osito2dancer

Do aliens get any type of "Bioelectric Skin" skill? That would be a good counter, perhaps enhancing a grenade with an skill to do a 3x3 AoE that uncovers any hidden operatives (without damage or something), or give electric skin to leaders and navigators so they can check around them in a given area.

Cool, new options: Save ScumItchy Trigger TentacleAiming AnglesMind Hates MatterTraining Roulette What does each do? Would be cool to know from first hand experience :3.

As a patch for XCOM without EW, or is it a complaint about EW not being "stand-alone" enough?

Does "Offline Steam" still work? I always do both phone-home and offline steam to play X-Com, since i dont trust that they just use 2 ips to balance the whole upload infrastructure. Hope it doesnt affect my gameplay, i dont want to update XCOM or buy EW just yet :(

Question: Did they add a new patch for base game (non-EW)?

Awesome work on decrypting that information. Now, i have a little insight on something: i) If the firing weapon is a Rocket Launcher and the projectile has moved at least 192 units (2 tiles), and the touched actor isn't fragile and the shot is not a hit the the rocket explodes immediately. (In practice I don't think this can happen). I think this is what happens if you shoot a rocket at a distance but you have a block between the rocketeer and the intended area, but that block is not solid and it is not right next to the rocketeer (as if in the middle of the trayectory, there was a breakable wall or something). If the distance is too short, your area of effect does not proyect over the intended target, but rather closes up right next to the soldier or right next to the solid block. That should explain the fact that sometimes you can get an "area of effect" around the intended target, but the %-to-hit is shown as 0, modeling the fact that the missile will explode before hitting the target. ALSO: Now, with this information, what would you deduce a "%-to-hit" really means? Is it such as "40% to hit any projectile on the target", or more like an average from all projectiles (deduced from a "i want to hit this alien in a fixed point, and my chances are 40%". Perhaps it is better to mod "%-to-hit" towards a more "%-to-hit-X-damage", such as dealing 1 damage with a higher chance by "bullet spraying" mechanics (just hitting some projectiles in his body, you just want to hit them somewhere, a LMG approach, if you will) than dealing 10 damage from an aimed "shot-thru-the-heart" (full 100% proyectile hit, from an sniper shot)? If each bullet has its trajectory, then you can opt to take a risk and shoot a wounded alien with a higher chance of dealing that pesky 1 damage and kill them, rather than shooting for full damage and missing it altogether (making LMG a higher-aim lower-dmg suppresion choice, sniper rifles a high-dmg low-aim killshot, and rifles something in between, as i would presume is meant to be).

When you install the game, you can choose the folder it goes to. So, just instead of choosing "F:\SteamLibrary\SteamApps\common\XCom-Enemy-Unknown", just choose "F:\SteamLibrary\SteamApps\common\", and it will go right.

I concur: Giving too much ammo to soldiers amounts to breaking a game dynamic (properly evaluate shooting v/s losing a turn reloading), and ends up giving a less stressful enviroment when in "close battles" (6+ aliens v/s 6 soldiers). Too much ammo = shoot until dead, we have reserves. 8-6(HVY) shots is good, perhaps 12-9(HVY) is kind of overkill.

Sounds awesome, does it save a lot of space to do other things? Modulus and division give proper values? Although you could change that 34 to 33 (since 100/34 ~ 2.9, so you get 2 shots instead of 3). You are one of many godsend people to XCom, im just waiting for your patches to be released on Toolboks format, so i can apply them to Warspace and begin playing again :). GL HF!

Wow.... just .... wow. Flush already seems like such a weak ability that to make it require double ammo seems kind of crazy. I'll add the conditional to allow Flush to consume additional ammo, but am going to leave the default value to be normal ammo usage. I think Flush uses 3 ammo charges, since it's a guaranteed hit (it has +30% hit chance and forces the target to move to another cover, although at reduced damage). It is a good way of triggering "Close Combat Specialist" on a closer Assault or trigger Overwatch attacks for Opportunist Snipers who are not in direct (or Squadsight) LOS, and need the target to move somewhere else. About that: What's the chance of hitting an alien who's on the run, with overwatch, apart from the -20% penalty? Does it get "exposed" (hence, OW has critical damage buffed), or it considers the older cover? half cover? full cover? range constraints?

