
trying to set up the respawns for the Endless Cosmonaut rn

[hidden jetty]

there's an on destroy event

[lilac anchor]

I dont see it? I might be doing this wrong

[hidden jetty]

ah its called death

I run it pre with an execution limit of 1 and then run the destroy event manually. I don't do it here but I set it up like that so I could get a reference to the unit before it is destroyed and still run events afterwards

[lilac anchor]

Alright

when the EC dies I have a dialogue set to play

and then I have the on a new round, spawn him in

only issue is I need to make sure there arent 5 of him flying around at once, so it only spawns him when hes dead

[hidden jetty]

I think there's a check under unit state for 'is alive and on map'

[lilac anchor]

oh fr?

[thin lark]

You can probably also count the number of units that match a filter of some sort, and then only do it if that number is 0. I can’t recall offhand how specific it gets.

[hidden jetty]

ok so I still need to set up a github or something for the source code, but my modloader should now be ready for actual use.

To use it, drop the 'modloader' folder in the .zip file into the same folder as your game executable, then run the executable with --script modloader/modloader.gd

here are the mods and texture pack I made for it. Drop them in the modloader/mods and modloader/texturepacks folders respectively

• gms-1st-party-1.0.pck - adds the chomolungma, sagarmatha, hurricane cluster projector, tempest charged blade, and superheavy mounting core bonus
• mhi-1.0.pck - adds my homebrew mech, the Wyrm, its license equipment, and manufacturer. It is an artillery mech which handles heat well in exchange for catching fire if it ever stops moving. The license is themed around making line weaponry more viable
• cat_ears.zip - adds cat ears in the character creator, and a no ears option for if you don't want both human and cat ears. Tbh I only made this in order to test the texture pack loading

[hard saffron]

Hey! While you are in chat wanted to ask about the suggested level for the mini campaign? I couldn't find it in any of the map descriptions but I am assuming I missed something!

[hidden jetty]

LT maps are meant to scale with level, but there's currently a bug where it doesn't scale properly above tier 1. If you're looking for a level, I suggest LL3

[lilac anchor]

Oh shit??? We modding LT now??

Bbbbased o7

[hidden jetty]

the two most asked questions on the lancer tactics forums seem to be 'does this game have mod support?' and 'are you adding the other gms frames?' so I figured I'd try and kill two birds with one stone

[proud dirge]

omg do u think this can work on mac

[hidden jetty]

apologies for my mid pixel art as far as the frames go. I'd love to have an actual artist do it, particularly if I'm going to be adapting the other first party frames, but I don't know yet if I'll be able to commission someone

[hidden jetty]

the same .pck seems to work for both the windows and linux executables, so I think it should work on mac? I don't have one to test with though

[proud dirge]

yar valid

[gusty agate]

I could not find those folders. I looked in both lancer-tactics-pc and LancerTactics in Appdata. Do I need to make those folders? and if so in which spot?

[hidden jetty]

the modloader/** folders are in the modloader.zip file I sent above. You need to copy the modloader folder out of that .zip file and put it in the same folder as your LancerTactics.exe file (I'm not sure where that is on windows)

[hidden jetty]

now on github so people can access it. I've included a brief explanation of how the .json files are set up so you can make your own texture packs and mods for it.
https://github.com/GavstarB/lancer-tactics-modloader
https://github.com/GavstarB/lancer-tactics-mods

[gusty agate]

Ah, I didn't scroll up. Thanks!

[grand pebble]

Hey, PC user. Bought and downloaded the game. Now can't figure out how to open and play. Any helpful tips?

Oh wait, file didnt extract all the way. Nevermind

[grand pebble]

How do I pick a frame other than the everest? I increased my LL but the only mech in the drop down was the everest. Do I need to change the manufacturer?

[mild jay]

You need at least two license levels in the same mech license

So check that you have that

Ie if you are license level four and have 1 LL in goblin, 1 LL in Nelson, and 2 in Drake, you only have access to the Drake frame

[glad lotus]

A friend tells me that after suffering a sitrep defeat, all mechs in the party are set as destroyed in the subsequent instant action setup. Is that supposed to happen?

[quaint yoke]

Anyone got tips on how to load the tutorial into the level editor. I wanna take a look at it to see how I can make similar triggers and events

[hidden jetty]

go into the level editor, then
load button -> stock button -> tutorial: tutorial

[quaint yoke]

Strange request. Canine ears fjr my friend perhaps lol

[hidden jetty]

I'm not an artist so I'm afraid I'm not going to be making any more texture packs, but there's nothing stopping you from making one of your own

[quaint yoke]

I'll have to ask around how to lol

[hidden jetty]

there's a short explanation of the format on the github, but probably the easiest method is to download my cat ears pack, then edit the filenames, image and textures.json. You should be able to get the color values that you need from that texture

I recommend saving an image of a character and putting as a layer in your art program so you can get the ears in the right place - a bald one will let you get the position correct, then a hair one will let you see if it looks right

[languid quartz]

Hi all, I was wondering if anyone could help me out with setting up a specific kind of trigger in a custom encounter.

I want the boss of the encounter to be deployed when a player ends their turn within the marked "Objective" zone, but I can't figure out what condition to put in to make that happen. I've attached a screenshot of the trigger as it is right now, if it helps.

[hidden jetty]

you probably want something like this (note the execution limit is set to 1)

[languid quartz]

I see, so I want multiple conditions

And yeah, I meant for the execution limit to be 1

In theory it should only spawn the boss one time

[hidden jetty]

you need to check that the unit ending the turn is a player because otherwise it will trigger on enemy turns too

[languid quartz]

Much appreciated; thanks!

[fervent salmon]

just picked this game up for myself for Christmas. it's great! the Import from COMP/CON feature is fucking incredible

my players have loved seeing their characters imported and played, and the grid-based combat on PC immediately brought a different, crunchy energy to Lancer that I really enjoyed

[alpine sorrel]

that sounds like a bug!

[quaint yoke]

im trying to make players start in a zone so to speak ebfore the game starts then have thier PCS moving into the zone as part of the prologue before the actual deployment happens. Any ideas as to how to make that happen?

[alpine sorrel]

I'm not sure what you mean -- the PCs both start in the zone and also move into the zone later?

[languid quartz]

Got another question regarding a custom sitrep I'm trying to script

I have custom reinforcement groups and enemy spawns scripted in the sitrep itself, but Instant Action also wants me to select an OPFOR from the list. How do those two things interact?

Here's an example of some scripted enemy spawns, to demonstrate what I'm talking about

And then here is Instant Action requiring me to select an Opposing Force from the list in addition to that

[alpine sorrel]

The Instant Action screen will create a reinforcement group with a hardcoded name of "Reserves". Your own triggers can interact with that or not. The next build will have a checkbox in the editor that disables the Instant Action opfor & other settings, so it'll show up like this:

but until then, you can leave whatever opfor selected and it shouldn't show up if you're on Use Map Settings

[languid quartz]

Copy that; thanks very much for the prompt response

Also, you probably get this a lot, but while I have you here, I just want to say the game is phenomenal

You're doing fantastic work, and it's super fun and runs really well, especially for an early build

[alpine sorrel]

😁 that's great to hear! I'm glad you're having a good time!

I can get so focused on the issues with it that I need to fix I can forget what a good state it's in overall

[languid quartz]

I know the feeling lol, I get the same way with research papers

There will always be more little issues to fix, so the important thing is that there's an actual Good Game™ underneath those

[quaint yoke]

more or less. They start off to the side in the prologue that's not gameplay. Thier mechs walk over to the holdout zone. Dialogue. Then you deploy in the hold out zone as normal

think of it kinda like the pr0ologue of sacred stones where erika and seth start off map, move to a spot. Dialogue, then have dialogue

also is there a way to have an NPC talk in dialoguye without them being on map?

[alpine sorrel]

There's a move event that can move a unit that's already on the map -- I'd say check the tutorial for reference.

For NPCs speaking, you can set up a speaker that points at them while they're still in a reinforcement group:

[alpine sorrel]

I don't think I've ever tried to deploy Lancers that are already on the field.... you might have to like silently kill them off and then re-deploy them? I'd recommend skipping the deploy step and just launching into the combat, given the current tooling.

[quaint yoke]

That's fair. It's something I wanted to ask cause it's pretty classic in like fire emblem

Other question. Is there a way to make a dialogue trigger happen after a talent ability procs

But in a way that's off to the side and doesn't stop gameplay if that makes sense

Or when core power activated

[alpine sorrel]

hm, like one of the pilot barks that happen on deploying, etc?

for core power, there's already a way to do that without triggers -- open up the pilot in question, edit their Dossier, and set their core power bark to whatever line you have in mind

I should make an event that plays arbitrary text via the bark system though. logged.

But generally there's a Unit Action event (or something similar) that triggers can hook into; you can then put a condition on the string to see if it matches up with the kit ID of the talent/core power in question.

Also, we just finally got cat ears officially integrated 😌

[cyan crow]

Oh, update?

[alpine sorrel]

for the next one

not live yet

[thin lark]

Knowing it creates one called Reserves is actually really useful because it lets us make use map settings maps that still run off the selected one!

Thanks for this, will be helpful!

[hidden jetty]

this little shotgun-wielding asshole is causing me so much grief you would not believe. First it was triggering effects on only knockback caused by one character and now its ensuring that the various supermassive mod versions prevent the other versions from being applied. I haven't even gotten to the Cannibal's multiple attacks per reload yet

this is actual code from the is_applicable_to check

character_sheet_script.character_sheet_bus.save_character.emit()
var user_pilots: Dictionary[String, UnitCore] = UserContentLibrary.get_all_user_pilots()

does it save the character sheet like 8 times every time you click on the interface? Yes
does it finally update the interface properly? Also yes

[fair pike]

Now that is awesome

Viceroy next perhaps? 👀

[hidden jetty]

No promises lol. The Viceroy is grouped with the SSC alt frames so we'll see how much of a nightmare the Amber Phantom's core power is first

tbh the one I am looking forward to least is the Tagetes' rifle modification. I don't even know how the heck to start implementing that

[fair pike]

I'd be interested in trying some modding out if I can

I have the programming background, just no time these days :(

[young sorrel]

My personal pick for modded frame to implement would be Chomolungma, to provide more variety at LL0, and it hopefully shouldn't be too hard to implement?

Replacable Parts is in already and Brilliance is just "take two specific actions as free actions"

[teal sundial]

thats a great idea

[young sorrel]

...Welp seems like you beat me to the idea

[weak willow]

Per my last email is freaking gold I'm chuckling out loud

[thin lark]

The "anything is a rifle" might need some help from olive. That said, look at how the mimic gun reports it's everything. My guess would be the passive finds out what gun it's being used with and does the same, if there's access to do that...

[thin lark]

If Per My Last Email and Customer Service Voice ever work together, combining front of house and back of house into one unholy squad of passive aggressive corporate service worker rebellion, the corporcracy is doomed!

