thither

Sorry I've been offline guys, IRL issues have been keeping me really busy for a while. I will try to roll a new version of the Mac installer this afternoon, which will hopefully alleviate the issues with trying to get the Linux one working on OS/X.

I have installed Yosemite on a machine, but haven't had time to check out the installer on it yet (I will hopefully have time this weekend). Are you getting an error? (The installer is written in standard python, and the version of python included in OS/X hasn't changed too much from Mavericks to Yosemite, so I'm hoping it will still work correctly.)

Yeah, without finding any UPKs in there, or other similar files, I'm kind of flummoxed. Just to double-check, are you running this as root? (Wondering about the "invalid user access" bits at the end there.) If not, try running your dtrace command again with "sudo" in front of it and enter your machine password at the prompt. Otherwise I'm stumped. You're kind to ask for a way to thank me, but unless you have a way to make my computer print beer, there's no need. ;) Sorry I couldn't actually fix anything.

Uh, you might as well, yeah, and then put the output on pastebin and post a link. Maybe try starting a new game this time, and then quit from there. I suppose it's possible that the app store version of the game has buried the UPK files and so forth in all those Mac plist files and frameworks somewhere, or exploded them onto the filesystem or something, in which case installing the mod is probably going to be very difficult.

Hmm, the weird thing is that I don't see any .upk files in there (which are some of the game files that need to get modified in order to apply the patch). Did you actually launch the game and get to the main XCom menu, or did you quit from the little launcher application? Also, if you go to pastebin.com you can upload a big blob of text there and then just post a link to it back here (you don't need to create an account or anything). We wouldn't want the forums to run out of electrons!

Oh, that's awesome. Thanks so much.

Hi! I wrote a little script to install the XCom: Enemy Unknown mod Long War on the OS/X version of XCom, and with it I created a little Mac-specific distribution of Long War. I've emailed it to the mod maintainers (johhnylump, in particular) and they've uploaded the file to the files section. The only hiccup is that the distribution I created is originally as a .dmg file, but I guess the site will only accept .zip files for uploads. For now johhnylump has just zipped the .dmg file and uploaded it, which is fine, but it would be nice if the site would just accept .dmg files for upload directly, since that's the format most Mac users are used to getting software in. For non-Mac users, dmg is short for "disk image", and when you open one on a Mac it creates a little virtual disk image with your installation software on it. It's basically just a bunch of binary data, and it can be compressed much like a rar or zip file is. Again, it's not a big deal, Mac users can just decompress the .zip file and open the .dmg file inside it, or if need be I can repackage the distribution as a .zip file instead, but since it seems like this wouldn't be too hard to change, I thought I'd ask whether someone can just enable uploading .dmg files directly to the site. Thanks!

Sure. 1. Download the Linux installer (it's a .zip file) 2. Unzip it 3. The three files you want are in LW-EW-Linux/install-files/: localization/int/xcomstrategygame.intcookedpcconsole/xcomgame.upkcookedpcconsole/xcomstrategygame.upk4. Copy the upks to XCOMData/XEW/XcomGame/CookedPCConsole 5. Copy the .int file to XCOMData/XEW/Localization/INT 6. Also copy it the .int to "XCOM Enemy Unknown.app/Contents/Resources/MacOverrides" I don't think you need to wipe out your Feral Interactive directory after this (if you do see above).

Good news! I tweaked my script enough so that it produces a .dmg file with the script and the installation files on it, and I've produced a bona-fide OS/X distribution. The install should be somewhat simpler and you won't need to have innoextract installed any more. The distribution is the same as Beta 13, plus the fix for buying weapons that wghost81 has in her Linux distribution. I have PMed the file to johnnylump for upload to the site, and updated the docs on github to reflect how you install from a .dmg file. In the interim, you can still use the script to install from a .exe file as before: ./LongWarInstaller.py --install ~/Downloads/Long-war-beta-whatever.exe I'll probably be offline for a few days, but will check back here to see if anyone has any trouble.

Yeah, this is the same thing I was seeing. No idea what might be causing it. Hey, can anyone tell me where to find the game logs?

For this step you've got to delete these two files from your installation directory (under SteamApps/common/XCom-Enemy-Unknown/XCOMData/XEW/XComGame/CookedPCConsole): XComGame.upk.uncompressed_size XComStrategyGame.upk.uncompressed_size They're supposed to be a file protection mechanism to stop you from fiddling with the files, but if they aren't present the game just ignores the check.

Well, good news and bad news. I copied *.int from app/XComGame/Localization/INT in the installer to XCOM Enemy Unknown.app/Contents/Resources/MacOverrides/XEW in the installed game, and the game options now appear correct (I see "not so long war" in the second wave options, and there's no beginner difficulty any more). Also, starting a new game I notice that there are just four operatives in the dropship and they are in white armor, which seems to comport with how I remember the mod starting on Windows. The bad news: when I hit "Launch Mission" for the first mission, the game just hangs with a black screen. It's not completely frozen, the mouse moves and I can just regular-quit it from the taskbar instead of needing to force quit, but no actual mission seems to appear. I've also noticed that the game pretty reliably crashes at startup on every other launch now. Like, I start it, quit to desktop from the main menu, start it again, and it crashes. If I restart after the crash I get the "report error" dialog box, cancel, and the game starts normally. I'm going to try validating the files and starting over from scratch to see if I can improve the stability that way.

Fantastic - good sleuthing! I will try to verify this later tonight and report back. About the crashing thing, I did see something in the README about a known crash which is supposed to occur after the first time you install the mod (right at startup) and I've seen that. I haven't seen many CTD's in game though, yet. I'll be curious if you see the same graphical glitches I've been seeing.

Thanks for the detailed replies, Ameneri. I'll play around with this a little more when I get some more free time and post my results. I got distracted, meanwhile, by banging out a python script to apply the mod to an installation of XCom on the Mac. It's not finished yet, but it already is able to extract all the files from the inno installer, figure out what's there, and make a backup of the original files that the user is about to overwrite. I don't think it should be too hard to add the executable patching in there as well, and I'm planning to make it easy to back out the mod from the backups as well, which should be helpful for testing. Right now it's only for OS/X and EW, but it shouldn't be too hard to get it working for Linux as well if need be. Anyways, as I say it's not working yet, but I'll keep hacking on it. The source is available here if anyone is curious. Pull requests welcome, etc. https://github.com/timgilbert/long-war-unix-installer

Also, if I get a little time I'll try to write up a little python script or something to automate this a bit more.