To do a fast check, you could do a 2 - 2 - 1 - 2 - 2 - 2 - 1 setup, or something of the sorts, since the first mission always promotes a soldier to certain rank, so it would be fast to identify if that works right away or not. Dont know if the changes to the tree are taken into consideration over saves, but it would seem that it doesn't. I've been following your work on several topics, and i'm currently waiting on your "Alien Lockdown Bug fix" to properly play the game again, since it has become boring to lock 4 aliens with 1 soldier at close range and overwatched :(. O2D

To all who it may concern: Just yesterday, i was subject to a most unfair situation, in which i had cornered a muton to a standstill in the Paper Mill map (abduction), with proper cover in all sides at the start of the map. Right when i finished my turn, a no-where to be seen Cyberdisk (i previously found that disk, but it went towards the back of the mill, and was really no-where to be seen previously, so i cannot take blame for not killing it in time), teleported in front of my two top-soldiers and proceeded to pummel them into nothingness (and smartly enough, he took the FIRST surprise turn to kill my H.E.A.T. Bullet Storm Heavy, so i could not kill him back at my turn). That, in conjoint to other ocurrences, made me contact you (as a modding entity) to analyze how does that teleport bug come to life. The main idea of this post is to find if by enabling a patrolling stance to take initiative whenever the map starts (in contrast to "when-discovered"), or if the "random movement" can just get disabled somehow in coding/modding (by a jump of some sorts). Several times i've encountered that the monsters go a long way from cover to be discovered: 1) I once saw the sectoid's health bar a LONG way into the dark, and see it running towards my soldiers to be "found out" and trigger their sequence), moving a distance too far to be even dash'd with mobility enhancement (40 tiles?). 2) Another time, in a "Rescue Hostage" mission (Anna Sing, if that helps, seems to be an standard map for that mission), i found a group of thin men just at 27 range, trigger their "discovery" scene, but they got teleported to the back of the map (right near Anna Sing, with the soldiers at the starting point on their first turn). Those ocurrences give me a hint that the teleporting bug must come from a variable of patrolling enhancement, so it CAN BE ACTIVATED/DEACTIVATED beforehand, so it might be just a change of variables and BLAM, teleporting gone. DISCUSS. O2D.

http://xcom.nexusmods.com/mods/60 This videotutorial will help you on your enterprise: In short, you have to open XCom with a "texture debugging" mode, and get the flags from the already existing textures. They even add a new flag to show how it's made (or so i recall, cant watch the video ATM).

First time i saw the expenses/prices of items, my mind added the "M$" to it, so it should not be needed to add so many 0's, since the screen gets "dirty" and messes up the game balance.

As Bokauk said, ToolBoks should do the work: First time i set up "50-50" chance, i got 4 female soldiers as an starting group, so it might work if you set it "100% female".

The good thing about having saves to rely on, is that you can project your moves and, if not succesful, you can opt to do it differently. It is quite common sense that, if you do things the same way every time, the outcome should not differ, and the SEED RNG accomplishes just that. If you don't like an outcome, dont do the things the same way: Move differently, shoot with another soldier first, do an OW trap, i dont know, blow the damn aliens with your grenades or rockets, do a suppression run... the limit is your own smarts and tactics.

I've always had a doubt about this: Can you "hook" DLL function calls to UPKs? If so, you could generate code, place a dll call into your script (and fill with no-ops to erase the originally-replaced function) and play with it. O2D

Nice post and investigation about LoS, seems to confirm most theories i had over such issue. Kudos to the planner, it must have taken a lot of work.