[weak willow]

Maybe the Tagetes just has a separate list of all weapons but tagged as rifle instead

[weak willow]

The concentrated, weaponized essence of passive aggressive corporate dispute resolution

[quaint yoke]

add canine ears as well, i will give you 5 dollars

[hidden jetty]

this may be the way to go tbh. Because everything in LT is a resource, if I modify a weapon for the Tagetes it will modify it everywhere else too

I ran into this same problem implementing the tightbeam mod but there I cheated and made it an alt fire
(also the secondary problem that there is no 'on mod applied'/'on mod removed' callback anywhere in the code, mods are passive effects which apply on scene start not in the character sheet page)

[quaint yoke]

my friend says and I quote

"a trans woman's self identity depends on it"

[alpine sorrel]

it's pretty common that I've got to add new engine functionality for most things like this. The "right" way to do it will probably be to add a new Buff TO that changes weapon types, then have tagetes have a weapon mod trait that can apply to multiple weapons that applies said buff. So that's two engine tweaks.

Another thing on my list for official mod support is changing the Buff TO enum to a list of StringNames so there's not a master list in one file and multiple new ones could theoretically be added without conflicting.

The fact that you're doing PC frame implementations with mostly just the tools that already exist is wild to me.

[hidden jetty]

its actually worse than that - the player needs to be able to select whether or not to apply the buff on a per-weapon basis from the character sheet screen

[hidden jetty]

its not so bad, there's a lot to work with. Some of my Caliban code in particular is super cursed though (like adding export vars to buffs and the character sheet refreshing code I posted above)

[quaint yoke]

God I wouldn't even want to consider the code needed for empakaii

[hidden jetty]

actually Empakaii probably isn't too bad because it can piggyback off the grappling code already written for the Blackbeard

I may eat my words on this one lol

[alpine sorrel]

Yeah sorry that's what I meant with the weapon mod trait thing -- it'd be a checkbox like OPCal but for multiple mounts.

I dunno if you've checked out the Engineer talent // Castigate yet, but that's another way to configure things from the character sheet -- it sets state in a configuration dict much like state but persists between combats

[hidden jetty]

okay this is brilliant I hadn't used engineer so I didn't realise there were dropdowns you can put right on the weapon

[alpine sorrel]

lookat these new beautiful friends from @tulip peak 🤩

[smoky glacier]

ohhhh i Love the barricade

[gilded kindle]

I <3 spider mech

[tulip peak]

The stripes on the cement mixer were a pain but when I thought about it hard I was like "I gotta flex..."

[mild jay]

I was thinking rainmaker and hive for the middle two but I’m blanking on the left one

I forget what else is size 2

[lilac anchor]

Amazing!!!

[lilac anchor]

Aegis

[smoky glacier]

Bombard in the back, yeah?

Rad! That's an awesome Aegis

[lilac anchor]

It made me think of a Spite from Wallflower at first

[hazy ferry]

Big gun

[hidden jetty]

I love the hive - its just a little guy :D

[ashen kindle]

BALL MECH

I love the back mounted cement mixer too

[gilded kindle]

took a bit of figuring stuff out on my end but i managed to get GavstarB's modloader working

this stuff's awesome

[lilac anchor]

TFW pondering my aegis

[shrewd fulcrum]

Aaaaaa 🖤

[ashen kindle]

Pondering my aegis

[rain cipher]

The thingy on the top looks like a little bow ☺️

[teal flame]

hey what we have a modloader for this???

[hidden jetty]

here

currently on windows it seems to occasionally crash on startup - nothing gets corrupted so you can just keep re-running it until it loads. I'm working on a a fix at the moment

I love windows-specific issues because I only find out about them after I release the dang thing

[proud dirge]

love these new sprites

[old pivot]

I'm sorry for the ping GavstarB, but I'm not quite sure what you mean by "run the executable with..."

alternatively, if anybody else on windows is in a position to fill in my knowledge gap, that'd be amazing

[old pivot]

okay, I worked out how to solve that problem, but I'm having the windows-related (?) crash issue

[hidden jetty]

would you mind replacing modloader/modloader.pck with this file and checking to see if that fixes the crash? I have a suspicion it might be a race condition with the content loading thread so I just prevented it running entirely

[old pivot]

sure thing

that does not appear to have fixed anything

I can give you a screenshot of my command prompt if that would be useful at all?

[hidden jetty]

that would be helpful. Does it fail at different random points during the load process? That's what happens in my testing

[hidden jetty]

oh that is an entirely different issue

[old pivot]

it opens the LT window and I have precisely enough time to see and comprehend the word "godot" before it closes again

[hidden jetty]

you aren't starting the game from the Lancer Tactics directory, so you need to use
cd path/to/lt/dir with the path to wherever your game is installed
it can't find the modloader because it isn't looking in the right place

I really need to update the github to let people know you need to start it from that directory tbh

[old pivot]

my apologies, I have very little reason to ever use the command prompt, so I'm.... not experienced in this

it took me some googling to work out how to get the command prompt aimed at the right drive to start with

[hidden jetty]

nah this is on me. I keep forgetting not everyone knows what the heck I'm on about

btw you can start command prompt from a directory in windows by opening the folder up in file explorer and then typing "cmd.exe" in the bit where the path is displayed and hitting enter

[old pivot]

aha! Success!

(I just came off two years of requirement writing and bug identification for a major company... and never had to touch the command line once...)

[hidden jetty]

there's barely any reason to use the command line in windows tbf

I should probably package the modloader with a .bat file or shortcut or something which lets you launch the game with the mod just by double-clicking

[old pivot]

okay, so, first use of Wide Area Code Pulse + Balance Control lockout crashed the game. I'm going to see if I can narrow down which one of those was the culprit

[hidden jetty]

do you have the output in the command prompt? That would help quite a bit

[old pivot]

it appears to be happening when I destroy a grunt

I reloaded the save, used WACP again - picking a non-grunt worked fine. As soon as I executed something on a grunt and it died, the game crashed

[hidden jetty]

oh wait I might be trying to move the unit even though it doesn't exist and that's throwing a null reference

[old pivot]

I tried again with Fragment Signal and got the same result

so I don't think it's a movement thing

I'll reload again and check if its WACP

okay, a regular Fragment Signal outside of WACP on a grunt didn't crash

I tried on an Ace grunt instead of a Hornet grunt and proved it's not a Hornet specific bug

[hidden jetty]

yeah that'd do it

this is my fault lmao

the source is my hacky code for temporarily removing invisibility

[old pivot]

very small QOL request for the Chomolungma mod: there needs to be a way to back out of Brilliance without losing the action if you haven't executed any part of it yet. As it stands, once you click it, if you click "cancel" it just skips whatever part of the action you were on

[hidden jetty]

here try this and see if it fixes the WACP crash

[hidden jetty]

that's a good shout I'll see if I can implement that

[old pivot]

one moment, I'll install an spin up a fresh map

Grunt died successfully

bug appears to be fixed

new mod bug?: I hit a goliath with Balance Control Lockout, got a popup saying it's immune to prone, and then it became prone

[hidden jetty]

lol yeah its not meant to do that

[old pivot]

wait, no, I read it wrong

it says "immune to Knockback"

[hidden jetty]

did it move the goliath? Its supposed to be immune to forced movement

[old pivot]

it did not move the goliath, I think it's working perfectly and I'm just a fool. One second, checking the wording in the NPC rebake

[hidden jetty]

The Goliath can’t be pushed, pulled, knocked Prone, or knocked back by smaller characters.
nah its supposed to be immune to prone

[old pivot]

okay, no, not quite right - as you say, it's supposed to be immune to being knocked prone by smaller characters. And this chomolungma is not size 3

I am unclear if this is a bug on the Mod end (Balance Control Lockout) or the Vanilla LT End (Goliath statblock)

hmmmm... what in Vanilla LT causes prone? other than Ram

Ram works. Or rather, doesn't work in a manner that is expected

[hidden jetty]

just checking this is normal BCL not BCL due to WACP or Brilliance?

[old pivot]

normal BCL

Seismic Deluge on a monarch confirmed to successfully not work... so looks like this is the BCL

[hidden jetty]

okay this is actually way harder than it seems because it still counts as using the action if you back out of it

[old pivot]

yeah... I could imagine it's hard because it actually gives you two actions. I'd want to be able to back out if I haven't used either of them, but I don't think LT works in a manner conducive to that

[hidden jetty]

I could make it so you can't cancel the action but then it would break if there are no valid targets

[old pivot]

could you make it work kiiiind of like the WACP menu?

I.e. you hit Brillian button, it highlights everbody you can target, you pick a target or back out, and then if you've picked a target, it offers you your options of what to do to the target

[hidden jetty]

that doesn't work because unlike WACP brilliance actions can have different targets depending on the action

[old pivot]

drat, yeah, fair enough

[hidden jetty]

this should hopefully fix prone on the goliath. The issue was that I was using the godot id of the action not the persistent id of the gear it was attached to as the key for the effect, so the goliath couldn't tell it was from the chomolungma

[old pivot]

I will test and report back

Task failed successfully: Goliath was neither moved, nor knocked prone, by Balance Control Lockout

[hidden jetty]

nice

you do waste the action but I think that's actually what I want to happen in that case - its on you to remember that you can't move/prone a goliath

[old pivot]

very fair

thank you for making the two GMS mechs

I've had a lot of fun tonight with the chomolungma. I'll give the sagarmatha a whirl tomorrow

[tulip peak]

Currently working on an asset pack for the mech sprites for use as tokens and to help with modding custom frames in

Will include the templates I use for new sprites and some quick and dirty style guide stuff to help style match

Maybe down the line I can include some visual guides as well

[hidden jetty]

that would be amazing, thank you so much :D

the one part of this I really struggle with is trying to make the pixel art for custom frames

[hidden jetty]

I am kind of a god actually. These duplicates of weapons are generated on startup, registered in the content library and are only added to licenses when the selected character sheet is a Tagetes.

The implementation is kinda cursed - the passive gets the character sheet by getting the engine's root node and then walking down the node tree. I think I can use this same hack to fix the supermassive mod having to save the character sheet over and over.

(I'm not going to do the rest of the Tagetes right now but I wanted to make Fusiller because I couldn't stop thinking about how to implement it)

[weak willow]

https://tenor.com/view/matrix-gif-5613476

GavstarB

[teal sundial]

maybe cannibal's multiple attacks per reload could use the same kind of thing as the bombard's High Impact Shells

[hidden jetty]

I think I'm going to try and use a dice starting at 2, then unload when it hits 0 and reset

[weak willow]

I am so hyped for caliban I can't even

[thin lark]

Once the Christmas period is over and I have reliable computer access again I’m going to try for either the Gilgamesh license or some of the Suldan stuff.

[lilac anchor]

Holy peak? I gotta get my modloader installed soon!

[tulip peak]

I did it~ Happy Holidays everyone

https://gentrigger.itch.io/lancer-tactics-mech-sprites

[glad lotus]

Oh my goodness...

[hidden jetty]

that's amazing, thank you so much :D

[teal sundial]

!!!

identified fucking thing

[winged junco]

It's the Hydra

[alpine sorrel]

New build is live, including said hydra. 🙂 Happy holidays everyone x2! https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/wickworks/lancer-tactics/posts/4573425

[hidden jetty]

:D

[alpine sorrel]

Incl a dive on how we do recoloring of pixel art:

(it's a tiny me doing this by hand inside your computer for every sprite)

[stable smelt]

wow! my method!

