Ichthyic

excellent job on the video! Agree you should send that in to devs. I managed to capture the first ethereal I ran into, but it wasn't easy! only way I managed it safely was that by that time I had a trooper with mind control, and I took over one of the mutie elites, who was promptly slaughtered like a tiny paper doll by the ethereal, but it did manage to trigger a bunch of reaction fire in the process, which took out the other mutie, and then it was just a matter of whittling away at it with a couple more guys and then dashing in with a support guy and an improved arc thrower. That sounds easier than it was. Really. took me about 10 tries to get a combination that worked without getting one of my guys slaughtered. Even then, one WAS mind controlled by the ethereal, but it broke when i stunned it. yeesh. I can't imagine how that would have gone if I were playing ironman. *shudder* ...did I mention I really frikken' hate the ethereal's "reflect" ability? IMO, it should only work against the first attack to hit it.

given that I've seen this exact format for game files used by several other games, and those games eventually had a gui modifier produced, it'll happen for this too. it's not hard really, just a tad time consuming. what's actually surprising to me is how few lines of modifiable code there actually ARE for this game! most games you can easily get lost scrolling through the thousands of lines of controlling code, but in this one, the primary game controller file is relatively tiny; only a couple hundred lines or so. Mostly due to the tiny number of items carryable by soldiers. If anything will delay the production of a gui interface for modding the game, it'll be that: the files are already pretty small and easy to scroll through.

It's not really a "free move" so much as it gives you the opportunity to use two skills to "surprise" the aliens: invisibility and battle scanner. If you remove the ability for the aliens to react to your presence, then battle scanner becomes next to worthless, and invisibility loses half of its strategic value. look at it this way: You can hear the aliens moving, right? Well, so can they, and they, like you, take up positions to counter. yeah yeah, don't ask why they can't hear you coming when you're invisible. I know... the ghost suit has sound dampening too!

3 should be easy, given that the mods are just standard text files. there are lots of open source text file mergers. example: http://winmerge.org/

lol. yeah, i was warned early on that there is a bug in the savegame system once you make it around 100 saves (happened to me at 96). I just rar the old savegames so I can go back to them if I need to, then delete them from the directory. I just keep the last dozen or so saves. makes me think I should just set up auto-archiving on the savegame directory and save me the trouble.

yes, this is a psuedo-random generator, in that it uses sequential seeds to generate hit/miss numbers. How you can tell: say your solider has a 70% chance of a hit, fires and misses. If you reload, that same shot will ALWAYS miss. this is the seed part. the sequential part comes from the fact you can generate a NEW seed for that shot if you do something different with another solider BEFORE your 70% solider takes his shot. So, for example, you shoot at the alien with another soldier that only has a 10% chance to hit. That solider will miss (because it's using the same seed as the 70% soldier would have been). Now you have CHANGED the random seed for the next action. Now try firing with the 70% soldier, and you're likely to get a hit. Still no hit? do something else with a 3rd soldier and change the seed again. even tossing a smoke bomb will do. seriously, I've tested this thoroughly, and it works all the time. it's also not an uncommon way to generate "randomness", as a lot of other games I have played utilize a similar system. if you play ironman, obviously you cannot exploit the RNG this way. To prove how easy it is to exploit the RNG in this game, I'm playing classic, first time through, am fighting berserkers at this point, and have had exactly ZERO casualties for the whole game, and nobody has even been in the hospital since the 1st month. Oddly, this makes the game EXACTLY what the OP said they wanted: a chess match. the chess part comes in figuring out the order of moves to get everyone doing pretty much exactly what you want. :P

4 still works for slots, it's just cut off a bit at the bottom, but still selectable. "left at default for the sake of RP" LOL btw, I went ahead and made a mod of it, with various values, and posted it on the mod site.

zero doesn't give an error, but appears to turn off any chance of getting psi at all (probably just turns off psi checking period).

there is another way if you already have a game started! instead of changing the character lines, look for these lines: PSI_GIFT_CHANCE=2 PSI_TEST_LIMIT=4 PSI_TRAINING_HOURS=24 PSI_NUM_TRAINING_SLOTS=4 and change those. setting psi_gift_chance to 1 will pretty much guarantee your soldiers test positive (has about a 1% chance to fail) you can set the training hours lower (notice I already have) to speed up the process, and even add another slot to your training facility (any more get cut off by the display window). thus, your soldiers won't start with psi, but they WILL get it once you get to the point where you can build the psi facility.

