Satoron

Yes I know, it is very limited in what it can do and is by all definitions a makeshift fix, however I disliked the sleeveless armors terribly and am finding every drawback to the fix to be acceptable compared to my soldiers trying to impress the aliens with their muscular gene-mod biceps. One day there may be a more comprehensive fix, we may even get mod tools! *Knock on wood.* But until that day we'll have to make due with compromise. I for one am very happy with what Firaxis has done for us modders in this latest update. I feel like they didn't expect their fans to want to mod it as much as we do and now they're being reactive and helping us along. Of course I don't watch/read the news so I'm not sure how strong of a group the modding community was pre-release. I also wouldn't have as awesome a game without the amazing work of Amineri, Drakous, and the rest of this impressively strong community. Without them the game would have lost replay-value for me a long time ago. Anyways, I've tried a few other ideas with my fix like I didn't like the shear size of the male carapace armor I had to use in place of the gene-mod carapace in my fix, so I tried having my soldier "wear" psi armor in the carapace armor slot so I could fit another armor over it using the gene-mod deco options, but the pawn things must have game data linked to it cause when I did that there must have been a disconnect between the armor item they had in their inventory and the pawn armor I told the game they were wearing cause my guys would die as soon as they were supposed to be merrily skipping off the skyranger >_< So that was a bust and I'm compromising. =)

Thanks Drakous!

You are most welcome sir! I'm glad I could help =)

Just tried allying it and the soldier and pawn is now INVISIBLE for some reason... So let me see if I can be helpful. So this is what I do and it works for me and it should work for others because I haven't changed that much, but that's a big "should." First off, in the installation folder located at xew/xcomgame/config is a folder called "defaultcontent" This is the file that the game will copy into your documents/mygames/xcomEW/xcomgame/config and create the file "xcomcontent" if xcomcontent isn't there. So whenever I modify a defaultconfig file I delete the old corresponding xcomconfig file at documents/mygames/xcomEW/xcomgame/config so that when the game starts it creates a new file with the data from the defaultconfig file in the installation file. Please delete files responsibly however, you should prolly backup just to be safe, sometimes you don't want to delete some of those things like the xcomimput one has all your saved keybindings. So that right there might be your problem, that your old xcomcontent file is chillin out and the game's confused or summat, idunno. As far as my modifications directly to the defaultcontent file are concerned, let me try to explain better. UnitPackageInfo=(PawnType=ePawnType_Male_2_Skeleton_GM,ArchetypeName="Soldier_MaleSkeleton.ARC_MaleSkeleton") So this is what one of the lines looks like AFTER I modded it. See how I left the GM that was outside of the quotations alone? That makes it so that when the game goes to look for the GM model it finds it, however, I changed the model it ends up using by removing the GM from the texture file name or what-have-you, the thing in quotations. That name that is in the quotations in the name of the file for the default armor deco, so no more armored tank top. This would explain why it's invisible for you, really, the game is looking for the GM model and it can't find it. Let it find the GM model, but direct it to the default model, think of it that way. UnitPackageInfo=(PawnType=ePawnType_Male_3_Ghost_GM,ArchetypeName="Soldier_MaleGhost.ARC_MaleGhost")UnitPackageInfo=(PawnType=ePawnType_Male_1_Kevlar_GM,ArchetypeName="Soldier_MaleKevlar.ARC_MaleKevlar") Here are two more to look at for reference. So the thing is, the gene mod armor works differently then the rest in that this fix you're doing here replaced the armor tank top with the default (deco 1) armor in EVERY WAY. Including the fact that when you switch decos the only thing that changes are the elbow/shoulderpads and nothing else. I found a way to insert my favorite deco for an armor in there by basically fitting my favorite armor around the default armor where I made the default armor look like psi armor cause psi armor is pretty skin-tight to minimize clipping. If you want to hear more about that story, let me know, I don't want to bore everyone with my makeshift fixes when Amineri or one of the other awesome modders will prolly find a magical function in the UPK files that all you do is change it and it considers gene mod soldiers to be default soldiers for armor deco purposes.

See the thread 'Unlock all Decorative Armors for all Armors'. On page 2 Amineri identified the change you need to make. Ninja'd: I see you worked it out while I was posting. -Dubious- Oh okay cool! Thanks! Amineri always does cool stuff, unfortunately being the programming dullard that I am, I can't make changes to UPK files unless I have a unique hex string to find the offset so I can use toolboks to insert the changed result. I have tried using the modding tools, but I'm hopeless without you guys to help me with stuff like that by doing it first. It's okay though, I got this to work mostly. =D