[small panther]

Can't believe you managed to include a free Olive partition free with every purchase !

[tulip peak]

This is literally how I do the color key but in reverse

[alpine sorrel]

Hahahaha

[mild jay]

“This ungodly thing is a toneramp”
A lil’ bit of blasphemy now and then can be useful huh

I’ve used one in the past for mapping gray scale values to colors, but here you’re basically using it to sorta encode instructions on how to create a palette from a single color value?

[stable smelt]

this is a really neat way to get the kind of variance that hand-done palettes can have programmatically, or at least significantly approach it.

[mild jay]

I was having trouble comprehending while reading but it felt like it clicked after I backed out of the update page

[small panther]

The examples really cleared it up for me

Really cool stuff btw, love learning about this kind of thing !

[mild jay]

Tbf I think it’s just my brain having a delay on processing what it was taking in

[stable smelt]

(and frankly it looks like an innovation to me, it's not something I've seen done before in terms of like, programmatic pixel art coloring)

[mild jay]

I enjoy learning more about advanced techniques like this

One of the tools I made for myself to help work on one of my side projects was inspired by past Lancer Tactics update posts about how the pilot portrait maker works

[alpine sorrel]

I'd be interested to know how other games do it! For this, I was at a hours long but routine infusion center health appointment chewing on the problem of how to generate artful palettes and somehow stumbled on the Minecraft guide. I felt like it guided me through a veil of dreamlike understanding in that liminal space and I came out the other side muttering about reusable toneramps.

[stable smelt]

I'm admittedly just an observer mostly, but I take note of what a game does for dynamic recolors and stuff and the toneramps here are like, on the upper end of what I usually see.

• just put a filter on it(it's blue now.) usually looks bad, super obvious. ex; vampire survivors freeze effect.
• slightly more advanced version of that where it's actually like a multiply or overlay layer. usually looks better, but still basic.
• in the other direction, you have a base sprite and key in colors to it. really basic example: starbound's armor recoloring.
• the more advanced version of that, like LT was doing, you have a base sprite and key in a prebuilt palette to that. ex: ball x pit's ball sprites do this(this isn't a user-editable example though, but there are some)
  and I don't think I have a higher example than this off the top of my head? besides the obvious toneramps you've just added.

it's just a solution I don't think I've seen before.

[thin lark]

I’ve seen games do toneramps, especially those that use greyscale for the actual art and then replace it with the colour you pick. I think airships does their paint like this for example, though I can’t be sure

[hidden jetty]

me when I realise I have been exporting my .pcks wrong this whole time and it means the modloader and mod files cause every new script in the game to fail compilation when loaded in version 0.5.0

[hidden jetty]

the tone ramps are super awesome I haven't seen anything like it before!

(and I personally really appreciate that there are more greens in the game now)

[quaint yoke]

question

how does one set up a holdout objective to actually like

work

I'm trying to figure out to make this map i have into a holdout in addition to having reinforcements actually appear

so would appreciate some people who might know better than i

[thin lark]

If I had more computer than a phone I would show you! As it is you’ll maybe hopefully benefit from advice?

You put a zone in the middle called center, and when in holdout, enemies will come from entry, end zone and flanks, but players will spawn in the center

This is of course all out of date advice, the new update four hours ago probably changes stuff…

In the past that’s how it worked. With those zones, the holdout sitrep automatically deployed your player lancers in the center and pulled from the selected enemy opfor reinforcement bundle to populate the right amount of enemies

[quaint yoke]

how do you make it a holdout?

is there a button i have to press

[rain cipher]

Amazing to see all the changes since last patch (even as I saw most of them being reported haha). If it weren't Christmas Day I'd be tempted to jump in and try it all out! Ah well, it'll have to be tomorrow. Thanks for all your hard work LT team, Happy holidays and Happy birthday Olive!

[alpine sorrel]

There's a button in the zone tool that says "add defaults for sitreps". This will add a number of zones to the list. Make sure you add tiles for the center zone plus I think flanks. That should be all that instant action needs to run holdout on that map.

Maybe endzone / entry as well, I don't remember

Just got my first post release report that instant action is crashing 😭 https://itch.io/t/5695385/crashing-when-trying-to-enter-instant-action-on-version-050

Classic deploy before vacation whoopsie. Guess it'll be broken for a few days because I ain't doing Christmas Eve hotfixing

[quaint yoke]

oooh, so the you choose what sitrep it is during instant action in the map making step

im silly

alos happy b day and happy holiday

[alpine sorrel]

Ty ty happy holiday to you as well!

[tepid temple]

You get to brag about your birthday being one of the holidays in "happy holidays" :P

[versed garnet]

Hiya! Just got it, love it, but I have a small problem- as soon as I try to click on "Instant Action", the game crashes. I've checked, the instant_action folder is there

Can I ask for any help there?

[alpine sorrel]

Oy vey. Not sure, also reported in that link above.

[versed garnet]

Ah, fair enough

[alpine sorrel]

Ok I don't have my computer so I can't hotfix but I'll upload a temporary dev build from one version back. I think it also has an instant action crash but only for the control sitrep.

[alpine sorrel]

Just uploaded it from my phone lol. You should be able to play instant action with the LancerTactics_0_04_10 download on itch

[versed garnet]

Thank you!

[rapid seal]

Ah, cat ears

They know their audience

[proud dirge]

CHRISTMAS EVE UPDATE???

[versed garnet]

still doesnt work on my end. weird

downloaded the 4.10 thing

[proud dirge]

is there any way we can go back and download 4.9?

[quasi steeple]

Hi ya just chiming in too, I've tried both versions and I still crash whenever I try to play anything that's not tutorial.

[teal sundial]

Happy birthday btw!

[small panther]

Oh yeah happy birthday !

[weak willow]

Merry Christmas! Enjoy the holiday

[thin lark]

Yes, although I'm unsure it helps. There's a lancer-tactics-pc.zip which was released 14 hours ago, and a LancerTactics_0_04_10.zip which was released 8 hours ago, both available on the itch.io page

I am getting:

WARNING: Unable to initialize Windows common controls. Native dialogs may not work properly.
   at: DisplayServerWindows (platform/windows/display_server_windows.cpp:6940)```

in the log, if that's helpful to anyone

(Specifically, when Instant Action is pressed)

I really enjoyed the several choices of tone mapping to paint a cool looking swallowtail though.

The reverse luminance really gives it an excellent holographic look:

Also, one should never do this. But... you can, technically, do this:

[small panther]

The Rainiestmaker

[thin lark]

One could also in theory do this, but... I mean, really, we all know it's a bad idea.

I might have to test this. I think it's legitimately a raid boss by itself at this point.

It has adds, it has annoyingly high stats, it's always invisible... the list goes on :)

[teal flame]

hmmm

option of choice i think is to just melt the thing with tech attacks

does it have core book ultra stuff, or rebake?

from the looks of it, rebake

which means it doesn’t get a free stun clear!

[thin lark]

True, but it does reroll systems checks due to veterancy.

Well, let's give it a try. No terrain, no sitrep, can't be bothered, just some mostly stock LL3 lancers vs this horrible thing:

It's so small :)

An option to just make NPCs bigger because you feel they ought to be bigger would be nice

(For anyone asking "But how can you play, instant action doesn't work?" no, it doesn't, but the map editor works fine, you can load maps in it, even define a sitrep if you really want to put the effort in, but you don't need one if you have both player lancers and enemy mechs just dropped onto the map)

(And there's a test play button in there)

Hah, here's a fun bug, it's asking ME whether the Ultra should reroll its stress check (via Legendary). Poor thing rolled a 6 on 1d6 to overcharge and only has 5 heat cap.

Hmm, and another crash when moving swallowtail. Spicy version :)

ooh, repeatable!

Bug Report: Load autosave which will be attached below. Start turn for Swallowtail, move to indicated position in screenshot. Confirm move, game crashes

Alas, moving the swallowtail at all seems to cause the crash.

[hidden jetty]

funnily enough I actually can use instant action in version 0.5.0, I think because the linux godot is more forgiving

it prints out some errors every time you update the page though

ERROR: Attempt to disconnect a nonexistent connection from 'root:<Window#34527511906>'. Signal: 'focus_entered', callable: ''.
   at: _disconnect (core/object/object.cpp:1621)
ERROR: Attempt to disconnect a nonexistent connection from 'root:<Window#34527511906>'. Signal: 'tree_exited', callable: ''.
   at: _disconnect (core/object/object.cpp:1621)

Darloth's save gives me the same hard crash

           | Swallowtail started turn.
    Applying buff to unit Swallowtail (E6T513): buff_opening_argument (6G3CB4): Opening Argument
      > queueing reactions to new_turn post :: [event_buff_activate--101:<Node#98125104559101>]
[ event_turn_start FIN ]                    {711} 

    [ event_buff_activate ]                        {101}
  {unit: npcc_rainmaker-2WSDKM, target_tiles: [], event: event_turn_start}
    [ event_buff_activate FIN ]                    {101} 

______________________
Determining who goes next....
      phase controller: allow_unit_to_take_action  :: Unit E6T513
60.0fps                       | ~~ Generate pathfinder for standard move ~~ START 
60.0fps                92 ms ~| ~~ Generate pathfinder for standard move ~~ FIN 
+++ <null> +++    entire_movement pre
trigon : true
timing : true
hibern : true
Segmentation fault (core dumped)

[hidden jetty]

seconding this, especially since we can kind of already do it by manually adding the fomorian frame core bonus in the unit's json

I am really loving all the new icons!
(I'm going to need to update my mods to include some of them)

also, would it be possible to add the old bombard texture as an alt texture for the bombard, as its still in the game?

and I guess another bug - horus_hydra_back.png seems to be in the npc folder not the pc folder, which I imagine means it doesn't get used at all

[hidden jetty]

the task of getting mods to work across multiple versions of the game is kicking my ass ngl. I'm going to need to come back to it once I'm no longer busy with christmas stuff

[hidden jetty]

having used the new character editor to re-create some of my characters, I have found the colour selection is really good for most things, but I was lacking in lighter options - it could really do with another rank of even lighter versions for each colour

[iron agate]

What language is Tactics coded in?

[hidden jetty]

gdscript. Its similar to python

and some performance-intensive code in C#

[alpine sorrel]

couldnt leave well enough alone -- just made a build using my steam deck. issue was a crash from a fresh install. 0.5.1 is on itch, hopefully that fixes it. merry christmas!

[alpine sorrel]

also fixed this. the hound missile was trying to overwatch.

[proud dirge]

mac build for 5.1?

[alpine sorrel]

Oh I didn't make one, let me see if the steam deck can cross compile there as well

Looks like it can build but I don't have any of my notarization settings to get past Gatekeeper, so it's gonna complain/be blocked. I'll put it up as a separate upload from the mainline Mac build

[frank temple]

I tried the normal 0.5.dmg and the compatability0.5.0.dmg, and both crashed when I tried to launch the instant combat

(Mac)

The 5.1 worked, but new problem. The character maker is really really broken. Changing the eye color didn't stick, and changing the hair color changed everything

[thin lark]

Huh, character builder worked in 0.5.0.... I didn't try changing the eye colour, but I could try.

let's see. :)

In 0.5.0, Hair colour changes all hair colours pinned as you'd hope, and eye colour sticks fine

Hopefully that makes it easier to fix later? Will also check 0.5.1 for me.

