justdontdoitever

It always bothered me greatly that Particle Cannon, with all its great animation and sound, loses quite a lot on its cool factor because alien's death/dodge animation plays way before the actual shot happens. The shot animation is quite a bit longer than other shot animations, so I guess that's why timings are off. Currently, the cannon goes through its WHUUUUUM charge stage, then alien dodges/gets hurt/dies, and immediately afterwards the shot animation finishes. It would be nice if someone could research and try to improve this.

I did some research on the topic because I personally hate the Skeleton Armor (Corsair in LW) on females due to the long-neck disease (the armor model was probably scaled incorrectly as it appears smaller than other armors, thus leading to bad visuals). Changing UnitPackageInfo is, in fact, a right way to go. It correctly does the trick for all non-tactical game purposes and the armor is correctly replaced in the barracks. However, as original poster had noticed, soldiers in swapped armor vanish from tactical missions. This happens due to hardcoded class assignment function: XGCharacter_Soldier.GetPawnClass(). It describes bindings between PawnType (those "ePawnType_Male_2_Carapace" etc. you see in DefaultContent.ini) and the armor classes. Now, here's the thing: ALL ARMORS BELONG TO DIFFERENT CLASSES in XCOM (with the exception of sleeveless variants, which has the same class as non-sleeveless ones), so when you try to bind a different archetype to a PawnType in the .ini, the tactical game gets correct archetype name (the one that you changed), but a wrong class. Hence, it can't find the archetype, hence it can't create an actor, hence the soldier simply doesn't appear in tactical missions. So to correctly change how your armors look, you need to mod XComGame.upk and change the aforemented function to return correct armor classes. For example, Skeleton Armor has 'XComMaleLevelIILight' (or 'Female', respectively) class, and when you change the .ini binding for it, you also must change this class to a corresponding one. Fortunately, the function is simple enough to change it (it's basically a big switch(pawnType){} operator). For example, I made the following little mod for personal usage: I don't have any intentions to make it into a "proper" mod, but you can use the same approach to edit appearances as you like. PS: You can change sleeveless armor ("_GM" entries in .ini) to its corresponding normal variant without any HEX-editing, and it'll work. PPS: This post is applicable to Long War mod. I don't know if the same approach would work on unmodded EW.