Jeffman12

Except, as far as I can tell, you don't specifically get gutsy parts.

Sounds great, I like it. I never knew there was an autopilot mod until now. Thanks! Although I disagree that there's a distinct interdisciplinary link between the two mod concepts. I think the challenge is in not killing the player character when the armor they pilot is destroyed.

It'd be neat if you could play your pipboy holotapes while loading. I've never touched any of the games that come with RobCo Fun, but I certainly would if it helped me alleviate loading screen boredom.

While I agree that it could work better and that it's basically just a random location finder as is, I don't think turning it into a 4X res station is all that much a great move. I feel like that's a drastic oversimplification of a potentially interesting mechanic. IMO, as an interim solution to the otherwise uninspired current behavior, sending it on a search should "reveal a hidden"(Read: spawn in a previously non-existant) cache of the supplies at the location resulting in allowing the player to find one to three shipments of the resource in question onsite.

Yeah, I don't get how this isn't lore friendly, Fallout isn't known for being too strict with what it allows.

Hah hah, let's kick it off with a silly Bostonian accent pun! I bet we're not sick of those, yet! Anyways, I'd like a mod that lets me go mono e mono with the various trees of the wastes that don't happen to fall within the periphery of a settlement. Btw, does this seem like it might cause the cell reset bug?

Considering how far bethesda's willing to bend over backwards in some areas to let players have it their way, I'm appalled every time something like this comes to light.

Or just a HUD element that tells you what their current station is when you select them.

It'd be nice if it was a special component instead of a full torso, one you could apply to any armor, or maybe just a crafting recipe for future application.

Hells yeah. Maybe have a slight, potentially luck based, chance to recover a unique weapon mod while doing so? Same for armor.

Hear, hear.

I really just want a way to send newly discovered power armor to a vacant settlement bay, but 'uploading' a companion AI would also be pretty sick. At first I thought having some Fallout style version of a quadrotor come and airlift a vacant suit would be best, but I don't see why it shouldn't be able to go tromping off to a location on its own.

I've found quite the wealth of explorable areas under and over the sea, while most are lacking anything more than scrap and some baseline loot crates, I feel that swimming to them all is quite a chore and not worth while, which is too bad, because the scenery and atmosphere themselves is quite nice out there. This also opens up options for workshop zones, perhaps a derelict oil rig, a flotilla similar to libertalia, etc.

I'm in California, the best server for me is San Jose, but my downloads are set to west and default to Dallas, which always fails, and then immediately transitions to one of the Salt Lake servers. I don't know if it's just the distance, or if it's a Mormon conspiracy to delay the acquisition of my violent content, but downloads that take only 10 minutes from San Jose take upwards of an hour from each of these servers. Since I upgraded, I've had no issues with the Denver server, and it actually goes faster for me than all of the Salt Lake servers, but not as fast as San Jose. I think instead of designating a region, the mod manager should allow us to designate a favorite server, Dallas is nowhere near where I live, relatively, so there's no reason it should be starting with that server.

Actually, in the old XCOM games, when a country dropped out, you'd just need to scan it, similar to how EXALT in EW is handled, it would uncover an alien base, and you'd just raid the base to get that country back at a high panic level, but full pay and everything for that month.

Actually, a research project to enhance XCOM weapons using EXALT tech could probably be explained decently, and then maybe a follow up to it that would actually make them able to enhance EXALT weapons to actually be formidable...

Playing on normal, I lost the mec and weapon after a mec trooper died, I lost another soldier on the same mission and was able to recover their gear just fine, though. Meld prices are kind of up there already in normal. I waited until I had plasma weapons and titan armor before building the mec and gene labs, I had 600 or so saved up, it let me fully gene mod one soldier and fully equip one mec trooper, I could only do basic stuff with the meld I had left over. None of the gene mods really are free considering you need to pay for them on a per-soldier basis. Not to say nobody should make a mod that does this if they're willing to, but try bumping up the difficulty a notch if you're not playing impossible yet.

As of today's date, November 15th, 2013, the mec ability description when picking electro pulse for a paladin tier upgrade is mislabeled to indicate that it stuns organics and damages robotics. Upon using it in combat when surrounded by some mutons who's rank I no longer recall, I didn't receive a bunch of sleepy mutons as advertised, but a bunch of dead ones. I can see why, from a gameplay standpoint, this would not have stunned them, as that would have netted me some serious plasma level artillery, however the issue remains, I chose the ability for this paladin for the purpose of stunning a passel of grouchy aliens and getting revenge for all of those anal probes. Some things I might like to see come of this request: The ability does damage to all targets in range, but stuns instead of killing when health would be depleted by it. -Or- The ability overloads weapons, forcing them to be reloaded before fired. -Or- Organics in range suffer an effect similar to strangulation called fibrillation.

I'm not sure about the code, but you could chalk up the plot reason for bringing back less spoils as fuel and maintenance costs for multiple skyrangers.

There are some instances where aliens can pull of some stupid shots that ignore cover that would otherwise be completely obstructive. The Iron Man Impossible youtube series by Beaglerush shows one such shot in one of the early videos.

I do this in laser tag, slide up behind a piece of cover I know someone's behind, wait for them to look around the corner, as this is when their guard is actually down, and then I just repeatedly shoot them until they get the idea that they should just leave because I'm not gonna stop, and the cover is now mine. But really, whenever an alien drops themselves in my lap, I just throw everything I have at them, I mean, to an extent. But I bring a ton of explosives and have a guaranteed 3 damage per suppression.

