GamingVirtue

Thank you very much for your prompt answer, Ethreon. I appreciate the quick answer.

A lot of the interior cells, I've noticed, have their rooms composed of a single mesh. Adding a hallway in a mod that leads somewhere else, or even just adding a closet would require distributing a modified version of a vanilla mesh or there would be no way of reaching areas outside of the base mesh, due to them being self-enclosed. What would be the legal position here for such a mod creator? On the one hand, it's very close to the base game's mesh. On the other, it is genuinely modified in some way and not found in the base game at that point. Frankly, I think the decision to make some cells a single mesh (see the Institute's side rooms, like the SRB chamber, if you need an example) was a poor one because it puts mod creators in a bad position due to there being no ability to cull a part of the mesh in the editor, and thus they have to distribute slightly-modified versions to accomplish what they want to do, which of course leads to even more problems with overlapping mesh edits cancelling each other out. But, my question remains: is the mod creator legally clear, since the editing was their own work? Or are they at risk due to Bethesda's stupid attempts to make levels more fluid and, apparently, optimised?

Well, remember that Fallout 4 is using Umbra, so it's already not using an engine-native occlusion method. However, since it's using Umbra, I decided to look into it and, from what I've found, it seems that it apparently can work with dynamic occlusion planes kinda like what you're talking about. In that case, I can set the buildings not to occlude in the base editor, rebuild static visibility, and then drop the occlusion planes in under the models and the game should pick up on their presence dynamically instead of needing them to be baked in as well. If I HAVE to bake them in, that's gonna suck, but I might end up living with a few frames less per second in some areas if it means no flickering when I trash the objects in the way. EDIT: Well, I may not be able to. Unfortunately, it seems the edit window for cells is too tall to fit on my monitor. I'm stupid, I can just click outside the checkbox and hit enter to save the edit... DOUBLE EDIT: Well, turns out that disabling precomputed visibility in Sanctuary's cells doesn't affect the game in any meaningful way, performance-wise. And my computer's on the low end of the requirements. We're talking, lag and stuttering throughout Boston on the lowest settings. I'll test this out with a couple other places like Covenant, but I know Bunker Hill, which could benefit from it, would lag unbelievably with this set up, so I might have to finagle that one a bit. TRIPLE EDIT: As commenters on my mod have pointed out, there was already a mod that did this, so I wasted my time. Either way, this at least taught me what I need to do to accomplish this, so I should be able to implement this into my next mods...

I didn't plan on using it in too many places, so that's fine. I'm also going to try to find a way to properly nest new occlusion planes underneath the meshes so that, if they're still present, they'll still occlude, but make them children of the mesh itself so they'll be removed with the mesh if someone uses Spring Cleaning to remove things like the Covenant wall or the houses in Sanctuary. At the same time, this at least confirms that they're capable of being recalculated, which is awesome news since I'm also trying to find a way to possibly build occlusion planes directly into some of the workshop construction pieces.

Specifically, I've been looking around at Sanctuary and some other locations like Covenant, and I can't find any occlusion volumes or planes listed in the cell, nor is there anything hiding under the meshes when I've moved them. I'm starting to wonder if, since the base editor has a "non-occluding" or similar checkbox, could the engine be creating occlusion planes and volumes dynamically based on the meshes present? Then again, I might have the CK misconfigured and am being dumb, but I was wanting to make a plugin to complement Spring Cleaning so I could finally be rid of that damnable flickering when walking behind what used to be buildings and hedges. Anyone have anything to add, confirm, or deny here? I'd really like to figure out what's going on so that I can try and implement everything I'm wanting, but I can't figure out what's going on with the method for culling here.

Right. Well, when Firaxis gave out the full set of tools, they gave out the set of "Development Tools". So there's not a simplified pipeline for modding assets. This is both good and bad, in my opinion. It adds some complexity to some things, but also is much more powerful in terms of what can be achieved. It's like the difference between building a game using RPGMaker vs Unity or Unreal. The former is simpler, but allows less freedom to do what you want. That latter is harder, but allows you to build almost anything you can imagine. Firaxis basically gave us something close to the latter. Just my two cents, but...theoretically, they could've gone through and added libraries of common functions with the effects available on hover, and built them into various additional interfaces without ruining or even really modifying the way it works right now. Essentially, a way to bridge the gap between people who understand the code being used for the engine and those who aren't familiar with it. I mean, I'm certified in several scripting and programming languages, and it's not completely foreign to me when I look through the scripts in the ModBuddy, but at the same time, I can see how this would seem downright arcane to others. After all, the documentation provided isn't exactly the most effective reference available, and many of the classes are X2-specific, meaning you have to go looking for something before you'll know exactly what you need. I do hope that Firaxis improves upon the user-friendliness of the tool, but seeing as this is almost exactly the one from Civ V with a different title, I don't exactly see it happening.

