davidlallen

The modbuddy directory is where all your original source files are. If you never want to see the mod code again, you can delete it. But, the *game* will never look there, so it will stop showing up in the mod launcher picklist once you delete it from the other two places.

What features would you see in a combined mod? I'm mostly working on the human opponents and trying to figure out mission sources.

There are three copies of the mod. Don't delete the modbuddy directory. You can delete the other two with no problem. These are the one in the game directory and the sdk directory.

Awesome! I just had my first full four on four mirror fight (my 4 soldiers against an enemy ranger, specialist, sharpshooter and grenadier). All four used their signature abilities, and kicked the a** of my poor rookies. Now if only I can get mission objectives to work, I can publish the thing. https://www.reddit.com/r/xcom2mods/comments/4d0lot/missing_a_step_in_creation_of_new_mission/

Unfortunately due to the game bugs which swinka6666 has pointed out, your project involves jumping into fairly deep waters. Until you have more experience, it may be worthwhile to note down as a "known bug" in your mod that the troopers don't have the proper suppression graphics. Basically, you need to create 3-4 custom weapons, each slightly modified from the normal trooper weapons.

That is quite a large undertaking. The AI trees are not set up for making decisions where there are say 7 action points, 2 to shoot, 3 to reload.

That is because it is already in the game. If you have to abandon a soldier due to a mission timer, the game stores that. Later, a council mission may randomly generate a rescue mission. It will randomly choose between a scientist, engineer, or soldier. If there is a "rescue soldier" mission, it will randomly pick one of your abandoned soldiers. So, it is kind of rare.

If you do not see the Andromedon but you see the others, you probably need to load a game, which did not have a previous version of the mod activated. I have added this to post #1.

So then, both cloning and the mission. The way I setup the mec mission, you can't clone (juryrig) till after you get the mission. One future benefit of the mission mechanism is that for some aliens, cloning is not very lore friendly. For mecs, juryrigging seems fine without any mission. For vipers and chryssalids, YMMV but I can see them being cloned or spawned. It's the other aliens where a rescue mission seems like the only way that fits "lore". So, if I get good feedback on the mission structure, I would permanently remove the muton, berserker, andromedon proving grounds projects, and only deliver them via mission. That is why the random aspect worries me.

What do you think about the random aspect? Somebody says, "Cool mod, I want to play a viper", and then the first five games they play, they get other random aliens.

@ zurg, did you download from nexus or steam? If from nexus, please confirm you have the April 5 version. Do you have the other aliens? Did you set FREE_ALIEN for all of them? (Or else you need the autopsy plus two corpses).

New version up on nexus, on steam shortly. See post #1 for overview, post #3 for detailed release notes. Now with Andromedons! Also, I would really like feedback on the story mission concept here: http://forums.nexusmods.com/index.php?/topic/3983220-story-mission-for-playable-advent-mec-discussion-and-feedback/

How about playable mecs, vipers, mutons, berserkers, and now andromedons? http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=644076161 Discussion thread: http://forums.nexusmods.com/index.php?/topic/3879390-playable-advent-mod-details-feedback/

(nexus release completed not yet available on steam) Bradford: Commander, Resistance Radio has picked up an interesting transmission. It seems there is a MEC which is behaving oddly. It has concluded that Advent is wrong to hold power over humanity and destroyed part of an Advent base. Advent has imprisoned the MEC and is planning to study it. We can organize a rescue mission, but it'll eat up a lot of our intel and supplies trying to do this. In the latest April 5 version of Playable Advent, I have added a mission which allows you to build mecs, only after you successfully rescue a mec on a mission. This thread is for discussion of that particular mission, and how story missions in general should be added to the game. Main discussion thread Steam download (preferred) Nexus download First, please if you haven't, give a positive rating at steam. We really want the fifth star. Instructions for completing the mission 1. This mission is disabled by default. To enable it, in XComPlayableAdvent.ini, change the line MISSION_ALIEN=false to MISSION_ALIEN=true. Optionally change FREE_ALIEN to true. 2. You don't need a new campaign, but you do need a save that doesn't already have this mod active. 3. Once you complete Resistance Radio, you will see a new research item: Rescue Misbehaving Mec. Right now its cost is free. 4. Complete this research, and you will see a Council mission on the geoscape, whose reward is the mec. 5. Complete the mission. We know that the mec's idle animation is holding a gun, which he doesn't have. 6. The new mec is a reward for the mission. It is highly likely that the new mec will be affected by the "armor glitch" due to lack of class specific armor in the base game. Go to the armory loadout and equip the mec armor. 7. Now in the proving ground, you will see the project to build additional mecs Comments and questions I am really not sure how new story missions should fit into the game. We do not want them to be triggered randomly; when somebody loads up the mod, they want that mod's mission to *happen*. So the mission is always available until you execute it. If there are a lot of story mods like this, they will clutter up the research list. Is there a better way to start this whole set of steps? I would like to add more specific mission icons to the geoscape when the mission is present. It's possible for people to overlook what appears to be a standard council mission icon. The mission completion screen is a generic one. I need to replace this with a more specific one, hopefully using the mec portrait instead, and give some more "lore" information about building additional mecs. This will help people to know that there is a new proving ground project. Is this type of story mission even worthwhile? For mecs, there is sufficient "lore" reasoning to just allow Shen to build them, after the autopsy. Maybe this entire concept is not important enough. If you can think of more that I can do to make this better, please let me know.