I'm talking about how they released their engine free for indie devs with the stipulation that they need to buy a license if the devs make bank on it. Of course the contract is a little more complex than that, but anyone can obtain a copy of the UDK and use it free of charge. ModDB is still getting new games from it and mods from the older UT games converted to the UDK. It's not quite what id's done in the past, but that's pretty close to open source. Well, okay, but I still don't consider my retex of the arctic avenger from CSS a "mod" so to speak. What I intended to say is there really are less friendly games and engines out there, by comparison. Besides, I'm almost certain UE doesn't have any built in checks for edits by date or variance in file size. If anything, custom file packs, I think better incentivize total conversions when you figure out the compression method and the file structure. Westwood's games saw that happen. Maybe it could be attributed to less file security, but I suppose the reverse is just as possible if not more likely. Not to imply the current level of understanding here is adequate to begin without, say, assistance from the studio of some form in learning how to edit the game better. That stands to reason, I just read an article in GI that, in a way, reveals that they 'just kinda wanted to make a new xcom game bad enough to do so' if I may paraphrase. But I do hope they decide to come on in favor of modding, everyone wins then.

Yes, not saying they aren't possible or that they haven't been done, but some games/engines are more open ended in that regard. See Source circa 2002-2007. ModDB is absolutely glutted with TC's for the Half-Life series, but true, they did release an SDK with all of the bare essentials of the engine. My point is: So did Epic with UE. There's less than Source, but considerably more than Bethesda's titles. I'd say they tend to compete with Cryengine in so far as level of custom content per mod versus number of mods available for each. I should clarify, source maps can work anywhere. Sure, some functions depend on what game you're playing it with, but you could very easily create a map that functions perfectly in both L4D and CSS, just make sure you BSPZIP the content that both games don't have in common and make sure you have survivor spawns as well as CT and T spawns. Objective ents and brushes would be ideal for playing the map in CSS, too, but if you don't include them, the game will work like TDM. There's rarely any functional limitation that would make a map only load in a particular game when it comes to Source. One could argue models could, too, but you need animations to have the same names for them to work properly, on say, weapons or character models. Either way, that sort of falls into content replacement which is what I consider more of a precursor and/or component to more strictly defined modding, such as adding the portal gun to HL2. Basically: Is it replacing something(Sounds, models), is it an addon(maps), or is it new content that changes the way the game is played(mods)? When it comes to XCom, I'm more inclined to think of texture/sound/model replacements as mods as they require more work than just dragging and dropping new content into a folder, unlike Source games. Mind you, this is likely because Firaxis didn't intend to allow modding but didn't do everything they could to prevent it, like obfuscating the game executable. I do hope they release tools and become more supportive in the near future, but before hearing that there was an XCom Nexus page, I never expected to see modding to have come this far for it. Not because of the engine, but because studios aside from Epic, themselves, don't tend to support modding to its fullest when they use UE. It's definitely a conscious choice on the devs' behalf.

UE3 modding tools were released along side the game, UT3. The engine itself is free to use, as an attempt to compete with Unity. Speaking of, Unity games don't tend to be mod friendly, and it's one of the bigger engines these days. If you take a look at bethesda's games, they're less supportive of Total Conversions and has a drastic loss in stability when modded too heavily. Source engine has been losing mod support steadily over the years in favor of indie game development, unless you plan on using the depricated versions, furthermore, you're more likely to see standalone mods that act as total conversions instead of minor changes unless you intend to replace models or sounds, maps don't qualify as mods, in my book. As far as I know Cry Engine seems to be the best where accessibility versus compatibility is concerned. UE3 is known for being less than user friendly in the coding and mapping departments, but one of those has already been tackled by XCom modders, it seems. Proprietary engines, such as Frostbite's usually tend to be the worst except in cases where ease of modding is a focal point of the game's development. Case in Point: Bethesda's CE/Gamebryo. Little known fact: Epic Mickey was made in Gamebryo.

Well, it's not about looks, it's about functionality. UE needs some really heavy screwups to become unstable, and it's pretty modern as far as what shaders and middleware it will tolerate, and it's ideal for modding, I don't think this much progress would have been made already if their engine was proprietary. As for abductions, the green stuff is why you don't see people on the streets, they've all been cocooned in it for easy transport. Clearing the aliens out is the first step in preventing their capture. Crashes are actually very unlikely to hit cities as they tend to want to avoid being shot down, generally speaking. The fastest way to get tracked down is to fly over a city, and then you can be sure the spacecraft would be fleeing, in fact this is actually measured in game by a timer. Not fleeing or destroying its pursuers is a surefire way to get shot down and crash. Furthermore, assuming these aliens have a survival instinct, they'd not want to land in a city as this would likely hasten XCom's response with a more urgent situation, further diminishing chance of rescue, also, any rescue craft sent to the city would likely suffer the same fate. Now, that doesn't explain why you never see humans in crash scenarios, but I'd guess they know better than to investigate when there's a less than covert war going on against hostile ET's. Any other missions? Yes, it would make sense to see people about, unless they have some advanced warning about aliens lurking in the streets, then they'd probably be encouraged and inclined to stay indoors. Being a global agency, I'm guessing XCom has the decency to call ahead when they come to town. Not saying nobody should attempt to make mods in this area, but I'm perfectly satisfied with the game as is in that regard. Who knows? If something comes out, I might try it, but I think the game has plenty of explanation in of itself.