Long War mod discussion

[Yzaxtol]

Woah, I've only been gone... what.. 5 months? And you've made so many changes it hurts my head just trying to think of all of them...

[johnnylump]

Yo Yzax, good to see you again on here.

 

Don't you worry; we'll all be back somewhere near Square 1 when the expansion pops.

[Krazyguy75]

You mean we'll have to figure out a knew way to make changes to the internal ini despite the developers' claim that they moved variables to the ini?

[Amineri]

Good to see you again Yzax :)

 

@ Krazyguy75 : There will be a whole host of things that have to be done to make Long War compatible with Enemy Within. More ini variable is good (perhaps things like cover and aim modifiers will be moddable now), but many of the big new systems in Long War consist of substantial hex rewrites.

 

Some things will be major undertakings : With the addition of the genemods and MEC class, the soldier Barracks UI will be changing substantially. Also, the training roulette SW option means that a new data structure has been added to the XGStrategySoldier class to store a perk tree on a per-soldier bases (currently it's statically defined separately). This means that the expanded perk tree mod, as well as the extension to allow the 8 subclasses will have to be substantially redesigned to work with the expansion. Rebalancing may also have to occur given the new XCOM abilities.

 

Some thing will be smaller, but still need adjustments : The interceptor vs UFO game has no changes announced. If it stays unchanged in terms of the Firaxis source code, it will still require changes to the Long War hex edits. Since there are new classes, functions and variables being added, when the Unreal Engine compiler/linker builds the reference tables, the same variable from Enemy Within will almost certainly have a new hex reference. These simpler changes will require using the references in the search/replace hex changes.

 

I'm also a little concerned that some of the Demo/debug code that has been taken over to write in new hex functionality might have been removed, which could limit the ability to re-code the functionality. Will have to wait and see...

[tata2tatakazika]

@Amineri

Ok with explanations ... but when long war will be compatible with enemy within :D??

Closer to month or 2 months?

Just dont answer ... ya know ... soon :)

[johnnylump]

It won't be soon. I suspect it will be several months at a minimum. But we have NO way of estimating until we actually get the expansion and see what it does.

[therattlebag]

Hi -- looks like a fantastic mod but I'm hgaving an install hiccup that can't be solved by the warspace FAQ.

 

The installer is looking for XComGame.exe in :

 

F:\SteamLibrary\SteamApps\common\XCom-Enemy-Unknown\XCom-Enemy-Unknown\Binaries\Win32

 

but is unable to find it since on my fresh steam install that .exe is located at :

 

F:\SteamLibrary\SteamApps\common\XCom-Enemy-Unknown\Binaries\Win32

 

If anyone could shed some light on that discrepency I'd be very greatful!

 

UPDATE: Creating that extra "layer" of folder nesting manually results in the longwar intsall completing but not being able to run the game through steam as now it can't find the .exe

Edited October 7, 2013 by therattlebag

[Amineri]

@Amineri

Ok with explanations ... but when long war will be compatible with enemy within :D??

Closer to month or 2 months?

Just dont answer ... ya know ... soon :smile:

 

I'll reply with a quote from Bertilsson :

 

 

Considering that I have counted 290 functions modified in 76 classes only in XComGame and XComStrategyGame for LW, I think I'm starting to get an idea how enourmously much work there will be just to repair most of the mod.

 

The work involved in recreating some of your mega modlets from scratch (alien base, extended perk tree and interceptors) I don't even want to think about.

He wrote a web tool that compares vanilla XCOM:EU to a mod, and this was the result for Long War as of September 8 (so there have been a few more changes since then). This doesn't include the actionscript changes (they go in a different upk) needed to implement the perk/interceptor changes.

All of the hex changes for Long War were built up over the course of several months, with most (but not all) of the changes written by johnnylump and myself. Even with an optimistic estimate of 'repairing' 1 class per day per person, that would mean 76 person-days of work, so with 2 of us working that would mean 38 days of work just to repair each of the classes changed. That works out to 3.8 function repairs per person per day of work.

Some of the function changes are simple, but some are complete rewrites, with a SLOC count of 60 to 80 lines of code. And since we have to manually compile the code into hex (instead of having a compiler to do it for us), working on code is a slower process.

For something like a small patch that wasn't changing any functionality I'd use the above estimate to say that it would be about a month to fix up the Long War changes for Enemy Within. However, Enemy Within adds some big new mechanics, and is going to be adding even more stuff than we've seen so far (the Exalt stuff that's been leaked). This means some significant re-design.

To complicate things a bit ... JL and I don't get any special insight into the new Enemy WIthin mechanics. We'll be having to play the game (and check in places like ufopedia) to understand what all the new game mechanics are. After we have a handle on that, then we can start figuring out how to alter the Long War design to still be balanced (but still brutal ;) ) with all the new features. Only then can we start reworking those portions of code.

There is some good news, though! I keep mega-detailed working notes for all of the individual component modlets that I created (most of which ended up in Long War), so recreating these mods will not take as long as creating the mod in the first place.

-------------

In summary : I'd agree with JL that it's going to take several months (2 to 3 months) until some reasonably playable beta version is out.

Most of the variability is going to be down to how many design changes have to be made due to unannounced Enemy Within features. Roughly 1 month to do basic patch-up to get existing code working, and 1-2 months to redesign. We'll have alpha versions of course where we are testing specific features in isolation to see if they mechanically work. How much of a distribution those see will mostly be up to JL, as he's the lead for the mod :)

[osito2dancer]

Hi -- looks like a fantastic mod but I'm hgaving an install hiccup that can't be solved by the warspace FAQ.

 

The installer is looking for XComGame.exe in :

 

F:\SteamLibrary\SteamApps\common\XCom-Enemy-Unknown\XCom-Enemy-Unknown\Binaries\Win32

 

but is unable to find it since on my fresh steam install that .exe is located at :

 

F:\SteamLibrary\SteamApps\common\XCom-Enemy-Unknown\Binaries\Win32

 

If anyone could shed some light on that discrepency I'd be very greatful!

 

UPDATE: Creating that extra "layer" of folder nesting manually results in the longwar intsall completing but not being able to run the game through steam as now it can't find the .exe

 

When you install the game, you can choose the folder it goes to. So, just instead of choosing "F:\SteamLibrary\SteamApps\common\XCom-Enemy-Unknown", just choose "F:\SteamLibrary\SteamApps\common\", and it will go right.

[penkki]

I really like the Long War but how can i disable soldier combat fatigue after mission. I haven't tried doing any exessive fidling with files before in this game.