Modding Meld

[Tycus]

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If you want to make arc thrower more useful, you can tie in meld to captured aliens, not the dead ones.

With a bit of afterthought I might agree on this one (capture aliens to get your precious meld early), but I just thought of added benefit of having choice between "get at least some meld" option vs "make those dodge matrices" (and dodge matrices are important in my mod, because of rebalanced UFO interceptions, and you'll burn through those real quick), but I have to give it a try before I can say for sure.

 

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Manually dissecting each and every body to get meld from it is as boring to me as re-equipping soldiers each time in OG (XCU helps, but it's not perfect and can't auto-buy ammo, for example).

You aware that you can order multiple objects in single engineering project at once, right?

 

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Also my plan on rebalancing explosives is to allow them to have random damage (like any other weapon in game has) and give them slightly randomized explosion radius (mostly to discourage trick shots).

Edited November 25, 2013 by Tycus

[wghost81]

You aware that you can order multiple objects in single engineering project at once, right?

Yes, but that is still to many micromanagement for me. :smile:

[Tycus]

 

You aware that you can order multiple objects in single engineering project at once, right?

Yes, but that is still to many micromanagement for me. :smile:

 

Apparently not for me, because I always get this feeling that game was oversimplified in some areas or maybe I like to give player (and myself) more options/more choices to make (because on Ironman Impossible (the only difficulty I play this game) every tiny thing matter (like positions of your soldiers in pre-mission load-out screen, and I'm not talking about squadleader)

Edited November 25, 2013 by Tycus

[wghost81]

Yes, I play I/I too. But there are many ways to play this game, even on I/I, that's why I love it. :smile:

 

True, on I/I in first two months everything matters. And you already have enough hard choices in EU. Meld is another nice addition, although I don't like original EW idea. Corpses are valuable resource on I/I. And if they can be destroyed by explosions, as well as other valuable resources like fragments, meld, alloys and elirium, it will certainly add more choices to the game.

[wghost81]

Meld Mod initial release: http://xcom.nexusmods.com/mods/431

 

Remove canisters + add 1 (adjustable) Meld per corpse recovered + explosion destroys corpses.

 

Second part is to add Meld to Abductors, Supply Barges and Alien Base.

 

There is a XGBattle.CollectLoot function, which collects loot from mission. It uses native CollectCollectibles function to recover alien artifacts from map and scripted function GetRecoveredMeldAmount to get recovered Meld amount. GetRecoveredMeldAmount calculates total meld amount from amount of canisters collected and can be rewritten (I think) to get X Meld for each specific collected object, like eItem_AlienStasisTank or eItem_AlienSurgery. Again, you'll have a choice: blow all this stuff to pieces for easy kill, or risk and recover it for more Meld.

 

Amineri, I have a question for you. Since you modded CollectArtifactsFromDeadAliens, you may know the answer. Which objects kSquad.GetPermanentMemberAt actually returns? Aliens (+ EXALTS) or all units, including XCOM and objects like Battle Scanner?

Edited November 25, 2013 by wghost81

[SectoidMedic]

Im waiting for Toolboks custom mods to disable Gen and Mec labs and remove these new retarded stuff, but keeping the new maps, missions and UI feautures of EW.

You mod saves me the job.

[wghost81]

Yes, you can simply set meld amount to 0 and play "good old XCOM" again. :smile:

[Amineri]

Amineri, I have a question for you. Since you modded CollectArtifactsFromDeadAliens, you may know the answer. Which objects kSquad.GetPermanentMemberAt actually returns? Aliens (+ EXALTS) or all units, including XCOM and objects like Battle Scanner?

 

I'm not 100% sure what GetPermanentSquadMemberAt returns, particularly for EXALT. I think it is designed to allow skipping over mind-controlled units and battlescanners?

 

An alternative is to simply loop over all units in XGPlayer (or XGAIPlayer) m_kSquad. This is a static array so you can't use a foreach iterator.

 

The CollectArtifactsFromDeadAliens function retrieves:

• corpses
• captives
• weapons from captives
• alloy and elerium
• meld

The UFO bits and weapon fragments are determined in that other native function. However they are copied into the StrategyGameTransport structure in CollectArtifactsFromDeadAliens so you still have some control.

[wghost81]

Thanks, Amineri.

 

I think, I found all collectibles/loot/artifacts functions. Only one native, so many modding possibilities. :smile:

 

Actually, weapon fragments are generated in XGUnit function on unit kill (XGUnit.CheckForDamagedItems). UFO loot (destructible map objects) is collected by native function, but can be accessed/modified if necessary.

Edited November 26, 2013 by wghost81

[wghost81]

Ok, I need some advice. I think, I could add more switch options to make meld amount differ for each alien. But this may require removing calls to DGC.INI values, making meld/alloys/elirium per corpse ajustable only through ToolBoks custom mod. Is it worth a try? Or fixed amount of meld per corpse is enough?

 

I think increasing meld for big/cybernetics aliens will make early game harder and mid-to-late game easier, as there are more aliens and more big aliens. And that's not what I want.

Edited November 26, 2013 by wghost81