Wow, tough break, hope he recovered well. I second the OP's request, not asking for a mod, but rather to make a point in being: Early game is the most notorious time this comes into play (but not the only one), since you are due to be hit once or twice (by thin men more than sectoids), and getting a low rank soldier out of the game for 5 months is giving him the red card and removing him from the game altogether. When higher armors come into play, you are still bound to a "lucky crit" from the enemy to get your 12-15 HP Lance Commander (Colonel) down to 1hp = GG top soldier. I balanced it from 14-30 to 10-18 (using the source + compile option from warspace, since all other features are 100% supported and endorsed by me) and im getting more "reasonable" times (~1 month for injured, 2-3 months top for gravely), which is hurtful in his own regard, but it still manageable (one month is not that big of a difference between ranks, and still drives the point home to "watch your soldiers at all times").

So, you can actually destroy an alien ship, rather than having it crash and recover it? How did you manage to do that ingame?

Interesting. The game tracks the highest rank you've achieved, even if your top soldier dies (you don't lose OTS options, for example), so it may base the reward on that, rather than the top living guy. So far with the code change I've only seen corporals and sergeants, and never anyone above my highest rank achieved. Yeah, but i was just getting my soldiers up and running (March-April), so i didn't have any Seargents (dead or alive). Moreso, the OTS was unlocked thanks to that mission reward soldier (has happened a couple of times, so it was not a bug or something). Perhaps the check has some subtlety behind it. Good thing it works though, congrats on the mod :).

Get in line: New Maps/Map Modding Capabilities are one of the most required "extensions" given to Firaxis about this game. So far, no dice on editing maps. Wondered the same thing, and shouldn't be difficult: We do have time bomb missions, would need to check if that setting is map-locked or game-locked, in order to enable them for landed/crashed UFOs. Soldiers CAN MISS a 99% shot, that could be taken as a "gun jam", i have missed 3 90+% shots AT POINT BLANK, against a Berserker Muton, talk about "crapping in the line of fire". The game does allow aliens to perfom movement to avoid them getting "picked on" without cover when discovered for the first time. That is a great advantage to them, and i dont think an Ambush setting could be enabled without serious modding to alien behaviour (Allow them to Shoot + Move? SectoID fire is bearable, anything higher... SectoPOD fire is a NO NO). You can get ambushed though if you walk up towards a hidden "already seen" alien, so Overwatch traps are being applied in the game.

Hrm, I thought it was enough -- those are hex strings unique within the file, so a search within the hex of XComStrategyGame should turn them up. Do you need anything more than function names (which are noted in previous posts)? Because I'm not sure what else to provide. To change alien progression: XComStrategyGame.upk/XGStrategyAI.GetPossibleAliens There are a series of IF MONTH >= X THEN statements; what follows is a series of weighted chance for different kinds of aliens to show up. The weights and kinds of aliens can be edited, but the following code only designates the months: 3c 44 00 00 2c 02: May Aliens (adds Mutons) 3c 44 00 00 2c 03: June Aliens (Cyberdisc, tougher Mutons) 3c 44 00 00 2c 04: July Aliens (Muton Berserkers) 3c 44 00 00 2c 05: August Aliens (Muton Elite?) 3c 44 00 00 2c 06: September aliens (Sectopod?) Changing the last byte (02 through 06) will change the month for that set of weights. If you skip a month, that's OK, because the formulation is >=, so it just means that the prior months alien layout will take precedence. They should stay in the same order, though, because of the way the function is built. So far this seems to work. To edit the range of soldier ranks you'll get as an abduction reward: XComStrategyGame/XGStrategyAI.DetermineAbductionReward XComStrategyGame/XGStrategyAI.DetermineRandomAbductionReward (for the Second Wave option that randomizes abduction rewards) The code includes a call to another function that builds the award soldier. But you can edit the range of possible ranks by editing the following hex string: 26 16 2c 03 2c 05 It will show up twice, once in each of the two functions. The 03 is the minimum rank of the soldier (default: sergeant) and the 05 is the maximum rank (default: captain). I changed it to 26 16 2c 02 2c 03 so the range is corporal to sergeant, because I don't like getting a top soldier for so cheap when I've done so much work to build up the rest of the team. (It looks like there's also a governor on the function that prevents you from rolling up someone higher than one rank below the highest-rank a soldier has achieved so far, but I left that alone.) So far this seems to work. To change the number of aliens during abductions: XComStrategyGame.upk/XGStrategyAI.DetermineAbductionSquad. There is a case (switch) statement that determines the size of the alien squad based on the difficulty of the abduction. (The determined in another function; it's based on the panic in the country, with a randomizer). The code for difficulty 1 (lowest) is 2c 02 0f 00 e7 43 00 00 2c 04 The code for difficulty 2 is 2c 03 0f 00 e7 43 00 00 2c 06 The code for difficulty 3 is 2c 04 0f 00 e7 43 00 00 2c 08 The code for difficulty 4 is 2c 04 0f 00 e7 43 00 00 2c 0a In each of those, the numbers to change are the ones after the two "2c" bytes. The first number is the number of alien pods (groups of 1 to 3 aliens). The second number is the number of aliens. So difficulty 4 is 04 pods and 0a aliens, or 4 and 10. I'm pretty sure the number of aliens must be >= number of pods AND <= (number of pods * 3) - 2. Playing on impossible will add two more aliens to the squad (which is why the -2 is there). The number of aliens probably doesn't have to be an even number, but I set it that way anyway, because all the default entries were. For example, I changed the 4-difficulty alien squad to 2c 06 0f 00 e7 43 00 00 2c 10 That's six pods, 16 aliens, or 18 on impossible. Seems to work so far. Let me know if and how I can be more specific. Cheers! Cool, didn't catch this at first, seems that i just glanced it tiredly. Thanks for pointing it back :). Couple of things though: The reward soldier can be 1 rank above your highest soldier if that soldier is below the minimum range (for example, i have gotten a Seargent soldier when my top guy was still a Corporal), but seems to reset itself when you go above that threshold (i dont recall getting a Major when my top one was Captain). Also, i do remember getting a Major soldier at some point (when my top guy was Colonel), so the top limit might be off.

