Modding alien progression ?

[Acid81]

Two questions;

For those of you that have experimented with changing the aliens progressin during campaign by hexing, I know johnnylump has done this in his Long War mod. I figured i would make a chage of my own to see how it worked.

1) The first two months March and April are hard coded and cannot be currently modified, correct ?

 

2) How big a gap between months can be manually hexed without causing problems ?

[Amineri]

All of the alien squad selection happens in XGStrategyAI.

 

There are a bunch of Determine<missiontype>Squad functions that define pod number and type, as well as total number of aliens for that particular mission. There are two principle pod types defined here : type 0 is soldier and type 2 is 'secondary' (i.e. terror-mission types). There's also a type for the commander (although it's set up somewhat differently) and a currently unused pod type (roaming).

 

The 'encounter table' is defined in GetPossibleAliens. This sets up an array of possible aliens for each type. The array is different based on what the current month is. Also, each alien type has a relative weight that determines how likely it is to appear. In laters functions (ChooseAlien) each pod type is randomly selected from the array of possible aliens.

[Acid81]

The 'encounter table' is defined in GetPossibleAliens. This sets up an array of possible aliens for each type. The array is different based on what the current month is. Also, each alien type has a relative weight that determines how likely it is to appear. In laters functions (ChooseAlien) each pod type is randomly selected from the array of possible aliens.

I hope im understading this right. That said array of aliens wont take place until the player reaches that set month, is this correct ?

[Amineri]

 

The 'encounter table' is defined in GetPossibleAliens. This sets up an array of possible aliens for each type. The array is different based on what the current month is. Also, each alien type has a relative weight that determines how likely it is to appear. In laters functions (ChooseAlien) each pod type is randomly selected from the array of possible aliens.

I hope im understading this right. That said array of aliens wont take place until the player reaches that set month, is this correct ?

 

 

Yes. Basically the function builds an "encounter table" for aliens depending on what the current month is. Each alien type has a certain chance of appearing. Later the ChooseAlien function rolls against this table for each pod on the mission to determine the mission's aliens.