GrayMeer Posted November 4, 2012 Share Posted November 4, 2012 Hey All, I'm playing around with an assortment of mods, and I ran into the phone home problem with most recent one(Aetius Classic Rebalance). I didn't have the problem with UFO rebalance because I had no internet connectivity (thank you Sandy) at the time that I was playing it. I'd like to disable the file that does the "phone home" but I can't seem to find the stump easy for stupid people directions. I don;t want to take Steam offline everytime I want to play my modded game (cause I'll likely forget). Can anyone help a brother out? And just as a general question regarding mods, I'm noticing some mods have a file called patcher.bat and others have modpatcher.exe what is the functional difference between the two? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Perraine Posted November 4, 2012 Share Posted November 4, 2012 Full instructions are here You'll need to go to around page 13 (i think?) and read some of those posts ...It runs through adding some lines to your windows hosts file to stop x-com from "phoning home" As for your second question, I'm not certain, but I think they are similar programs that do virtually the same thing (modify the x-com executable file) However Modpatcher is a very simple program that will replace a modified version of 1 of the games.ini files (which is actually embedded inside the .exe) the other I think includes a program that gives you more scope for making a wider variety of changes to he game ... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Daimond007 Posted November 4, 2012 Share Posted November 4, 2012 another way is if you have a firewall program or you can go as fare as a hard firewall one, is set the exe to deny the exe internet accsess. Its not perfect though for the Program controled one, as after every time you modify the exe file, you have to load game, jump out then re-deny the exe, works again till you mod the exe file again. Although although 1/10 load steam some times gets around mine it seems. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
GrayMeer Posted November 4, 2012 Author Share Posted November 4, 2012 Full instructions are here You'll need to go to around page 13 (i think?) and read some of those posts ...It runs through adding some lines to your windows hosts file to stop x-com from "phoning home" As for your second question, I'm not certain, but I think they are similar programs that do virtually the same thing (modify the x-com executable file) However Modpatcher is a very simple program that will replace a modified version of 1 of the games.ini files (which is actually embedded inside the .exe) the other I think includes a program that gives you more scope for making a wider variety of changes to he game ... That seemed to do the trick. I copy pasted the 3 lines referred to onto my host file. Thanks a lot. A follow up question regarding mod installation and uninstall. UFO rebalanced provided directions for restoring your game to stock by putting the original XCOMgame.exe back into the binaries/win32 folder. What about for Aetius Classic rebalanced? Or if you messed around with values in the XCOMgame.exe using resource hacker? After reading, I'm thinking that a lot of mods are basically changing values within the XCOMgame.exe and that restoring the original .exe would erase and restore original values? Thanks for you help, I've modded a handful of games over the years and always impressed with the knowledge base and willingness to help of the various communities. Gray Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Perraine Posted November 4, 2012 Share Posted November 4, 2012 No worries ... ATM mods are pretty much restricted to altering the .exe in one way or another, as the game uses a proprietary format to store the rest of the resource files, which we can't repack once they are modified (would probably have to buy an Unreal Engine license to do that)... There IS a tool which modifies the .exe just a tiny bit, so that it will actually read modified (i.e. hacked/non-original) resource files. So in most cases replacing the Xcomgame.exe with the original will reset pretty much all mods and return the game to original. Ultimately it would be nice if Firaxis/Y2K just gave us an .exe that looked outside for files instead of cooking them into itself, but that's probably never going to happen. (can't milk users for DLC $$$ if the modders have already created it) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BlackAlpha Posted November 5, 2012 Share Posted November 5, 2012 (edited) No worries ... ATM mods are pretty much restricted to altering the .exe in one way or another, as the game uses a proprietary format to store the rest of the resource files, which we can't repack once they are modified (would probably have to buy an Unreal Engine license to do that)... There IS a tool which modifies the .exe just a tiny bit, so that it will actually read modified (i.e. hacked/non-original) resource files. So in most cases replacing the Xcomgame.exe with the original will reset pretty much all mods and return the game to original. Ultimately it would be nice if Firaxis/Y2K just gave us an .exe that looked outside for files instead of cooking them into itself, but that's probably never going to happen. (can't milk users for DLC $$$ if the modders have already created it) It's possible to mod the UPK files, it's just that you are limited to HEX editing for now. Which means you can't make any complex modifications. But as far as I know, most mods don't mod the UPK files. You just need to restore the original EXE file to restore your game to vanilla. And I just remembered, some mods do alter different files, like the ini files. Edited November 5, 2012 by BlackAlpha Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
GrayMeer Posted November 11, 2012 Author Share Posted November 11, 2012 Ugh, Firaxis is pissing me off. That new patch came at the worst time. I've been without power for almost 2 weeks, playing XCOM with a mod and some other tweaks, almost done with my second play through. Power goes back on, get connected to to the internet, start steam and XCOM patches. Sigh, so now I can't get my mod to work, even with the addition to the host file. Anyone have the current work around? Gray Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bokauk Posted November 11, 2012 Share Posted November 11, 2012 Anyone have the current work around?Doesn't anyone run firewalls these days? Next you'll be telling me no anti-virus either! The current working solutions that I've heard work are:hosts fileSteam offline modeFirewall I'm not sure if anyone has reported that magic or praying has been a solution for them yet, so it looks like we're stuck with ONLY three options :) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BlackAlpha Posted November 11, 2012 Share Posted November 11, 2012 Ugh, Firaxis is pissing me off. That new patch came at the worst time. I've been without power for almost 2 weeks, playing XCOM with a mod and some other tweaks, almost done with my second play through. Power goes back on, get connected to to the internet, start steam and XCOM patches. Sigh, so now I can't get my mod to work, even with the addition to the host file. Anyone have the current work around? Gray You need to remove all modded files. Then verify files in Steam to let it repair the game. Go to step 3 here: http://forums.nexusmods.com/index.php?showtopic=822597 Note, it is CRUCIAL you delete all files that are not ORIGINAL, otherwise your game might get screwed up when you install a mod. Then you'll need to let Steam repair it again. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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