[proud dirge]

thank you olive!!

[thin lark]

Wow, yeah, face colours are messed up in 0.5.1 even if it's a pilot from previous versions, suggests rendering error rather than it's being set wrong

But the instant action works!

[proud dirge]

agggh 5.1 isnt opening on mac

[hidden jetty]

I think its just a rendering error because the pilot isn't corrupted when loaded again with 0.5.0

[alpine sorrel]

I had to use the new c#-less build to build on steam deck so something might be going on there

But yeah I'm not going be able to do any more fixes today

[proud dirge]

ya go have christmas thank u olive

[frank temple]

I got around it with tips from here

[thin lark]

Yeah, go enjoy christmas and some time off!

I'm really enjoying the new builds though, bugs and all. Lots of fun to be able to play with new stuff. I've never actually got to play against quite a few of these things. Rebake hound missiles especially are hilarious. So much damage!

Also, the right click to cancel out of move into inspect feels very natural indeed, I like it lots.

[proud dirge]

yayyy thank

[thin lark]

HAAAHAHAHahahahahah that was magical

The bunker failed its hull save and was knocked back 6 spaces like a character

THE BUNKER :)

(The movement was animated, I cannot describe the glee this caused, it was so silly.)

[hidden jetty]

I'm pretty sure that's rules legal as well. Incredible 😂

[thin lark]

I don't believe it is

It's not a character unlike a drone

It is a deployable, and those typically cannot be knocked back I -think-

[hidden jetty]

knockback just specifies 'target', so it applies to object as well I believe

[thin lark]

Wouldn't be the first time I've been totally wrong with lancer rules minutae, but I'm checking :)

for Hades Missiles specifically, it says "all characters" so the bunker shouldn't have been affected.

But yeah, maybe Knockback in general could apply to deployables which were targetted

Most special-attack sources of knockback specify characters

But most weapon tags (like War Pike has Knockback 1) do not, and the targetting and knockback rules would allow you to knockback a deployable that you targetted in that way

Yep. You can knockback a bunker. Just not with Hades missiles :)

Bug Report: Hades Missiles specifies "all characters within the area", but applied knockback to a deployed portable bunker, which is an object and a deployable but not a character

[alpine sorrel]

Ya I recently learned another way I've been playing lancer wrong forever. I thought drones counted as objects/deployables ie could be targeted by jackhammer rounds. (Didn't have the object/character dichotomy totally clear)
So there's not a low-level enforcement of targeting characters, I have to filter individually for each ability and frequently forget

[thin lark]

For sanity maybe the portable bunker deserves to be immune to knockback but alas, that's not in any of the books as far as I can see.

It seems sensible you could knockback an aegis shield thingy, which is a deployable, but not so much an entire bunker.

You could argue (and I now believe you should) that "it can't be moved or deactivated once deployed" is also knockback immunity, though. Probably immunity to all sources of forced movement.

I've been playing lancer wrong forever since I started playing it, and I don't see it stopping soon

[hidden jetty]

real. Me too tbh

[thin lark]

Well, we utterly destroyed the ultra.

Even with (or perhaps because of) them using limitless every turn and stressing their reactor most turns to get an extra action, bombarding the entire team with damage, and having 5 stress bars and 4 structure bars, three activations, and all that kit, they just were not that hard to hit and damage (admittedly, a swallowtail with Athena removed invisibility as a factor) and then were eventually crit for 26 damage by mourning cloak.

So, they -still- can't be a single boss unit and that's fine. Was a fun and rather different feeling fight though

[teal sundial]

they do seem to be overcharging nonstop

[hidden jetty]

maybe they need the logic I added for my 'ultra' where they only overcharge if they have 6 heatcap remaining so there's no possibility of stressing themselves

on the other hand purposely stressing yourself every turn to do more damage to the enemy is exactly what a berserker ultra would do lmao

[thin lark]

It’s a difficult balancing problem.

Also many ultras just don’t have 6 heat cap total. Rainmakers for example have 5 and no real way of getting more unless I missed an option

Many start with 8, which is fine, but rebake changes a few to have less

[hidden jetty]

then they really shouldn't be overcharging lol

[thin lark]

(Which I think is good)

Yeah, they’d have lasted a lot longer if they hadn’t been exposed the whole fight. But arguably not THAT much longer

[grand notch]

I haven't been keeping up much with development, but I am compelled to say "hooray cat ears, thank you." (Yes, I did just find out via the email.)

[odd whale]

Lancer Tactics Update 👁️

whats new

[teal sundial]

the new colour palette options are bangin beyond belief

[odd whale]

oh? :0

[teal sundial]

apparently using techniques borrowed from minecraft skin artists

[mild jay]

Out of context that sounds like a very odd phrase

Sounds like somebody’s magic system for their fantasy setting

[burnt frigate]

I'd like to circle back to this, are you saying the Rainmaker unit in lancer tactics only has a heat cap of 5 or am I misreading this?

Because that shouldn't be the case, Rainmakers have a heat cap of 8, both in the CRB and the rebake

[thin lark]

Hmm... I will check. I believe it was 5. Not sure why, could have been as a result of something, I stacked a lot of things on that NPC.

[burnt frigate]

Nothing should reduce an NPC's heat cap

I don't think there's any combination of anything that should result in that happening

[thin lark]

Indeed, looks like a bug with the Rainmaker statline in LT then

That's a base rainmaker

Bug Report: Rainmaker statline is wrong, see above, heat cap should be 8 at all tiers. Rest looks correct to me according to rebake PDF, although I have no easy way of checking it has the +2 systems bonus it should have from the level editor, it doesn't show HASE stats for NPCs at the moment.

Also, I used the word "many" earlier, which is totally wrong. Most have 8 heat cap, I think. "A few" NPCs don't have at least 6 would be a lot more accurate. Some have 6 or 7, but most have more.
Edit: I checked, it's only Hornets. Only hornets have 5 heat cap.

(They probably still shouldn't overcharge all that often, but eh.)

[burnt frigate]

Yeah for the most part my philosophy with rebake heat caps wasn't so much to directly adjust them (I do in a few places but mostly it's smoothing out scaling over tiers and not "dropping someone's cap by 3") but to add more stuff into the mix that costs NPC's heat to use, optionals, baked in Limitless for Veterans, etc

[proud dirge]

bug report! witch's blur ability is making their outgoing attacks check invisible if they're in the danger zone, which i dont think is how it works

[worn tiger]

Known and fixed as of the most recent update (yesterday)

[proud dirge]

oh awesome!!

sorry im playing 4.9 cause i was having trouble getting 5.1 to work

[worn tiger]

All good, I just remembered seeing that one in the update notes and figured I'd mention it'd been sorted out

[thorn tree]

i can't tell if i am just dumb and can't figure it out or if the color editor for pilots is buggy as hell

[thorn tree]

things start like this when i open a blank character (first image) and when i go to change say the hair color it responds like the second image

[alpine sorrel]

I think some folks were mentioning that the emergency build I did had some portrait maker problems

[languid quartz]

Bug Report: Ghast Nexus does not appear to inherit Grit bonus to-hit when deployed away from the parent chassis. Bonus to hit displays as +0 while Ghoul Nexus is displaying +3 on a LL6 pilot. Percent chances to hit reflect this as well.

Haven’t checked if the Assassin drone has the same problem, but it’s probably worth looking at as well

[hidden jetty]

Caliban license continues to cause me pain and suffering. Spike grenades are a buff that targets can clear as a quick action, which means that action needs to be added to their loadout in such a way that it doesn't get saved permanently to the character sheet and break everything.

And they cause knockback, which means I need to give them a fake 'attack declared' event to get pursue prey to proc.

Pursue prey is just not going to proc on other non-attack sources of knockback I think, it barely works as it is and there's no way to get it to other than to change the actual game source code.

[quaint yoke]

question for someone dumber than i

or well smarter than i

how do i do a mission with preplaced units on the ally side

i'm currenltyt rying to figure that out

[teal sundial]

as in- make one in the combat editor?

[alpine sorrel]

There's a switch at the top of the panel when you select a unit in the editor

[quaint yoke]

sorry should rephrase that

how do i load it up in the instant action with these units and let player's control them?

[hidden jetty]

to use preplaced units and triggers you have to use "Use map settings"

which means you also have to define the enemy opfor and sitrep inside the map for it to be playable

[quaint yoke]

ok so if i'm trying to make a hold out, how would i do that?

[hidden jetty]

• you'll need a trigger at the start of a new round to detect when X rounds have passed. Then you can check how many players/enemies are in the obejctive zone to end the mission with a success/fail
• the selected reserves list on the instant action screen is called "Reserves", so at the start of each round you can deploy units using a deploy reinforcements trigger with that name

[teal sundial]

on this subject- one thing that would be nice is the ability to copy trigger groups from one combat editor file to another within the UI (or adding an additional intermediary place you can copy trigger groups to and from from within any given combat editor instance)

[alpine sorrel]

You should now be able to awkwardly do this via the sitrep modal -- make a new "sitrep" and add the current triggers to it. Then you can add that sitrep's triggers to any battle

[alpine sorrel]

1. You can copy holdout's triggers via the sitrep modal to your map
2. Delete the "spawn players" trigger
3. Place your units
4. Play "use map settings" from Instant Action

[gilded kindle]

for some reason whenever i try to do the survive mode the game will spawn only a single enemy and nothing else, go through 2 rounds of that one enemy doing nothing, then declare that i have lost

i've tried a few maps and a few opfors, and it appears to just be the survival mode

[thin lark]

Does the map say it supports survival? Maps seem to be able to specify nowadays whether they'll work for a thing, but it's... weird.

At first for me everything was holdout everywhere even when it couldn't be, but enough map and opfor and sitrep selection seems to have fixed that

That said, can confirm the same happened to me with Tom's Special, on Pipeline, with Survive

I think the triggers for Survive are just not correct right now. Attempting to fix locally so I can give a better suggestion, but even for a custom map the player deploy trigger just doesn't seem to work

Huh, really, THAT fixes it?

Whenever anyone wants to fix the Survive sitrep, here's how I did it. When applying the player deploy type to Center, you have to make it visible, or... it doesn't work. Don't know why you can't deploy to an invisible zone, but you cannot.

If the zone is visible, sitrep works fine.

Bug Report: When detonating, the Hound Missile rolls a save vs itself.

Bug Report: Description for Ronin's Counter Ballistic Suite is missing when it triggers. It starts with The Ronin may give them a Ronin's Mark

It should probably start with:
Whenever a hostile character within range 5 makes a ranged attack, the Ronin may-

Feature Request: There's a hidden default toneramp that can only be used by not selecting any of the tone ramps, and once you've selected one you can't get back to the hidden default except by resetting ALL the colours to default. Can we have that default as an accessible toneramp please, it's sometimes nice, especially for NPC colours because it's pretty neutral with neutral colours. (It's weird with saturated colours, admittedly)

Observe - default sentinel:

Default Sentinel with a colour set:

But none of those toneramps actually match the bluegreyish tone of the 'default' tone ramp :)

other Feature Request: There's a default grey colour we don't have access to, and I'd like it. Or possibly just more greys and neutral tones, there aren't that many, and they often have pastel hues creeping in with the tone ramps

Feature Request: Even more red - we don't have much red either. There's only one column of true red and it's rather pale, close to orange.

