FluffyQuack

Yeah, I think they did a great job in general with implementing the gunplay in JA2. One thing I really appreciated about JA2 (and it's something I like about the old X-Com games as well), is that the collision used for bullets and grenade matches extremely closely to what you see visually in the graphics, and you get to see clearly the exact paths the bullets take. So, if you miss something due to it hitting something in the environment, it's super apparent. I also like how critical hits are handled in a natural and intuitive way. Most RPGs and turn-based games handle it as an arbitrary percentage chance. In JA2, it's straightforward: if you hit them in the head that's extra damage. Which means you get to see visually that it was a critical hit, while in most games you'd just see certain damage numbers be higher for no apparent reason. I've spent a lot of time reading through JA2's source code and I think that's given me even more respect for the game. The function for calculating hit chance is a bit of a monster, but every factor influencing hit chance makes sense and it all looks like something they put a lot of thought into. On the flipside, the more I read about how nuXCOM handles things under the hood, the less respect I have for it. For instance, what you see visually with the environment doesn't match the collision used for bullets at all. Or how the game adds or subtracts a massive bonus to accuracy based on difficulty but it's never shown to the player.

Very exciting to see Ian Currie is involved with the project. I've got a ton of respect for him considering he was one of the main guys behind the original JA games. I really hope the final game manages to live up to expectations. I've almost lost hope of ever seeing a good successor to JA1/JA2 after we've seen the countless attempts over the years. A few of the games were competent but none of them were even remotely as good as JA2. Seeing Steroid's full design is funny. Getting some strong Duke Nukem vibes off him!

Based on my memory, I think this worked well in JA2. You could miss at point-blank range, but it was relatively rare even if you aimed at the lowest accuracy setting. I did a quick test in JA2 to try to judge what the average hit chance is in that scenario. I created this setup: Early fight in the game; attacking first Drassen sector. Fox positioned next to an enemy. Her accuracy is 69%. Using her starting G17 pistol. I made sure to not get the "aiming at same opponent after one shot" to try to get the same accuracy for each shot. I did modifications to the source code to show hit chance (the game calculates a hit chance based on many variables and factors with a percentage ending up between 1 and 99), and to make damage always be zero and gave her infinite AP to make the test go faster. I kept doing shots with lowest aim level and hit chance was 68% -> 75% throughout the test (I forgot an obvious factor which is that her accuracy would go up the more I shot, so it didn't end up being static). Results: 100 shots 81 hits 19 misses So, in that scenario, a weak character with a starting gun ended up having a practical hit chance of about 80%. By the way -- for anyone who's curious about how this all works -- because of how the bullet simulation works the practical hit chance is higher than the hit chance the game calculates (I wonder if that was one of the reasons they decided to keep it hidden from the player): The game calculates the hit chance. Let's say it became 75%. The game "rolls" a number between 1 and 99. If it rolls a number equal or lower than hit chance, it's a hit. If it's above, it's a miss. Let's say the game rolled a 80 (miss). If we hit, the bullet trajectory will match perfectly where we're aiming. But the more we miss (aka, the difference between hit chance and the number rolled), the more the bullet trajectory angle will divert. But since the bullet path is fully simulated, a "miss" can actually turn into a hit if the shooter is close enough to the target and if the angle diversion is small enough. If you guys do end up with allowing misses at point-blank range, I hope you don't end up doing the same mistake as the nuXCOM games where it looks visually ridiculous. In those games, you'll see the soldier hold up a gun literally on an alien when you're right next to one, which makes the firing animation when missing just look absurd. One thing I enjoyed about JA2 is that what you see visually matches up what's happening. You can very clearly see the paths bullets take. That's something that bugged me about the nuXCOM game where the bullets you saw visually were just pure cosmetics.

This was a project I did for the fun of it last year. I used e4e+StyleCLIP to generate these images. Those are AI-based programs for identifying a face and then trying to recreate it from scratch (unlike other, more popular AI-based programs that upscale the original image). More info about the software here: video link The result vary based on the character. Some of them end up looking quite a bit different than the original images, but for the most part, I think the results are very impressive. I've got a collection of every JA2 portrait re-created here: https://mega.nz/file/EM9BzSrT#c5NpXPpfrZHo2fiKkNVzhI7DtQhrlTZRGMdQlzgHDro