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Finding the first step?


NephilimNexus

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I should note that the Wiki tutorials are very hard to follow, and outright not true (at least for me) in a few cases. A lot of that comes down to fiddly details which end up as utter showstoppers unless you find creative ways around them.

 

For one, hex-editing the exe is dirt simple... If you know what you're looking for. The Wiki tutorial says I should search for "XComGame\Config\DefaultGameCore.ini" which simply doesn't show up anywhere in the file. What I ended up searching for is "58 00 43 00 6F 00 6D 00 47 00 61 00 6D 00 65 00 5C 00 43 00 6F 00 6E 00 66 00 69 00 67 00 5C 00 44 00 65 00 66 00 61 00 75 00 6C 00 74 00 47 00 61 00 6D 00 65 00 43 00 6F 00 72 00 65 00 2E 00 69 00 6E 00 69" which in the file writes out to something like "X.C.o.m.G.a.m.e.\.C.o.n.f.i.g.\.D.e.f.a.u.l.t.G.a.m.e.C.o.r.e...i.n.i" That's what HxD shows it, anyway. In practice each of the letters is delimited by a hex 00 character which doesn't seem to map to a printable character but nevertheless prevents direct text searches. I found the above hex string by hand by finding XCOM, noting down its hex code, spacing that out with 00 characters, then searching for that until I found the DGC. This is what was tripping me up before, and it almost tripped me up again trying to apply this to a fresh install.

 

Secondly, the "Mods and Steam" article directs me to look for a log file which plain doesn't exist in my XCOM folder anywhere. A few log files exist in the broader Steam folder, but they're for stuff like QUBE and Viscera Cleanup Detail. None for XCOM, which means I don't know what to "block" in my host file. The "recent" discoveries (as of a couple of years ago) do give a static IP for EW, but I don't know how recent those are, and what to do when information contradicts. Blocking the game from updating itself and running in offline mode is easy to do. Messing with my Host file when I don't even know if I'm messing with the right IP is less so. I don't actually have an answer to that as of yet.

 

Apologies if it seems like I'm spamming the thread. I just found the tutorials rather difficult to use. Either things have changed since they were written, or my system is weird in some way.

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Hah, that's cause you aren't doing the search correctly. You're supposed to check the unicode box ("These are unicode text strings"), and you did not.

 

As for the second, I highly doubt you looking in the "My Games" folder, which is in a place like "My Documents".

 

Our tutorials are about 95% accurate, so on average, just reread them.

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Hah, that's cause you aren't doing the search correctly. You're supposed to check the unicode box ("These are unicode text strings"), and you did not.

 

I am actually looking for Unicode, but I'm still getting no results. Not sure what the issue is, I'll mess with it some more and see if I can't get it to work. It would definitely make it much easier to reapply if I can find the string like that.

 

As to Logs, I did find that after looking in My Documents. I'd misread the path as I assumed that was referring to Steam. I did find a full path referencing <username> (i.e. my Win7 user folder) under Cloud Syncing, which I didn't actually get all the way down to. My own fault - I didn't care about save game file preservation so I didn't read past the "Retaining Control" section. Checking the log files, I can't find all the information required as nothing shows up as "FHttpDownload::StateParsingHeader" but that could be because I'm running the game in offline mode or such. I DO get "performing DNS lookup for" and that has the name of the site I'm looking for, so I suspect I can use that. That'll take some doing, as well, but at least I know what I'm doing. Thank you.

 

Apologies for criticising your tutorials, they do seem to work. Still not sure what's up with the Unicode thing, but I've had encoding issues on this machine since a recent reinstall that I didn't do too well. Will look into that on my own time. Regardless, sorry to criticise unfairly.

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Heh, it's fine to criticize, it's just better to ask for help understanding before stating inaccuracy. I can understand having a hard time understanding them, I was around when some of those tactics were being discovered, and I didn't understand about half the stuff they said.

 

As for the unicode thing, that is weird, as it works fine for me. What is your search query?

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Heh, it's fine to criticize, it's just better to ask for help understanding before stating inaccuracy. I can understand having a hard time understanding them, I was around when some of those tactics were being discovered, and I didn't understand about half the stuff they said.

 

As for the unicode thing, that is weird, as it works fine for me. What is your search query?

 

Again, my apologies. That was mostly frustration talking and I should have slept on it before making that post. Sorry.

 

And my search queary is a direct copy/paste out of the Wiki. I messed with my Region and Language settings (basically changed everything, then changed everything back) and now it seems to be working. I've had a lot of issues with encoding with this PC and I'm not really sure what's causing it. I installed it using US settings then had to switch to local (Eastern European) then I couldn't read my own cyrillic text and had to switch around a few times. I don't know what I did and if it wasn't just a few restarts that did it, but HxD's searching fine now, it seems. Fingers crossed that it stays that way.

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It's because you can't install any XCOM mods with any mod manager. There is no mechanism for supporting mods. They are all "hacks" to the game executable and UPK files. Fortunately the "UPK Utils" mod tool set was developed by a talented member of the community to provide that support in a unified format to mod creators. But as a user of mods you still have to perform all the needed steps yourself.

 

XCOM EU/EW is one of the hardest games to play modded you will ever encounter. The "Basic guide to Installing Mods" wiki article is a "must read".

 

-Dubious-

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It's because you can't install any XCOM mods with any mod manager. There is no mechanism for supporting mods. They are all "hacks" to the game executable and UPK files. Fortunately the "UPK Utils" mod tool set was developed by a talented member of the community to provide that support in a unified format to mod creators. But as a user of mods you still have to perform all the needed steps yourself.

 

XCOM EU/EW is one of the hardest games to play modded you will ever encounter. The "Basic guide to Installing Mods" wiki article is a "must read".

 

-Dubious-

So sad. Thx for the answer.

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