That lovely blood red from the default NPC loadout is not available anywhere, for example

Bug Report: The Commander template's Press the Attack description doesn't mention how it is triggered, just saying The Commander can attack the target-
It should start with:

Effect: The Commander can attack the target-```

[thin lark]

Bug Report: If there's not much space in the enemy deploy zone, instead of expanding it like the player deploy zone does, it just... deploys NPCs into places they can't fit, like so:

(Many Sentinels overlapping)

That or it's not checking how big they are. One of the two.

[thin lark]

Bug Report: Some built in maps will not support Control even though they should, because they have zones defined as obj_1, obj_2, etc, and Control is expecting obj_a, obj_b, etc.
So far, Urban Sprawl is one of these, have not checked others

Bug Report: Urban Sprawl has zones within 8 tiles and so is not working well with Holdout or Survive.

Both Holdout and Survive, by default, force the enemies to only enter from the Entry zone, with none of the flanks or endzones surviving after the pictured clause

Removing that clause from the Initialize trigger bundle will preserve all zones, but obviously then deployment zones could exist within 8 tiles of sitrep zones.

I'm not sure why it's removing ALL the NPC deploy zones, as only the Endzone is within 8 tiles of the Sitrep (Objective) zone on this map, and it's also removing the flank zones (which are further than 8 as far as I can see) but not the entry zone?

Edit: No, it's because the flanks are ALL ONE ZONE, and there's a single tile of them within 8 :)

If you make the clause remove anything 7 or closer, then you won't have to redesign Urban Sprawl to work with Holdout properly :)

Alternatively, you could redesign Urban Sprawl such that the flanks are actually 8 tiles away

@gilded kindle and anyone else who wants to play Survive or Holdout, drop these into the Sitreps folder of the lancer tactics data directory (that is %APPDATA%\LancerTactics\sitreps by default if you're on windows) and they will add new options to the Sitrep dropdown which make Survival work, and reduce the exclusion zone on Holdout to 7 tiles rather than 8, which should fix most? of the current maps. If you want to adjust the exclusion zone radius further, it's on line 154 of the sitrep_holdout_battle.sitrep.holdout.modded.json, just change the 7 there to some other number (maybe also edit the label for sanity also).

[alpine sorrel]

So many bug reports! Ty. I'm going to do one more hotfix today for critical issues then go on break for real.

[thin lark]

Yeah, sorry, I want to help not overload you with stuff :)

As a general observation the enemy is happy to move even when there's targets in range, they have a good position applying overwatch to lancers, AND they'll take an overwatch themselves when moving.

And if I were the GM I wouldn't move that unit under all those conditions, personally. I just watched a Sentinel that was standing next to a melee Everest pop Eye of Midnight (great!), attack once (great!) and... move... four tiles, taking the melee overwatch, and now it's not standing next to two Lancers so it can't apply as much overwatch anymore.

Not a bug as such, but here's the log and the save from just after that happened, if you eventually want to look into how the AI was thinking

[thin lark]

Maybe bug? (Edit: Not a bug, mech corpses are a zone of difficult terrain that provide hard cover, so a size 2 mech does get size 2 hard cover standing on a size 2 mech corpse) The Sentinel is standing on the corpse of another Sentinel, and getting hard cover from it. I'm honestly not sure if that's how it's supposed to work, or if it's allowed to stand there.

[lilac anchor]

Hello fellow Lancer Tactics fans, I come bearing gifts!
I recently made a big Lancer video, and one of my guest stars who I talk to is Olive! Our wonderful dev! I figured I could share it here! (I asked and they said it was ok to promote my vid here)
https://youtu.be/bMm-6FKxRto

[lilac anchor]

i think your allowed to stand on wrecks, but they shouldnt give hard cover

[thin lark]

Nope, checked. They "provide hard cover" and are difficult terrain, so you can both stand on them and maybe even -should- stand on them

It just looks weird because it's a size 2 mech on a size 2 obstacle that is difficult but not impassable terrain

With that in mind, if anyone would like some pain, try against this OpFor in a Holdout. I managed to pull out a victory, but it was extremely phyrric

It seems fine at first, until they all start cross-buffing each other, and eventually they're all standing on the point with armour and big beefy HP bars, and you can't move without getting shot, and you can't even shoot things without getting shot, and every time you get shot you take guaranteed damage and maybe negative status effects

Also, you're worse at shooting, and most likely the things you really want to shoot at are invisible.

[lilac anchor]

ah alright, I always thought they gave soft cover!

the name "Shotgun Fiesta" scares me

[thin lark]

I'm experimenting with groups of the same NPC type, but with different of the optionals attached to it. This one is Sentinels.

Lancer Tactics is both a) letting me do this at all with Rebake, since I didn't get a chance to run that, b) let me experiment a LOT more with different OpFor options including stuff like this which would be goofy as a tabletop scenario, but works rather well.

[lilac anchor]

fun!

LMK when orbital strikes are added to scouts

my grunt scout horde will one day be real

[alpine sorrel]

Should be in this most recent build

[lilac anchor]

oh fr?

LETS GOOOOOOOO

[thin lark]

Indeed. I'm building an OpFor which is solely made of Grunt Operators and Grunt Scouts with Orbital Strike right now.

(This is absolutely not something you should ever do, I won't be presenting it as a good idea, and Rebake is even designed around you not even being able to do this... I should mod in the grunt subtypes)

But look at this. This is a Gauntlet, so standard, 1x reinforcement pool:

Can you imagine? It's going to be AWFUL.

For a holdout, DOUBLE that.

Probable bug report: Scout is a half size mech, sitting in a divot like this, it should have hard cover from those directions. Visible, yes, but also cover.

Topdown for reference also

Even if somehow the Drake can see over/around the rock because of size calculations, the scout is adjacent to a height change, I can't see how it (as a half size mech) doesn't have hard cover from the entire bottom and left directions

Nope, was a different grunt. It -did- do something first, sorry. First it called down an orbital bombardment on its own position, and now it's risking a knife in the back moving out. Seems legit :)

Huh... interesting rules quirk. Overwatch with an aux/aux slot, can I retarget the second half against something that didn't trigger the overwatch? I think so...

Long term bug: The odds calculator is calculating wrong. Just made a "100%" tech attack against a grunt, and, well...

Sure, this was very unlikely, but it wasn't a 100% chance to hit, was it?

(Specifically there was a 97.5% chance of landing that)

[small panther]

if the "designed around you not even being able to do this" bit is about the new grunts, iirc the rebake pretty explicitly is still made to be compatible with the grunt template and even CRB NPCs so not really

[thin lark]

Fair enough.

[small panther]

still do not do 50x grunt orbital strikes, but not because that's what the rebake tells you, just because it's the right thing to do (loud_incorrect_buzzer.wav)

[mild jay]

Rebake grunts are there to fill the role of grunts in a way that avoids blundering into oops all operators

The issue is mainly core grunts aren’t intuitive to a brand new gm which npcs make good grunts. Though some of the changes to classes do probably tone down how rough some of the choices can be

[mild jay]

…with some exceptions, perhaps

[thin lark]

It was surprisingly tame. A LL3 team handled it without difficulties. There’s a lot of damage in the Operator plasma rifles but the orbital strikes are slow, yet the scouts prioritise placing them over making Markerrifle attacks

Just apply some area damage and a few tech attacks, no big deal

As in, it barely used up many consumables. Couple of repairs and an auto loader drone for the entire battle

[alpine sorrel]

heya, I'm making a quick hotfix to address the portrait maker and sitrep issues. Did you find what the problem was with the existing Survive?

oh I kept reading, a zone viz issue

[hidden jetty]

the pure greys seem to have this slight tinge to them - you can see here with the old/new versions of this white-haired character

(the wings on the mech are old orange and new red respectively - new orange looks kinda weird at these lighter colour values)

[alpine sorrel]

What's happening here is that we didn't totally remove the old handcrafted-palette system; you can see us still using it for pilot skin colors. The mech defaults are still using the old handcrafted greys/others.

It loads old ones just fine (for backwards compatibility) but setting a new color switches the token over to the new system

Noted that there's more tweaks needed to toneramps/bases to be able to achieve the same colors as the old system 👍

Just posted another hotfix that addresses the sticky colors problem: https://wick.itch.io/lancer-tactics/devlog/1219950/v052-hotfix

aka olives_holiday_break_final_FINAL

[hidden jetty]

testing with this version and it seems to all be working great so far! Characters are back to normal which is awesome and instant action seems to be working correctly. I haven't tried the sitreps though, just my test map

thank you Olive for taking the time out of your holidays to provide us with bugfixes like this!

[thin lark]

It’s much appreciated but certainly from my point of view I don’t want you to lose holiday time over it and would be happy to wait. I have been most certainly enjoying the new NPC things though, as you can hopefully tell.

[thin lark]

I wonder if Orbital Strike is supposed to go away when the scout is killed. From a mechanical sense, the system has an immediate effect, and the timer is not linked to the scout which calls it in. However, most such timed effects are linked to the character that called them, and fiction can easily go either way.

I can tell you that a load of scouts dropping orbital strikes on the objective rapidly make a BIG hole in the terrain though, which is very funny.

(Or possibly it's all the other stuff happening there, I can't really tell. As written, orbital strike shouldn't even be hitting the terrain though if it is, good, I like it.)

[hidden jetty]

big progress on the modding side today:

• I now have a new version of the modloader compatible with 0.5.x versions of the game (v0.4.7 and v0.5.x modloaders are entirely incompatible with each other's game versions, and I'm still not sure exactly why)
• mods can now be built such that they are version-independent (to an extent, they still fail to compile scripts if changes are made to the code they reference, and I'm still trying to figure out how to remove all the (harmless) uid warnings spamming the console)
• the game has new icons (and they're really awesome!) so I have updated all my mods to have icons of their own, kitbashed from various game icons
• Caliban license is now feature complete!
  (last thing to do for the Caliban is make the front/back mech sprites, a task I have been procrastinating because I'm kinda dreading it ngl)

I'm hoping to be able to release all this stuff in the next couple of days

[burnt frigate]

Orbital Strike doesn't go away. The reason is that even though it has a time delay, its timing is independent of the existence of the Scout. Put another way, if Orbital Strike was tied to the end of the Scout's next turn and the Scout died before it went off, there would be no "Scout's next turn" for it to measure. But Orbital Strike is keyed to the end of the next ROUND, so it persists even if the Scout is destroyed beforehand.

[thin lark]

In which case, bug report, Orbital Strike goes away at the moment when the scout is killed.

[naive relic]

is the extraction sitrep bugged or is there an action Im missing ? the object doesn't move with my units by default. sorry if this came up already but I couldn't find anything searching the thread

[alpine sorrel]

There should be actions that pop up in your bar when it's adjacent and uncontested: move payload & shift payload

[hidden jetty]

Bug Report: units cannot Overwatch with integrated weapons, such as the Raleigh's M35 Mjolnir (or the Caliban's Flayer Shotgun)

this seems to be because traits/core powers are never appended to the attacks list in loadout_core

[hidden jetty]

v0.5.2 versions of the modloader and mods are now released!
https://github.com/GavstarB/lancer-tactics-modloader
https://github.com/GavstarB/lancer-tactics-mods

I have written some scripts for automatically filling out the git repository with the .pck and source code when I build a mod, so that should be less of a hassle in the future.

