UI Mod - Bigger Perk Tree

[Amineri]

Excellent work Amineri for the discoveries and mods and bokauk for making them abailable to the public, you ppl rock

I know what Ill say is a bit offtopic, related to custom perk trees... I've played a bit redefining classes, for heavies or whatever class has the rocket launchernis a bit cruel not giving them the fire rocket, cause they will have the launcher anyway. And in my attempt to unlock bullet swarm for all classes I made the ready for anything perk can be used after moving and firing, quite powerful now, I assigned it to support but I may keep it as it is for assault at the same level as rapid fire or close comb spec. Repeating perks can already be done with defautl perk trees. I gave support 2nd choice either smoke grenade orfield medic, and then give them the same choice at lvl 5 or 7, so it will automatically choose the other unselected perk. It's pertty cool in the sense you kind of choose a path and youll be stick to it for a few missions, if those choices can be corrected next level you quite emove the payoff for chosing somthing instead of something else.

Keep up the good work, this promises lots of nice combinations

 

Thanks for the support :)

 

The current perk tree did support placing perks in the tree more than once, but with a signifcant flaw:

The game checks whether a rank can have a new perk selected by looking at the available perks at that rank, and checking to see whether the soldier already has any of those ranks.

 

Following your example:

1) Support is given the choice of Smoke Grenade or Field Medic at level 1, and then the same options at rank 5

2) Suppose I shoose Smoke Grenade at rank 1

3) Upon reaching rank 5, the game checks perks available at rank 5 : options are Smoke Grenade and Field Medic. The soldier already has Smoke Grenade, therefore no perk selection is allowed at rank 5.

 

A fair amount of the time I spent went into reworking how ability promotions are tracked and maintained in order to prevent this from happening.

 

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I had the same idea as you -- allow earlier options as to the TYPE of soldier a class is going to be, in order to open up more options during the early game. Thus Heavy can go with Rockets or focus on LMG early. Sniper can go with Squadsight or Snapshot, etc.

[Amineri]

Anything stopping the support from not grabbing smoke grenades but grabbing the smoke grenade buffs instead?

 

Main reason smoke grenades, run-n-gun and fire rocket is forced at stage 1 is to make it more end-user friendly.

 

No, there is currently no "linking" of abilities present in the mod. These could be added with a future expansion, placing prerequisites for abilities. It is technically possible to select Dense Smoke without selecting the Smoke Grenade perk. Without additional mods, these would be "wasted" perk choices.

 

However, one of the next mods I plan to incorporate is adding additional item choices. One of these will be equippable Smoke Grenades. This changes the Smoke Grenade perk from "the only option to get smoke grenade" to "a free small item inventory slot with a smoke grenade".

 

The support soldier would have 1 automatically available smoke grenade, and still have open small item slot(s), whereas other soldiers will have to use a small item slot in order to have a smoke grenade. This means that a support soldier that did not select the Smoke Grenade perk but did select Dense Smoke could make use of the Dense Smoke perk by equipping a Smoke Grenade.

 

I also made Smoke Grenade available as a perk choice twice in order to minimize this impact.

 

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That all said, I'm not claiming that these perk choices are balances or in any way great. Just something I came up with quickly that alters the perks so that the mod is recognizably installed quickly, without too drastically altering the class balance.

[Amineri]

I've started posting the mod up to the wiki. The main page is here: http://wiki.tesnexus.com/index.php/Enhanced_Perk_Tree_mod_-_XCOMEU:_2012

 

None of the hex changes are up yet. I'm just getting to the subpages now. Any feedback on clarity and layout of the page is welcome (using the discussion sub-page on the wiki would be preferred, in order to keep this discussion focussed on issues with the mod itself)

[Amineri]

Okay, all of the information about the mod is up on the wiki. I've not yet uploaded my development notes, but everything else should be complete and accurate.

 

((I did a lot of copy-and-paste from my working documents))

 

Please feel free to ask for clarification is something appears incomplete or is unclear.

[Amineri]

Has anyone been brave enough to try and install this using the hex changes listed on the wiki?

 

Or is everyone waiting for the packaged Custom Mod for ToolBoks? ^_^

 

I'm just curious as to whether it's working for anyone else. With such a large number of changes I get nervous about whether it will work with someone else's installed game ...

[bokauk]

Amineri, I thought you might be interested in this update :smile:

 

I'd suggest testing it out to make sure ToolBoks modifies Command1.upk properly before releasing your mod :smile:

 

Let me know of any problems.

 

Looking forward to seeing your mod in action :smile:

 

EDIT:

 

Has anyone been brave enough to try and install this using the hex changes listed on the wiki?

 

Or is everyone waiting for the packaged Custom Mod for ToolBoks? ^_^

 

I'm just curious as to whether it's working for anyone else. With such a large number of changes I get nervous about whether it will work with someone else's installed game ...

hehe, beat me by 11 minutes! :P

Edited May 7, 2013 by bokauk

[Amineri]

Amineri, I thought you might be interested in this update :smile:

 

hehe, beat me by 11 minutes! :P

 

I guess I'm just too impatient!

 

I'll test out whether the 1.2.1 version is modifying the Command1.upk properly and get you some feedback.

 

With the search/replace functionality deprecated, it's not so easy to uninstall a mod now (one particular mod, as opposed to reverting to a backed up version), correct?

 

Would it be worthwhile to create a second Custom Mod that is the uninstall (i.e. vanilla game code)? Would it be possible to package this into the base mod as an "uninstall" section?

[bokauk]

 

With the search/replace functionality deprecated, it's not so easy to uninstall a mod now (one particular mod, as opposed to reverting to a backed up version), correct?

 

Would it be worthwhile to create a second Custom Mod that is the uninstall (i.e. vanilla game code)? Would it be possible to package this into the base mod as an "uninstall" section?

Yep, that's right. The only benefit that search and replace had was that it was easy to uninstall, but on the downside it didn't allow as much flexibility.

 

It would probably be far simpler to create two Custom Mod files such as "MyMod.txt" and "MyMod - Uninstall.txt" :)

 

You can create your own folder to be placed within Custom Mods (or any other folder) with all of your install / uninstall files and documentation etc :)

[Amineri]

Yep, that's right. The only benefit that search and replace had was that it was easy to uninstall, but on the downside it didn't allow as much flexibility.

 

It would probably be far simpler to create two Custom Mod files such as "MyMod.txt" and "MyMod - Uninstall.txt" :smile:

 

You can create your own folder to be placed within Custom Mods (or any other folder) with all of your install / uninstall files and documentation etc :smile:

 

That's fair enough. It makes sense to me to have a mod uninstaller, so I'll just parse my existing search-replace hex change file into two files ... one with the search (uninstall) and one with the replace (install).

 

Now that I've made some headway with the AI 'turn-skipping', time to package this perk tree mod up for release.

 

Thanks again for all the support you've put into ToolBoks to enable this ^_^

[Yzaxtol]

About http://wiki.tesnexus.com/index.php/GetPerkInTree_UPK_mods_Enhanced_Perk_Tree_-_XCOM:EU_2012

 

I just know that If I try to convert the Toolbok Custom mods into pure HEX search-replace .txt file like my own I'm going to mess it up big time. Any chance that you could share the entire UPK switch for each tree.

 

Then I can cut and paste it into a nice Perk Manager and save myself a lot of panic attacks :biggrin:

Edited May 8, 2013 by Yzaxtol