Modding details? Ask away!

[SakuraKoi]

I am currently despairing for hours now with making my Increased Enemy Squad Size more user friendly and making it compatible with other edits to the same XComMissions.ini. Simply editing/replacing the .ini obviously works, I have tested the opening mission (not tutorial one but the one where X4 has to be placed) several dozens of times up until this point. Editing the .ini always produces two pods with three normal troopers each and the second pod has additionally an officer. Making it a Mod with the ModBuddy and using the resulting build which shows no errors and shows up does always produce one enemy less.

 

Now I took other alike Mods as reference however I wouldn't be asking here if I could get it working.

 

Primarily I just used the DefaultMod and added the XComMission.ini Config, copied the range of lines I edited along with the header into it and choose to build it.

Variations include a different name for the Config, keeping everything from the DefaultMod and other Shenanigans (Options), that do not include scripting and scripts, since those are my absolute weak point indeed.

 

Searching and looking around did not exactly turn up nothing but either I simply do not understand those general guidelines or those are rather irrelevant or I can not tell if it is indeed the case for me that it would be easier to add than to change (but obviously, even if I would define new EncounterIDs, those would need to be placed, in new, available, missions).

 

I seriously hope that I just missed something essential all the time (which may be embarrassing but better than) instead of it being indeed much more complicated to create a custom balance through simple .ini edits. I'd like to not stop at this point since I already have more plans which I'd like to test and share to ultimately turn this up to thirteen reasonably because honestly, I find the default number of soldiers too low and restrictive, increasing that number results in the enemy numbers being too low. By the by, one of my plans is to increase all health, damage and armor by a factor of 10 or maybe just 5 if the UI does not want to while fine tuning some other stats, obviously one problem would be the compatibility with other mods but I expect that this could make XCOM 2 more entertaining and enjoyable (just imagine having a real close shave and the fact that you can not calculate damage that easily).

 

 

Damn I knew I should have studied something useful, like programming, instead of languages and history :blush:Thanks for trying though.

 

That reminds me how I ended up from focusing on languages in high school (instead of science) because somehow I got better at them, and worse at science/math, at least in terms of marks. In middle school it was the other way round, maybe because math was just calculating (not many achieved to write a perfect math exam back then, heck I was the only one who did twice but mind you, the few grammar and spelling mistakes that were possible, I made them)... now majoring in computer science was also a mistake, as one may be able to tell from my inability to script. Long excuse short, I may be too lazy to be a programmer despite wanting to learn it for Game Design... or as I want to see it, all those different programming languages are like real languages and take as much time to learn to write while I really would like to have immediate results (not much different from the prior but sounds better).

 

In any event, I'd be glad for any assistance so that I may be able to get back to what I'd rather like to do (and obviously I'd still like to sort out this compatibility concern).

[tzarnal]

 

It could also be that the XGMission code isn't the one generated the mission names. Most of the XG- prefix code from EU was deprecated, and now the common prefixes are XCom (for gamestates and archetypes) and X2 (for rearchitected classes). The remaining XG- classes are mostly things like pawn controllers (e.g. XGUnit, which is no longer a data container -- that's now XComGameState_Unit).

 

 

 

I've continued my quest for funnier mission names, and am now just baffled. I accepted that for now editing XGMission was either not going to work or the wrong thing to edit, but i learned a few thing about .ini files and localistation files so I figured i could just make a mod that removed all the original ones, insert my own.

 

Tried that, nothing, no changes in the game at all. Annoyed and figuring out i'd misunderstood how .ini files worked afterall I just editied XComGame.int manually, no mod involved.

That didn't work, but I figured, maybe its not actually loading the one in the SDK folder. Editied both the SDK and regular game version and was met with more completly vanilla mission names.

 

At this point I was doubting if the .int file was even being used at all, edited something else in XComGame.int that was talked about in another topic ( rank names ). Ranks happily changed.

 

What the hell is going on?

[Amineri]

 

 

It could also be that the XGMission code isn't the one generated the mission names. Most of the XG- prefix code from EU was deprecated, and now the common prefixes are XCom (for gamestates and archetypes) and X2 (for rearchitected classes). The remaining XG- classes are mostly things like pawn controllers (e.g. XGUnit, which is no longer a data container -- that's now XComGameState_Unit).

 

 

 

I've continued my quest for funnier mission names, and am now just baffled. I accepted that for now editing XGMission was either not going to work or the wrong thing to edit, but i learned a few thing about .ini files and localistation files so I figured i could just make a mod that removed all the original ones, insert my own.

 

Tried that, nothing, no changes in the game at all. Annoyed and figuring out i'd misunderstood how .ini files worked afterall I just editied XComGame.int manually, no mod involved.

That didn't work, but I figured, maybe its not actually loading the one in the SDK folder. Editied both the SDK and regular game version and was met with more completly vanilla mission names.

 

At this point I was doubting if the .int file was even being used at all, edited something else in XComGame.int that was talked about in another topic ( rank names ). Ranks happily changed.

 

What the hell is going on?