(Caliban mod should be coming soon...)

[odd whale]

MODS POG

Gav
i will actually fucking love you if you make a mod that lets us import our own images as mech sprites

[ik its planned for the future but i really wanna see it lmao]

also i dont mean to be an absolute moron but how do i "Run the Lancer Tactics executable with the parameters --script modloader/modloader.gd"

[hidden jetty]

okay so the good news is this already exists, its called a texture pack and you can see the format on the github

[odd whale]

👁️

well holy shit

but uh

i still dont know how to get the mods to work

[hidden jetty]

are you on windows?

[odd whale]

yep

i got the modloader thrown in here

but i dunno how to do the fancy bootup stuff, lmao

[hidden jetty]

awesome, that's the right place

at the top of the file explorer where it has the filepath you should be able to click on it and type cmd.exe, replacing the highlighted text, then hit enter

this will open a command prompt in that folder

[odd whale]

oh shit

i never knew you could do that

okay now what 👁️

[hidden jetty]

then you should be able to type LancerTactics.exe --script modloader/modloader.gd into the command prompt and hit enter

[odd whale]

righto!

[hidden jetty]

and that will start the game with the modloader

[odd whale]

Ayyy!

Do i have to do that every time? 👁️

[hidden jetty]

yes, if you want the modded content (and modded content may break or crash your game if loaded without the mods)

[odd whale]

no biggie

[hidden jetty]

you should be able to launch the game with the params using a shortcut but I dont' remember off the top of my head how to set that up

[odd whale]

right

oh well. still worth it

now i must figure out how to implement my own tokens as texture packs

but for now i will enjoy the glory of the SAG

thank

[hidden jetty]

pixel if you ever feel tempted to make some isometric mech art I am struggling with making art for the various modded frames ngl

sagarmatha doesn't even have art it just uses the everest token

[odd whale]

I use Retrograde Minis like most folks unfortunately, lol

[hidden jetty]

ah cool

just @ me if you run into any bugs and I'll try and fix them

[odd whale]

oki doki!

[hidden jetty]

on this note if anyone knows someone I could commission to make isometric token art please let me know. I'd ask Gen but I suspect they'll be busy for the foreseeable future

[fiery bear]

Impact Dynamics colour scheme spotted

[alpine sorrel]

It would have been a nice combo to be able to use retrograde's tokens for the base game & be able to tap into the massive body of existing work there... but in order to accommodate their base scale, we would have had to make all the tiles really large. At standard zoom (1 screen pixel == 1 token pixel) you'd only see like 10 tiles across at a time. An L for pixel art's inability to zoom in/out well.

Very much looking forward to seeing what people end up modding with Gen's token pack though

[hidden jetty]

Here it is, the mech all sailors fear, the IPS-N Caliban!

I've spent a lot of today trying to make the tokens for it and I've finally created versions that I don't hate. It uses game code which changed between v0.4.7 and v0.5.0 so I've had to build two separate versions, unlike my other mods which work with both.

You can download the mod from this message or its also on the github:
https://github.com/GavstarB/lancer-tactics-mods

As always, just @ me if you find any bugs or issues.

[proud dirge]

CALIBANNNNNNNNNN

[old pivot]

Excellent, one step closer to being able to replicate my players in LT (just need... Several other 1st party things....)

[lethal leaf]

I can't find Skirmisher in the talents menu.

[alpine sorrel]

It and siege spec are still the two unfinished talents

[radiant hinge]

you can make a .bat file with the command and it'll work fine

[odd whale]

yea lol, Castle is an ID pilot who the party hired a while ago. it was the first token i saw as an example xd

[hidden jetty]

tbh I should probably package a shortcut or .bat file in the .zip for the windows folks, I just haven't got round to loading up a windows pc to do that yet

is there any content that you all would particularly like me to tackle next? I know someone wanted me to do the Viceroy, and I've already partially started on the Tagetes

[odd whale]

Zheng or Empakaai would be my personal vote

[thin lark]

I’m going to try and get some sort of development environment today and see if I can add Rebake grunts as npc classes to start with, hopefully shouldn’t be too much tough in there. That or prod at the easier parts of Gilgamesh, but I know there’s some tricky bits later in that, what with spawning whole controllable units and all that…

(Maybe a protocol per deployed squad to move them around…)

[hidden jetty]

spawning and controlling deployables is actually not bad at all, there's plenty of support in the engine for it

[hidden jetty]

I'm not ready to try drawing an Empakaai token 😂

[odd whale]

pfft, valid

Siege Specialist would also be lovely 👁️

[hidden jetty]

I'm not going to make skirmisher, siege specialist or anything else in the lancer crb because that's already going to be added to the base game

I think I might do the SSC alt frames next because I finally have an idea for how to handle the Amber Phantom core power

[odd whale]

okily dokily

[gilded kindle]

Been trying this out a bit and it's working perfectly so far

[hazy ferry]

Note to self, I am still terrible at LT

Tried a payload objective and god damn I got my ass whipped by an Elite Bombard and 5 million berserkers

[hazy ferry]

The mirage didn't help. Nor me forgetting to put flight systems on a mech that I had given Ace

3 types of enemies spawned.
1 Mirage
1 elite bombard
Like 6 or 7 berserkers

Nor did the fact that I forgot to add a longer range mech to the team because I was being all "hehe cqb mech cool"

(I did have a saladin friend for mental support so it's not that bad)

Only mental support though because literally everything hit through the +1 difficulty and it couldn't really body block because bombard said "take a nap" to it and my Ghengis

So I was playing with basically two mechs

[alpine sorrel]

Elite bombards are no joke

[fair pike]

Both bombards and snipers are fucking scary man...

[thin lark]

Snipers aren't as bad in my opinion. Even if they do hit you really hard, it's one character, and it's not going to happen on their next action usually.

Bombards really only need you to be grouped up once, and they'll put in so much hurt, and then even when you're not grouped up it's still relentless.

[naive relic]

Snipers you can block line of sight and youre good, Bombards and Rainmakers are just, yeah relentless and keep hammering you whereever you are.

[hidden jetty]

bombards are why I take beckoner on all my hacker builds - the only safe place for a bombard is next to your melee allies

[odd whale]

Just gonna throw my thanks out towards Olive as Lancer Tactics has saved my ass in terms of designing characters lmao

currently using LT's pilot portraits in a google doc (i
[I'm overhauling a mission for IGF, and I want to make it as LANCER-Y as possible rather than just writing it all down on, say, notepad.

...Lancer Tactics is very helpful for that]

[mild jay]

Wonder if I could also use it for CAIN. There do seem to be quite a lot of outfits

At least enough to seem like they’d allow for a range of more modern characters

[hazy ferry]

I didn't realize Skirmisher still wasn't fully implemented tbh

[hazy ferry]

Even worse it was a pretty small map, that one community (iirc) trainline map

So my close range units had no way to hide or anything

[odd whale]

so long as i dont monetize this (i wont, it's literally just for my altered campaign lol) i can use the Tactics pictures, right Olive?

im not sure how the copyright stuff works here-

[shrewd fulcrum]

Definitely something that'd have to be considered a setpiece unit

[alpine sorrel]

I have an item on my todo list, for surprise reasons, to pick a license for portraits made in the LT editor. I don't know which one specifically yet, but it'll be something that allows for noncommercial free use and remixing (profile pics, using in modules, home games, probably streams, etc).

[small panther]

well that's one question I no longer have to ask

incredible news btw

[odd whale]

Soooo im allowed to use the portraits for my home game?

Epic

[proud dirge]

anyone know how to download mods on mac?

[hazy ferry]

I can't wait to see what the storyline is

[hidden jetty]

the process should be much the same as on other platforms - put the modloader folder in the executable directory, put your mods in modloader/mods, open a terminal in the executable directory or cd to there, then run your executable with --script modloader/modloader.gd

unfortunately I don't own a mac so while theoretically it should work I can't test it myself

[hidden jetty]

modloader and mods are on these github pages
https://github.com/GavstarB/lancer-tactics-modloader
https://github.com/GavstarB/lancer-tactics-mods

[proud dirge]

bug report i think? the rainmaker/monarch in SR-05 just used tlaloc protocol but i can choose the new target

[hidden jetty]

just tested and yes this happens for me as well. I don't think I can fix it unfortunately because it's already flagged as ignore player input. Not a game bug either, because it is not supported behaviour to stick TLALOC on an NPC. I think for now you'll just have to pick the target yourself, and I'll see if I can figure out something to replace it with

[old pivot]

Huh, I didn't notice that bug because I used the goblin hacking to take over the Monarch's turn 🤣

[hidden jetty]

supermassive launchers are apparently legal on the Viceroy

(the code for this is truly horrifying, like "generate a new script at runtime to overload specific functions on a specific weapon's script" level horrifying)

[teal flame]

frankly i’m shocked to see mods working so well already

how much coding knowledge does it take to make this stuff work?

also it occurs to me that it’s probably worth making a LT wiki at some point

[hidden jetty]

I have a lot of godot experience (it was my day job for like 2 years) so I can pull off wacky stuff like this, but for abilities which have actual engine support you don't need that much I don't think. A lot of setting stuff up in LT is just creating resource files and ticking checkboxes, then assigning various resources to each other

[hidden jetty]

the mods will almost certainly break as engine code changes, so don't expect things to be remotely stable until we get an official 1.0 release

[teal flame]

yeah that’s fair

still, it can be done, without even any official support

[hidden jetty]

at some point I need to write a guide on how I actually make mods, but I've been procrastinating it unfortunately

[teal flame]

also entirely fair lmao

wait, can enemies even take the scan action?

[icy creek]

no

[hidden jetty]

I don't think so. I believe in Lancer enemies are assumed to automatically know all your abilities

[teal flame]

right

[odd whale]

brain fart
didnt realize this was the tactics channel

but yea

Enemies dont need to scan, as they already know what the gang has in Tactics

[odd whale]

i am severely unstable

[teal flame]

i should make LT-quality versions of my character sprites for import reasons

[odd whale]

he looks like he tries his best

[thin lark]

The tie makes it look like he works in accounting, and the general expression and outfit makes it look like that Incident where nobody got paid last month was a regrettable accident that absolutely won't happen again next week... At least, if the coffee keeps flowing.

Maybe :)

[thin lark]

I haven't really noticed the enemy attempting to play around anything I have. They're happy to move into (and out of!) overwatch range of your people, content to sit in line of sight of the death's head, etc. It might be part of the calcuations somewhere but it doesn't -feel- like they particularly care. The NPC AI so far seems a lot more focussed on the (admittedly -much- easier to test and tune) metric of how effective they can make their own stuff

[odd whale]

i thought this was the gm corner at first but yea lmao
they dont bother scanning because the AI just knows and doesnt care

[thin lark]

Hmm, there's an idea for some very set-piece battles, a puzzle layout where for example the enemy has many snipers, you have some strong shielding options, and you need to get to the other end and kill them with a fixed loadout by using all your shield kit

[tepid temple]

I'm imagining Olive has needed to hastily add a "modding" channel to the LT server that's being built

[hazy ferry]

Napoleon.