You were right, the value is the number of seconds until the game will attempt to clear the corpse. However, if the corpse is currently near/in view of the camera, it will not be cleared. That's why you never see a corpse disappear when it's in view. When you scroll the camera away then go back, the corpse is magically gone :) So 7200 would mean the corpse would disappear only after it has been off of the screen for two hours :) For those that want to mod this without delving into the hex, I've created an easy to configure mod with this feature :) XCOM: ToolBoks From glancing at that code, it looks like the +1 you refer to just means, "how much XP is required for MyCurrentRank + 1 (next rank)", not by how many ranks you can be promoted in one mission. If there is such limitation (and I suspect there is), then I like your idea though :) Daemonjax wrote a tutorial on an example mod which might help you get started :) thanksfor the link and there is a limitation I did a mission with one soldier 12 kills (sectoids) and he only got a squddie rank while a sniper with the same amouts of kills but with more missions is a sargent This opens up another question: How does the game manage Exp overflow? Lets say that soldier (12kills squaddie) kills another alien at the next mission, does his exp start floored to 0, or limited to "nextrank-1"? Like a "ReadyToNext=1" variable acting as a flag or controller to oversee that? Think of it as "if that variable it's 0, he does not level up", and the flag resets at mission start. Would've been smart to do that. I would think that there is a controller (to limit 1 level up per mission) and an overflow manager (so you dont need to kill the X aliens needed to level up from rank to rank+1 at one mission, and losing all progress between missions). Perhaps that squaddie could have an overflow that helps him "rocket up" between ranks (as long as he is in a mission and gets 1 kill, the overflow buffer feeds the exp counter, so he levels up oncer per mission until depleting the overflow). Could help explain how did a no-kill soldier level'd up at one point in my C/I run.

Overwatch does not trigger if the alien moves 1 tile into LoS, he has to move 2 (since OW does "trail fire", and shoots at the "assumed position" rather than the current one, hence the aim penalty). If the sectoid moved around your LoS, it would trigger, but if he went "covert" (such as going around a building or an SUV), no dice. The plasma crits are a by-product of the enhancement done by WS. It adds difficulty, to avoid being shot and moving always in cover. It would be great to find a middleground between vanilla and WS in terms of healing time, but in the meantime, you can edit DGC.mod and shorten those times.