Off the top of my head I'm not sure where the "breaking concealment" part of those abilities is. I suspect that it's actually in the Kismet control script that handles the mission objectives, and it's actually tied to the abilities themselves. That is, it's not using the ability that breaks concealment, but completing the objective that does so. To get at the Kismet, open up UnrealEd and open (for example) the umap file at : Steam/steamapps/common/XCOM 2 SDK/XComGame/Content/XCOM_2/Maps/Mission/Obj_DestroyObject.umap There's no actual Actors in this map -- it's just Kismet. Open the Kismet viewer from either View / UnrealKismet or click on the toolbar icon that is a "Green K". Kismet is a visual scripting language that is described in more detail here : https://udn.epicgames.com/Three/KismetUserGuide.html If you save a copy of the .umap into your mod's content folder, and add it as an existing item to your mod project (but keep the same name), then your mod version will override the base-game .umap when the made is activated. Beautiful. I'll take a look at it and see what I can do with that information. I'll post here again tomorrow when I figure out whether or not that solved the problem!

Alright, so I was looking around in the files and I can't quite find anything that I believe matches up. Maybe you could help me out here. I'm looking for the soldier abilities involved in completing objectives like "hack console", "place X4 charge", etc, so that I can disconnect the effect that reveals your squad. I'm trying to do this so that I can create a mod that tries to conserve the feeling of a small outfit of covert fighters. And you can't tell me that ADVENT's forces managed to gene-mod better hearing into their forces between the intro cinematic and the first mission so as to catch a soldier placing the charge. I'm also trying to find where the "Eliminate all hostiles" objective is generated from so that I can make it optional and enable the "Call Skyranger" ability in cases where it might not be active, but I figure I'll find those on my own. Any idea where I might find those actions so as to disconnect the "Psychic Guards of Oblivion" effect it has? I get that the developers didn't intend for the game to be completed by stealth alone, but I figure it makes more sense than needlessly shooting up a city block and risking your soldiers if XCOM truly is as small as it seems.

Clearly, I don't understand this as well as I expected. Nevertheless, thank you. I can't believe I didn't remember UE Explorer... Also, I'm not new to modding, per se...XCOM modding, however, yes, I am very new to. I didn't expect it was going to be so involved, but without a modding toolset provided by the devs, I can see why it would be... Regardless, thank you all, and if it's not too much trouble, could I get a link to this wiki? I found one that I assumed to be it, but it contained a ton of broken links and appeared to be just a single cached page.

I've searched the original hex sequence and it's not present in the code any longer, regardless of which file I check. It simply doesn't exist in that form at this point. I believe it's because, over the course of the patches, they changed the way it was implemented yet again, thereby wrecking the sequence I knew from before. For instance, it was EW Patch 1 when I first modded it and it's...well, obviously not Patch 1 anymore. Nevertheless, I extracted the entire contents of the upk to a folder and got a bunch of .class files and folders representing the internal hierarchy of the file, but I can't get any of the resultant files opened, and decompressing the upk doesn't seem to have done anything, hence why I turned to extracting the contents in full. I found GetNumAbductionSites in XComStrategyGame.upk with HxD and looked through its values, but I can't find anything that would result in the value in-game currently (by default, 3). This is becoming more and more frustrating by the second, because it seems like they purposely modified the way it was interpreted by the engine specifically to make modding it harder. Which is kinda stupid, imo, because modding extends the life of a game and, let's be honest, who really wants to release a game and have everyone stop playing it forever within 2-3 years?

Blargh...so, it turns out that the original bytecode for that is just...nowhere to be found. However, I did unpack the entire XComStrategyGame.upk and now I'm stuck, because the file I found under where it'd be edited is ReturnValue.intProperty and I don't know precisely how to edit such a file. Anyone more knowledgeable than myself on this subject, I would appreciate assistance in figuring out how to open this bleeding file. Notepad++ just gives me a bunch of [NUL] characters and some random assorted characters like percent signs and such. I'd really like to know how to manipulate these files because this could easily open the door to much bigger modding adventures on my part, and who doesn't like mods? :D EDIT: So, I figured out that there are also .class and .XGStrategyAI files related to this, but I can't figure out how to open them, either. This is getting more and more interesting by the second, but also more and more confusing...

Honestly, I used to do this all the time back in Enemy Unknown, and now I can't seem to find a way to do that in Enemy Within. It used to be a simple hex edit and now it's...really not. At least, not in any way I can identify. Anyone know how to do this, by chance, or if it's even possible to do this anymore? I really enjoyed having a nice, calm game where I could throw my skyranger at one mission at a time. After all, why the hell are we limited to one skyranger and one base when the original managed so well with all the base and squad micromanagement? It just makes the game feel heavily scripted and adds artificial difficulty with the whole "who do we sacrifice" thing, which was NEVER a part of the original game if you had good enough squads to handle the aliens. Nevertheless, that's not the point...does anyone know if that can be modified and how it can be done if it's at all possible?