Turn on core, punch them all in the face

[teal sundial]

how does trueblack aegis interact with sniper's mark?

[hazy ferry]

I would assume it reduces the damage to 1

That's what it usually does

[thin lark]

Yeah, but taking "only 1" structure damage is usually no fun either.

Yep, looks like you'll take the 1 structure damage as usual. So snipers counter Napoleon pretty well.

the Blinkshield still stops it, but that's a slow way to advance

Trueblack Aegis works -way- better against Bombards, and adequately on Rainmakers (although all their multiple target stuff means you'll be taking the 1 plink damage quite a bit, most likely)

[lethal leaf]

You'd probably want ERM and Armor Lock, and probably Reactive Weave too.

[teal sundial]

will the final game have any music beyond what's already implemented?

[hidden jetty]

hardlight defense system + as many sources of forced movement I can fit onto my allies

snipers can't hit you if you are never targettable

[hazy ferry]

Which is worst:
Elite Bombard
Elite Berserker
Elite Sniper

[hidden jetty]

definitely the bombard

the others will wreck one target, the bombard will wreck your whole party

[thin lark]

I agree, the Bombard. You can do stuff to the Elite Beserker that keeps it relatively contained. The sniper is horrible but it can only hit one thing at a time. The bombard will not only always be restricting your movement or you take huge damage, it'll be dealing reasonable damage every turn -anyway- and there's usually nothing you can do about that right away.

@hidden jetty are you ok if I PM you questions about modding, btw?

[hidden jetty]

absolutely, by all means

[alpine sorrel]

I believe we have a few more downtime tracks that aren't in yet, plus will do some fmod magic to extend/rearrange the current tracks

[teal sundial]

sick

[thin lark]

Isometric pixel art is a step harder again compared to normal pixel art. I’m struggling to even get a stick figure to look ok :)

[thin lark]

Feature Request: WASD in the combat editor scrolls the map. WASD in the module editor doesn't, and I think it would be nice if it did (or at least was an option)

If it can't be WASD due to input concerns, could it optionally be hold-right-click instead of hold-middle-click please? The middle button is more uncomfortable, and also for reasons I've never properly understood acts as paste by default on linux which keeps pasting stuff into text boxes as you're scrolling by.

[thin lark]

The new potted plants are amazing, I love them

[alpine sorrel]

Wait did I accidentally let a module-editor-enabled build sneak out?

[thin lark]

Yes. Linux 0.5.2 has module editor kinda almost a little bit working. It’s crash happy, but I figured it probably wasn’t done yet

Happy to pretend it’s not there though if that helps :)

[alpine sorrel]

Oops lol

Noted though 👍

I'd take crash report bugs on it tbh if you have them anyway

I must have forgotten to flip the flag before building

[thin lark]

I'll try and get some of them reproducible, sure. It was easy when I was poking around but then difficult when I was trying to remember what I did to crash it. Because obviously * sigh *.

Bug Report: Sniper's Moving Target trait doesn't include the trigger condition in the description, it just starts from: "The Sniper interrupts the movement". Should probably start with: "Trigger: A character within Line of Sight and range 20 moves"

[tepid temple]

Doing GM prep has reminded me that they exist, so I figured I'll ask here: will LT be covering reserves, and integrating them into the campaign system?

[hazy ferry]

Same with Archer

[thin lark]

I hope it does reserves. I think there's a lot of potential there.

Bug Report: Moving Target can be triggered and ask whether you want to lose movement or gain the Sniper's Mark, and you select gain mark, but the mark isn't applied because it is already applied to another target.
Expected: Should move mark from original target to the newly moving target

Bug Report: Intercede triggered... and the -original- target was asked if they wanted to Brace. And if you say yes, they still suffer the penalties for it, even though they took no damage.

Relevant log fragment and autosave near the event

[thin lark]

Crash Bug Report: When using module editor, with default/last edited Pegasus module loaded, click combats tab, select combat 1, press Edit Combat -> Crash.
Crash only happens on production version, no crash when running under debug! Console has some errors like:

          at: GDScript::reload (res://addons/gut/gui/editor_globals.gd:42)
ERROR: Failed to load script "res://addons/gut/gui/editor_globals.gd" with error "Parse error".
   at: load (modules/gdscript/gdscript.cpp:3041)``` that are perhaps indicative that module editor is not in fact going to like being run as production code just yet? Could be wrong though.

Changing to a new module, importing a different combat, editing that seems to work

Crash is repeatable if you load Pegasus back up from stock and then try editing combat_1 again

Attempting to edit the dioramas also crashes with Pegasus.

Also works fine on a new module.

Also works fine when run in debug.
Maybe... it isn't loading quite right from the stock/packed versions of combats and dioramas?

I think that's all the ones I can find for now though so I'll stop poking at it. It looks good so far! I've been carefully not reading all the text blocks and stuff :)

[alpine sorrel]

Don't currently have designs for them, but would be fairly easy to add once we get the basics locked down

[tepid temple]

As an aside, man is this a wacky reserve

[gilded kindle]

i'm curious, will prepare ever be added?

[worn tiger]

Nope

[gilded kindle]

dont blame her honestly

seems like it'd be tough to program properly

[worn tiger]

Prepare is an open-ended nightmare that mostly results in cheesing extra duration out of Eject Power Cores

[stable smelt]

prepare is bad for actual GMs that can understand what's about to happen and would be catastrophic vs AI that cannot figure out how to minimize the effect of a prepared action.

[small panther]

That or fold space

[alpine sorrel]

Ok but also I could see a world where we make a basic version of it where your options are limited to fine versions of it eg shoot if an enemy enters your range

[worn tiger]

Ah yes, Overwatch (XCOM Version)

[alpine sorrel]

But I should not encourage scope creep lol

[stable smelt]

honestly I do sort of think even the 'shoot if something gets in range' version can be an issue, it's just usually less so.

[burnt frigate]

speaking only for myself and not as like a suggestion: the common argument FOR Prepare in lancer is "well it feels bad as a player to not be in range to do anything and prepare lets you try and get something done" but 90% of the time people get really interested in using it is for attempted cheese purposes. Left to my own devices, I would jettison it from the game, but if I absolutely HAD to include something like it, I would strongly consider making it something like a Skirmish only, i.e. what you're proposing

that said? honestly, I wouldn't worry about it

[orchid pendant]

I always feel like a Prepare action just isn't that needed in a game with popcorn initiative, compared to a set initiative track.

Since you already have a lot of flexibility with when you act.

[burnt frigate]

yeah exactly

Prepare is a thing that has a reason to exist in games with rolled initiative where turns fall randomly

[sage remnant]

I mean it has some merit, like for defenders who want to reposition while protecting their allies with guardian, probably Sargamatha's best early defensive tool

[teal flame]

the only use case where prepare was the best option in a game i’ve played was dealing with infinitely cloaked assassins

[sage remnant]

Or operator with fade generators

[teal flame]

well, more importantly, nearly-always-hidden ones

the intended counterplay (apart from getting lucky with a search roll) was to prepare a fire action for after they attacked

[old pivot]

the only times I've seen prepare some up was to either A: do shenanigans with Puppet Systems, or B: to wait out the arming of mines before pushing people onto them

[harsh pagoda]

Happy New Year

[thin lark]

I made a sniper gauntlet map for a single player lancer (allies are provided via Use Map Settings) of LL3, to see if the concept works. Would love feedback if anyone tries it, I played it through most of the way once to check it technically worked but not often enough to get a great sense for the balance.

Map isn’t the prettiest but it’s not the worst either, happy to be told I do indeed need to spend hours detailing my hills if you feel that way. (Probably still won’t but good to know how people think about that)

[thin lark]

Also, this is apparently the best I can do. It'll stand in for now :)

[hidden jetty]

I kind of love it actually

little pointy gremlin

is this for the gilg license?

[tepid temple]

This artstyle reminds me of an mspfanventure I read many years ago

[thin lark]

Not intended for it, this is aiming at the Striker-type grunt (bladed configuration)

But really it fits in for any disposable combat frame sort of place.

[thin lark]

I love the old payload/even older minotaur :)

If Lancer Tactics ever gets its own discord server, please, PLEASE can we make it an emote? :)

[worn tiger]

The perfect being

[alpine sorrel]

Lol it already is in the draft of the server; literally the only emote I've added

[worn tiger]

Bless

[small panther]

You only need one
- SSC Olive apparently

[worn tiger]

It is the perfect form. What else could you need?

[hidden jetty]

I forgot about the Orchis
(classic blunder)

this might take me a while lol, there's a ton of weird triggers on that frame

[hazy ferry]

Common issue

[teal sundial]

bug- blinkshield only seems to be counted as one space high on the sniper gauntlet map

[fiery bear]

You cannot stop this

[tepid temple]

I can't believe Lancestuck is going to come to life as a LT campaign

Oh God I don't know how I feel about someone having a :mspa: emote

[flint portal]

Grab Manipulators from Expanded Compartment

[thin lark]

Bug Report: Rebake Witch has HASE Systems of +4, but as far as I can tell Lancer Tactics Rebake Witch has +3. It's hard to tell, but I think so.

(Tier 1, to be clear.)

HASE Hull for the Witch might be weird at higher tiers as well, though I'm just reading off the resource files so I have not confirmed in game, but it's supposed to be a flat -2 across the board but has a +1 in tier 2 haseblock and -1 in tier 3. Let me know if this sort of datafile cross check is useful or annoying, if you don't want this sortof report when I'm using it as a comparison for a mod, just let me know and I'll keep quiet.

[alpine sorrel]

This is exactly the kind of report that's useful, thanks!

My favorite kind of bug: extremely clear, unambiguous, and trivial to fix

Maybe I should sprinkle some more number typos around just to keep the todo list dopamine flowing

[thin lark]

Noted, will report anything else I see in the datafiles that doesn't match the pdf.

[thin lark]

Well it took me three hours, but it no longer breaks everything just by attempting to exist!

Further work is obviously required, but I'm getting there :)

(It even hits people with its stubby blade arms and causes knockback!)

[hidden jetty]

oh btw the reason the colors aren't being replaced properly is you can only use the specific color values in this color key (you can use whichever gray you want, I just find it handy to have those on hand too, and a non-harsh black for outlines)

[gilded kindle]

first time actually using hurl into the duat 4th gate, this feels so weird

[weak willow]

it's very fitting that you're doing it with a hacktuga, I must say

[gilded kindle]

Nah, it was on my goblin

[alpine sorrel]

It would be a fun infinite budget easter egg to show something special for when you're controlling their turn. Like change the UI to see the world through their eyes somehow.

[teal flame]

could always just put a glitchy eye of horus over their head

[small panther]

Oh you actually control their turn yourself in LT ? That's fun.

It works way better here since you're already playing everyone, so that's probably the good choice actually

[thin lark]

Anyone have opinions on which sounds/looks best?:

• Striker Blade Type Grunt
• Grunt (Striker Type, with Blade)
• Striker Type Grunt (Blade)

or similar. suggest your own. :)

That is, the arrangement of the text.