So I'm not a huge fan of the gene-mod soldiers armor decos. Is there a way to make it so gene-mod soldiers use the default armor decos? I'd really like that. EDIT: HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA I AM DRUNK WITH POWER!! So I went into the Default Content Config file and just below the armor kit things is a list of armor deco things. (I'm in on the lingo I know) There is a bunch of armor deco lines that look like this. UnitPackageInfo=(PawnType=ePawnType_Male_2_Skeleton,ArchetypeName="Soldier_MaleSkeleton.ARC_MaleSkeleton")UnitPackageInfo=(PawnType=ePawnType_Male_3_Ghost,ArchetypeName="Soldier_MaleGhost.ARC_MaleGhost")UnitPackageInfo=(PawnType=ePawnType_Male_1_Kevlar,ArchetypeName="Soldier_MaleKevlar.ARC_MaleKevlar") Not sure if I posted that right, anyways all rights to Firaxis. So a bunch of lines lower then this is has the exact same format except GM (Gene-Mod) is thrown in. So I left the GM in the achetype and removed all instances of GM within the quotations so that when the game goes to look for the gene-mod achetypes it takes the default ones instead! And it worked! Nothing I try works on the first try! Anyways I hope someone gets a kick out of this and maybe were annoyed as I was about the gene-mod skins. EDIT2: So not a total victory, while the soldier is not longer wearing an armored tank-top into battle, switching the armor decos only switches the shoulder pads and elbow pads as if they still had the gene-mod skin. I don't really mind though, but just letting people who might want to copy me,

Hi Drakous! I'm a fan of your work =) After I posted I began trying weird things in the name of science just in case something worked and by removing those uncompressed_size files from my xcom directory the game recognized my modded UPK files. After looking into it I realized that the number in the uncompressed_size file corresponded with the number of bytes in the modded UPK file, so I bet it has something to do with telling the game how big the compressed UPK file really is or something. Like I said, it's all witchcraft to me. Thank you for your advice! -Satoron

I hate to have this stray from EW, but this used to work for me in EU, so I'm not sure what the problem is. I've decompressed the UPK files, they still read as normal UPK files though, just bigger. I made some changes just fine, seems to be good, but when installed in place of the UPK files in EW, the game crashes. Does it have to do with the 1kb files called xcomgame.upk and xcomstrategygame.upk? When I open those up they each have a number where the xcomgame one is bigger. I think they might be telling the game how big the files should be and now that I've made them bigger it's confused. That's just a guess. If I'm right, I'm not sure where to find the new number to change that to. So any help would be appreciated and if I'm straying more into general mod help at this point then EW discovery of different things, then please point me in the direction of a place I can get help, I don't want to be a bother. EDIT: I removed the 1kb files from the EW file and the game started working. So now I have unpacked the EW files and can directly modify them and use them from there without further work. It just strikes me how much of programming seems to be witchcraft. Thanks guys for the help you provided earlier.

And they're still called xcomgame.upk and xcomstrategygame.upk? I'm curious, how big are those two files in your EW file? Mine are 3,736 kb and 1448 kb respectively. I only ask because I have very slow internet and a re-download would be bad. Also I feel like if the download had messed up it would crash constantly, but I'm no expert.

So I've just gotten EW working and I've got all changes related to resource hacker working. My question relates to the UPK files, xcomgame and xcomstrategygame in both the EU files and EW files. The EW files are too small to contain all the data from EU and then the extra data from EW, so I assumed that EW references the EU UPK files, meaning I could apply my mods to the EU xcomgame and strategygame and have their effects reflected when playing EW. I found this wasn't the case and EW can even run without the EU UPK files being present at all. I'm not a programming genius, but decent with computers in general. I just need to know where EW gets the values that were present in the EU xcomgame and xcomstrategygame UPK files so that I can apply my mods to that file and have their effects present when I play EW. Due to my rudimentary knowledge of programming I'm afraid the answer may be very simple and obvious, so please excuse a layperson >_< Thank you very much for any help you can provide

Thanks Amineri! I'll do my best to see if I can mod this, but I'm no where NEAR as good at this as you are >_< You're pretty awesome =) Keep up the amazing work.

Hello! So I know this thread had been dead for a month, but it has shown the most promise for solving my problem, I just can't seem to find my answer. What I'd like to know is can you make it so you can choose two or three perks per rank? In such a way that a soldier would have greater then 7 perks total. The wiki page for Amineri's UI mod lists one of the mod's rules as prohibiting multiple perk choices per rank, so I was wondering if this could be changed... I'm not very good at script hunting and modding myself, but I know my way around ToolBoks and can successfully implement a original hex / modified hex modlet if that what solving this problem will take. P.S. I'm a huge fan of what this modding community has done, thanks for making this game awesome! =) P.P.S. Failing more perks per rank, is there a way to increase the total number or ranks beyond 7? These ranks do not need to provide perks, just stat increases that can be handled in the .ini. My questions must sound odd, lol.