 

 

The config and localization files in the SDK are basically just there for any compile-time checking -- they aren't used when you load the game. So if you are editing default config/loc files, they need to be the ones in the main XComGame folder, not the SDK.

 

I did a little poking, and it looks like XGMission is out. If you search through XComGame.int, there is a section *** X2MissionSiteDescriptionTemplates ***

 

Mission names in XCOM 2 are categorized by type, so there's HavenFirstName, HavenLastName, SlumsFirstName, SlumsLastName, and so on. I'd try editing these and see if you get new mission names.

[Peewi]

I understand that this is the place to ask about XCOM 2 modding. I've added a few country flags and would like to add custom name lists to go with them, which I'm having some trouble with.

I'm currently selecting the Norwegian name lists in my own snippetted version of the X2StrategyElement_DefaultCountries script. There are some things that I don't entirely understand, but it works, even with multiple mods with classes called that.

I see that the default name lists are in the XComGame localization file, which are added to arrays defined in XGCharacterGenerator.

I was hoping I could have my own XGCharacterGenerator, the same way I have my own X2StrategyElement_DefaultCountries, but I get this error when building:

Error, Unparsed class 'X2StrategyGameRulesetDataStructures' found while validating DependsOn entries for 'X2StrategyElement_DefaultCountries'

I tried adding my own class like this:

class NameArrays extends Object;
 
// Icelandic
var localized array<string> m_arrIsMFirstNames;
var localized array<string> m_arrIsFFirstNames;
var localized array<string> m_arrIsLastNames;

and add localization strings to it like this:

[NameArrays]
; ------------------------------------------
; --------------ICELAND---------------------
; ------------------------------------------
 
m_arrIsMFirstNames[0]="male1"
m_arrIsMFirstNames[1]="male2"
 
m_arrIsFFirstNames[0]="female1"
m_arrIsFFirstNames[1]="female2"
 
m_arrIsLastNames[0]="last1"
m_arrIsLastNames[1]="last2"

Which builds just fine, but the game doesn't launch and the console spews array out of bounds errors. I guess the localization files aren't getting loaded?

 

I have also found the XComNameList.ini file and I'm wondering if that's useful, but I don't know how to use it.

[Joshuahoeth]

I realize increasing the shell lifetime could effect performance, but I still want to do it as a test, mind telling me how I'd go about that because I have tried just about everything

[RapidXX]

More progress has been made!

A voicepack, the first one, has been created.

http://www.nexusmods.com/xcom2/mods/58/?

 

Thanks for guiding us with the first steps again Amineri.

Next: Adding armor/outfits

[Peewi]

In regards to my above post, I see that someone has another country mod that adds names and that he did it through defaultproperties on a class instead of a localization file. I'll probably just do that too, it seems easier.

[Amineri]

I understand that this is the place to ask about XCOM 2 modding. I've added a few country flags and would like to add custom name lists to go with them, which I'm having some trouble with.

 

I'm currently selecting the Norwegian name lists in my own snippetted version of the X2StrategyElement_DefaultCountries script. There are some things that I don't entirely understand, but it works, even with multiple mods with classes called that.

 

I see that the default name lists are in the XComGame localization file, which are added to arrays defined in XGCharacterGenerator.

 

<snip>

 

Which builds just fine, but the game doesn't launch and the console spews array out of bounds errors. I guess the localization files aren't getting loaded?

 

I have also found the XComNameList.ini file and I'm wondering if that's useful, but I don't know how to use it.

 

There's generally two ways to add localization strings. You can either add to XComGame, for those times you are adding strings to the base game or using a template that gets picked up from XComGame.int. For example weapon templates all pick up loc from XComGame.int, so the SMGs all extend XComGame.int instead of having a custom loc file.

 

However, if you do add localized (keyword) strings to your mod code, then create a localized file based on your mod name. For example, the officer mod does this, so there is an LW_OfficerPack.int (and other languages) in the Localization folder of the mod. It also has an XComGame.ini (and other languages), primarily for the abilities.

[Amineri]

In regards to my above post, I see that someone has another country mod that adds names and that he did it through defaultproperties on a class instead of a localization file. I'll probably just do that too, it seems easier.

 

You can use default properties, but then you won't be able to localize it for anything besides one language. If that's fine, then defaultproperties would work. We didn't do that for the LWS release mods, since we had to support all 11 languages.

[Amineri]

I realize increasing the shell lifetime could effect performance, but I still want to do it as a test, mind telling me how I'd go about that because I have tried just about everything

 

I think you'd have to override the weapon.

 

The particle effects are attached to the FF_Fire, etc animations as a anim notify, so that they can be initiated at the proper time during the animation. The animations are linked in with the model and other assets in the archetype. All of this is in UnrealEd.

 

So you'd need to copy over the archetype, animation, and particle effect to a new art upk in UnrealEd.

Then you'd modify the copied particle effect in UnrealEd.

Then you'd link the copied animation to reference the modified particle effect.

Then you'd link the copied archetype to reference the modified animation.

Then you'd modify the weapon template code to reference the modified archetype.

 

This is basically the same steps that Firaxis would go through to make such a change, btw :)