I experimented... a lot... 1 basically *almost* guarantees a positive test, 5 *almost* guarantees a negative test. I think those are 1% checks? I have had 1 positive show up out of around 130 tested at 5, and missed 1 positive out of 80 at 1. I'd have to test further to be sure, but it looks like fractions work as well, so that 1.5 tests less positive than 1, and 1.75 tests noticeably less positive than 1.5 even. logarithmic scale maybe? I settled on 2 to be a reasonable number so that I wouldn't have to hire 200 soldiers to find a few positives. gives me about a 10% positive rate. the base of 4 appears to be around a 5% chance. maybe the limit number affects the scale? *shrug*

are maps randomly constructed, or are they one of several presets each time you do a mission? if randomly constructed when you enter a mission, it might actually be EASIER to modify the hitpoint values of terrain and actually have it work right when a map gets constructed. heck, if it can be isolated, it's likely to be a single table file of terrain hp values that can just be adjusted in a day. OTOH, if there are literally dozens of preset maps... that's a whole lot of work to edit every single bit of terrain on every map to give it the right hitpoint values. I'm guessing it's the latter, given that the devs decided against free aim. .... " The exterior walls were nearly invincible in the classic game." IIRC, something even made mention of this during one of the missions? Something about "don't bother trying to shoot down alien walls" or something like that. god I loved that game. I think that, and the original Panzer General really turned me on to turn-based strategy.

I've tested any number of percent values for modifying the chance to test positive for psionics, but nothing seems to affect it. here are the relevant (AFAICT) lines in the modfile: PSI_GIFT_CHANCE=3 PSI_TEST_LIMIT=5 PSI_TRAINING_HOURS=240 PSI_NUM_TRAINING_SLOTS=3 I can change training hours and even the number of slots (you can just see it if you add a 4th slot to the test facility), but no matter what values I put for "gift chance", even 100, I still have only found 2 out of around 50 units to test positive. makes me wonder if this value is some kind of pre-set seed created at the beginning of a game? anyone else have success modifying this? edit: someone already figured this out: "; This number is used in a calculation to determine the % chance that a soldier will have the Psi gift. LOWER numbers INCREASE the chance, HIGHER numbers decrease the chance. If you ; want more soldiers to be Psionic make this a 0." here I thought it was a straight percentage. doh. I'll post again if LOWERING this number doesn't work.

NOTE: the following does NOT mean that a mod which enables the console command isn't needed. It would still be tremendously useful, just like it was in oblivion. I did a ton more research on this, and it turns out what is happening is that since a lot of laptops are manufactured in China these days, they typically install all the software using an external asian keyboard. what happens is that there is a registry setting left afterwards that has some key mappings incorrect for US keyboards in it, and the grave key (tilde key) is one of those. so, here's how to fix it: open regedit Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\i8042prt\Parameters There should be an entry named OverrideKeyboardSubtype with a type of REG_DWORD and a value of 2. Set the value to 0 and reboot. now, uninstalling the IR drivers in the device manager (if you have them) will work to enable the console to come up. if you don't have any IR drivers, then just doing the reg change should fix it for you. I just tested this myself, and it does work for my ASUS laptop.

true, but i have read in several places that some are already working on the script extender for FO3. there's probably already a rudimentary version of it floating around out there somewhere.

I think you should just give up trying to get information in this forum (it's obvious all you will get are replies about the IR drivers), and move the request to the "requested mods" forum. there are several threads there asking for exactly the same thing (I just bumped one of them). don't think any modders are paying any attention, though. I'm thinking about going back to the oblivion modders forum, and seeing if the person who did the console-ring thing is still active. the format of the files for FO3 is pretty much the same as that for oblivion.