Even more to keep track of. Some "native core" can be overridden, depending on how they are used.

For #1, please note XComTacticalCheatManager is "native core". When you attempt to extend it and write a ModOverride line, the game will not accept it. So for #1 you must make a highlander mod. I did not completely understand #2, but it may have the same problem. I was able to extend XComHeadquartersCheatManager to add commands without any highlanders. I mentioned above that one other modder had some trouble using this. Since then both he, and another player who reported the problem, could solve the problem with the magic "remove and rebuild ini files" trick. So, for strategy level commands, there is a known solution. For tactical level, non-highlander, please confirm if you have made this work.

Right now, it is unlocked upon Resistance Radio. More details here, with some comments following: http://forums.nexusmods.com/index.php?/topic/3879390-playable-advent-mod-details-feedback/page-28&do=findComment&comment=36042865

Where in the code does the Diff_3 template from strategy tuning get applied at all?

Well, I guess the question is clear enough now, but sounds like nobody knows the answer. The question is: we see that ResearchProject_TimeScalar[3] is 1.0. So a project on legendary difficulty should take the same number of days to research as any other difficulty level, but we see it doesn't. What else is affecting research time on legendary? Several people have searched and not found.

Development update (no release yet but possibly in 24 hours from now) * Andromedon provided by koopakid is integrated! * There is a new mission, which grants one playable mec. I plan to add an option where the only way to get the proving ground project is by completing this mission, but I haven't quite gotten that part to work yet. * Discovered that only certain aliens can be turned in the armory view, which is painful, since the berserker arm, and most of the andromedon body, block part of the level up screen. The aliens that can be turned are the ones where maclimes has created armor that supports tints, which is the mec, viper and chryssalid. For the others, I guess some animation work is required, but not started yet. * Increased dodge of viper to 30% + 5% per level, so at top level, their dodge is 65%. This should increase survivability. * Tried several things to fix the problem of alien armor getting un-equipped. No solution is working yet. I tried ... + making the item size zero, which makes them impossible to unequip. But, since we want the mec to have upgraded armor, in order to get heavy weapons, that won't work. + The uc class which checks for armor removability is a "native core" class (GameState_Unit) which means it can't be modded. + Making more hacks in the armory loadout screen, which increases the risk of mod conflict, but I can't get them to take effect anyhow. + So, there is no improvement, except to my understanding of the code I guess.

That is great! Regarding gremlin sync, I have found that the gremlin gets behind all the time. Even when the specialist just moves from one place to another, the gremlin lags far behind. If everything except the sync is working, that will be great. Can you send the code?

Do you feel mecs are *too* powerful? That is, would you just crush the game easily with a full squad of mecs, and nothing else? It is easy to make a super-unit, but it is more interesting to get the power level "just right". If you have to carefully think about trading off taking this unit vs taking another unit, then it is "just right". If the power level of the mec seems "just right", which soldier class do you usually wind up substituting for?

That is good feedback on the viper at commander. I am hoping to avoid armor. How about boosting defense and dodge more? Or some other dodge based effect like lightning reflexes? For muton and berserker, we haven't done much balancing yet.

It is worthwhile to think about this more. But, consider how a player will be able to use two such mods together.

One significant problem with this is that "native core" classes cannot be extended one by one. The only way to extend them is with the "highlander" approach. And the drawback of the highlander approach (the reason why the name is chosen) is that a user can only have one highlander mod active at a time.