[small panther]

[Role] type Grunt (options chosen) sounds the best to me

[thin lark]

Thanks

I think it's only Striker types that have such an obvious difference between the blade and gun configurations that they might as well be a separate frame. They're technically not, I know, in theory you need to scan them, but given it's easier for me to give them separate graphics if they're separate frames, I'm doing it that way and it'll also make it a lot clearer which of them are fast but melee, and which are slower but ranged.

Might well do that with the Artillery type's choice of DMR or Shoulder Mortar as well, mind you.

It doesn't have any stat changes though.

[glad lotus]

IMO you could drop the "type" from the names too, just to keep them more concise.

[lilac anchor]

agreed, "Striker Grunt Blade" or "Striker Grunt Gun" sounds easier without the type

[thin lark]

Sure.

Separately... is it a bug that enemies don't seem to even want to avoid Javelin missile spots? It's nice that they get actually triggered, but it's weird the enemies just walk into it.

Can anyone think of any abilities which assist movement of the unit activating the ability? I know there's the commander template ability which lets another unit move, but is there anything you can think of where a unit just helps itself move?

(As a standard action, ideally)

[small panther]

Boost
More seriously, Step, Supersonic and mabe even telefrag qualify if I understand your question. Don't know if they're in the game yet though.

[teal sundial]

like the avalanche charge?

[small panther]

Oh right that one too

[thin lark]

Thanks.

And yeah Boost is a good example but it's a core action, not an addon, so I am unsure it's as good an example. Looking for an example of how to teach the AI "Use this when you want to move more"

Double Time is a protocol, and it just never seems to choose to use it even if it's going a long way

(Of course as soon as I get it working I predict I'll immediately have the other problem and the AI will be all "Sure, I need to step three tiles to get into melee. Time to use the protocol I can only use once per scene to get more movement, lol!")

[small panther]

The main idea of double time is generally to use it on it's first turn to avoid dying before getting in position

But yeah, might not always be necessary

[small panther]

(my point here is that given the expected lifetime of grunts, hoarding the use for later might just get you killed before you ever do anything instead; there's not a ton of value in conserving the charge if it nets you any amount of benefit)

[thin lark]

Indeed. I should probably just give it a huge base weight, it's a protocol so it's hardly bad if they just pop it first turn always

Well I made it mandatory and it's still not using it, so clearly I am doing something wrong. Move on to easier stuff :)

[hidden jetty]

honestly I would go with the comp//con name and do "Grunt Striker (Blade)"

[thin lark]

people seem happy with Striker Grunt (Blade) for now.

If you have any familiarity with the AI Behaviour section please let me know, but I suspect not if you've mostly done player facing stuff so far?

[hidden jetty]

I haven't touched the AI stuff at all so I have no idea, unfortunately

[thin lark]

... well, figured out why Double Time wasn't working, it thinks you have to use it on/towards an ally. Clearly, I have indeed done something wrong :)

[hidden jetty]

I have just discovered that I can get the unit which forced a movement event out of the context for that event (its a field of the specific action sometimes present in the object field)

this means

• I can do Orchis' Hunting Eagle in less than 50 lines of code
• I need to completely rewrite a bunch of Caliban code now that I know its possible to detect every single knockback event

[alpine sorrel]

Requirements off the top of my head are that you'll probably need both an AI Behavior object on it ticked to target free spaces (iirc) and also a TargetRequirements also with "targets free space" pressed. But yes movement abilities are some of the most tricky ones to implement, you might look for examples of get_custom_ai_option which replaces the automatic behavior

Avalanche charge is probably a good reference, swapping out target units with some other logic for when it might want to use the extra movement

[thin lark]

Thanks. Yeah, I looked at Avalanche Charge but didn't realize it was targetting enemy units rather than spaces next to enemy units, that makes how it works a fair bit clearer

[gilded kindle]

what forms of knockback does the caliban you made not work with? i haven't personally noticed any

[hidden jetty]

any knockback event which is not the result of an attack (except spike charges because I added a fake attack event specifically so they would work)

[hidden jetty]

I think this might be my least favourite frame ngl

there are at least 4 separate sources of on_attack effects + reliable damage

[thin lark]

I have wanted to try the Orchis for a while, but it was released after I stopped playing Lancer tabletop due to most other people I played it with deciding they didn't like it enough to play again.

[winged junco]

I wonder how hard is Lich going to be, considering how many triggers it has

[thin lark]

I think the Lich itself will be moderate - it has a lot of triggers but they're all separate triggers for the same effect, and many of the triggers are blanket triggers, just flat out "any turn" or "any damage".

Stay of Execution, though, I think that will be hard. Not only is it immunity to effects from external sources, but it also pauses any such effects currently on the the target, but they keep their timers, and they're supposed to resume with the duration they had, but later

And I don't think anything else does that.

Time Split is probably going to have all sorts of fun bugs where the original character gets lost in time and space due to timing concerns with resolving the holes back into the characters as well. (Or possibly, you end up with two of the original.)

[hidden jetty]

stay of execution and time split are probably both going to need the same thing - store a deep duplicate of the character at the moment of applying the effect, then sticking that duplicate back on the map at the appropriate time

I think the soul vessel might need that too come to think of it

[thin lark]

soul vessel doesn't reset any stats, unless you're using it to resurrect, in which case it just sets stats to a fixed number

[hidden jetty]

oh neat

[winged junco]

And Glitch Time?

[hidden jetty]

okay that shouldn't be as much of an issue hopefully

[thin lark]

I don't even want to think about implementing Glitch Time.

But, in theory, if you can get deep enough into the action's code to just set the target TO the lich, it might be fine

[hidden jetty]

actually looking at glitch time I'm not sure there are any triggers there which aren't supported by the engine

[thin lark]

It's more that it can totally usurp the targetting of things which only work on allies but now they work on the lich as if it had been allied and the original target, or vice versa or whatever

[hidden jetty]

I think you can just change the target unit in the context after the event has already been declared, but we'll see if that causes a ton of bugs or not

if not I'm sure its possible to temporarily set the lich's properties to that of the target then put them back to normal afterwards

either way I'm not doing the lich for a while unless someone specifically requests it

[thin lark]

Well that's a start, I've got them using Double Time. They now use it to move exactly one space... :)

[hidden jetty]

single time

[alpine sorrel]

I bet you need to add a flag to the movement event; "ignore not having enough move to reach end" or something like that

[thin lark]

A blade type just used it to sidestep 5 paces before resuming getting closer. They're obviously not using it like normal movement...

I wonder if I could make it work better by having it be a one turn buff to their Speed instead. I'm aware that's not how the book action actually works...

(It means they'd proc less overwatches, but if it's that or having it not work I'm going to go with the one that lets the AI know it has more movement range at all...)

By the way, is there a faster debug cycle I'm missing? Currently I am restarting the game and going to the combat editor and testing the combat with things arranged in that combat, but if there's a quicker way I've missed please let us know :)

[alpine sorrel]

Godot hot reloads scripts so most of the time you don't need to reload the game (as long as the action isn't in-progress).
So it's like map editor -> playtest -> back to map editor -> make code changes and save -> replaytest

[thin lark]

Does it hot reload resources as well?

That's most of what I'm changing at present

[alpine sorrel]

For most cases yeah. If you create a new resource it won't be able to hot-insert that but changing numbers and stuff for existing ones it will

[thin lark]

Hmm. I'll try that. I thought I had tried that, but... maybe not.

Also very possible I had some other problem that was stopping it before. thanks!

[alpine sorrel]

You can also write automated tests and run them in the GUT bottom tab if you're being fancy, which lets you be even more controlled than the combat editor but it can be harder to see what's happening

And as always it can sometimes be useful to set an NPC unit to be player controlled so you can see if the action works (but not the AI)

[thin lark]

I think it's that because it's a protocol, it's not even checking where it wants to move, hasn't generated a heatmap of where it might move, it just generates a pathfinder directly to see where it can move, and then shrugs and picks some spot, usually whatever is next to the unit?

[thin lark]

Why can't I remember how Godot does lambda functions, ever? I know how to do these in c# but apparently the way godot has them slightly different just breaks my brain -_-

[alpine sorrel]

It's so clunky

It makes me miss ruby lamdas

[grand pebble]

Hey I downloaded the latest update and now my computer won't run the game. Any hints?

[thin lark]

Hmm. Does it say anything when it fails, or just fail to open?

Also, windows, Linux, or mac?

[grand pebble]

Windows

I get a pop up saying an attack was stopped.

Which makes no sense cause im running an already downloaded file that has 100s of hours on it

May just delete and start over

[hidden jetty]

sounds like your antivirus is blocking the executable - they usually block anything they don't recognise so if it is a recent build it might just be over-vigilant

[grand pebble]

Yeah probably right

[hazy ferry]

Spin Up Thrusters doesn't let you nominate a character when as your second action

Also sidenote why do enemies always hit through difficulty while my ass cant even hit a 72% or hit the latch drone on an ally

Oh my god damn. One of my mechs got round 3 structured from full structure because:
Has explosive vents
Berserker attacked
Get structured
Explosive vent activated
Berserker aggression
Get structured again
Roll bad. Die.

[icy creek]

something seems wrong there

explosive vents shouldn't activate when you structure, it's supposed to be when you clear all heat or take stress

[hazy ferry]

It was on Ghengis

Who clears all heat when structured

Anyways that was the best I did, as in instead of losing horridly, only losing a little bit

Because I had 1 mech in zone and there was 1 enemy mech in zone

Side note: may I request either a Draw or Overtime mechanic for some mission types?

Such as Gauntlet, maybe if you and the enemy have an equal amount of mechs in the zone, then an extra turn starts?

[alpine sorrel]

That is the domain of mod / user sitreps, we're trying to stick close to the CRB rules for the base game

Though I'm not ironclad on that if there were a rebake style redesign of em

But I don't want to add ad hoc extra rules

[hazy ferry]

Understood

Spin Up Thrusters (Ace 3) doesn't let you nominate a target btw

At least if done as second action. I don't know if it lets you if done as a first action

And Covering Fire didn't let me shoot someone who I did nominate when they moved (might matter but was mounted to Lancaster)

Side note: Deaths Head railgun is extremely fun and I should not be trusted with it

[lethal leaf]

A Berserker shouldn't deal a full structure on hit unless you skipped Hull Day.

[hazy ferry]

I believe I did skip hull day on that chassis actually

Focused on engineering and agility

[lethal leaf]

Well, there's your problem.

[hazy ferry]

I wanted the speed for the build

[weak willow]

https://tenor.com/view/crash-kid-fall-fail-trip-gif-5653811

[lethal leaf]

A Genghis has 10 HC. It doesn't need more engineering, though

[hazy ferry]

Said build involved flight so it was pretty needed

The idea was that I'd use Spin Up Thrusters to pounce on an enemy and move on an enemies turn

But that didn't work, for obvious reasons

[versed garnet]

idk if this is a bug or whatever, but I can't add Overpowered Caliber to Mimic Gun?

[worn tiger]

That'd be because you can't add Overpower Caliber to the Mimic Gun

[versed garnet]

oh

why did comp/con do that :(

[mild jay]

Game complex