Messages

1

Help / Re: Changing the item used by research's needItem: & destroyItem: variables?

« on: December 31, 2021, 05:05:31 pm »

i think the best option would be to include the lists 'disables:' and 'reenables:' already developed in oxce.
another possibility is to modify the mechanism to allow 'getOneFree:' to work on zero-cost topics, and on topics granted by 'lookup:' and 'getOneFree:' itself.
changing the source code does not seem to be straightforward enough for me. as a programmer, i'm somewhat aware of my limitations and i can't even specify the solution in pseudo-code.
just for the record, my suggestion was:

make any live alien project unavailable for research as soon as all dependent projects are unlocked, in particular race+rank combos.
example: completion of sectoid non-commander + non-sectoid commander should make sectoid commander unavailable.

again thank you for looking into this phenomenon.
i wish you and everyone a happy new year.

2

Help / Re: Changing the item used by research's needItem: & destroyItem: variables?

« on: December 31, 2021, 12:48:19 pm »

thank you for your prompt response. i'm not in a hurry.
i'm still unsure if you understood my problem correctly. maybe i did not express myself properly. sorry, english is not my primary language.

i had a few 'official' mods turned on, namely aliens pick up, limit craft item, unlimited waypoints, tftd damage model. none of which should interfere with research; nevertheless, i disabled them and started another test run with "1.0 git 2021-12-20".

i did the following:
- built the first base
- saved the game as '05.sav'
- made a copy of the file as '06.sav'
- edited '06.sav' to include a bunch of different live aliens and 100 scientists instead of 10. marked all modifications with eol  #comments
- loaded the modified save
- built some facilities, saved it as '07.sav'
- began the research process in the following order:
  - snakeman soldier. received snakeman. unlocked corpse, origins. snakeman soldier removed from available projects. as expected so far.
  - origins.
  - sectoid leader. received sectoid. unlocked corpse, martian. sectoid leader removed. as expected.
  - martian.
  - sectoid commander. unlocked cydonia, psi lab. sectoid commander removed. as expected.
all finished research projects are included in this order under 'discovered:' in the last '08.sav'. as expected.

at this point, snakeman commander should not be available, because its interrogation would not yield any more ufopaedia entries, not even the snakeman corpse. but it is still available as a new research project. i even finished cydonia before saving '08.sav'. see all attached.
i would say that none of the soldier, leader or commander ranks from the sectoid and snakeman race should be available for research at this point.

i don't say that the game mechanics are flawed. technically, because of the fact that the research on snakeman commander itself was not completed, it is not included in the 'discovered:' list, therefore it is available as a new project. i merely say that i would like to make my own mod that changes this behaviour to match my expectations. i'm somewhat suspicious about my find; i feel that either i'm doing something wrong or my expectations are too high. the vanilla research.rul would be complicated [beyond comprehension for people like me] if this mechanism was fixed/changed the way i expect it to work, that's why i'm trying to achieve it with a mod.

3

Help / Re: Changing the item used by research's needItem: & destroyItem: variables?

« on: December 31, 2021, 04:20:00 am »

reading thorugh the above, i would like to ask for any advice, too.
i'm not inexperienced, have put together a mod or two, but have always had difficulties with understanding unlocks:/requires:/dependencies:/etc.
i would like to modify the vanilla xcom in the following way:

as to my understanding,
- if the getOneFree: list is depleted, the live alien of the matching rank (engineer, medic, navigator) ceases to be available for further research. this is as expected.
- when completing a research of any live alien, Origins becomes available. this is "required:" by Leader Plus.
- Origins is to be completed.
- any leader/commander has to be researched as Leader Plus "depends:" on it. since it has "cost: 0", Leader Plus is also completed on completion.
- Martian Solution is next, that "depends:" on Origins and Leader Plus.
- upon finishing Martian, any commander has to be researched as Commander Plus "depends:" on it. as with Leader Plus, "cost: 0".
- Cydonia is next.

my expectation is,
no more live leader or commander the player acquires should be available for research, provided their race is discovered previously, since it can yield no more new information. for example, if one captures and interrogates a sectoid soldier, a sectoid leader, a sectoid commander (origins, martian, cydonia in between), then for example a snakeman soldier, the next snakeman commander should be unavailable for research.

my observation is,
yet they show up on the research list indefinitely.
same goes for any soldier, leader or commander captured.

i would like to fix this. please help if concerned/interested/agreed.
thank you in advance.

4

Playthroughs / Re: xcom1 vanilla single mission

« on: December 22, 2017, 08:34:03 pm »

i will try to repeat without any losses, possibly with stunning a navigator that was mentioned earlier. i also made several mistakes that led to at least 6 months of delay. i'm sure it can be done without psi, albeit very difficult to. one saves a maximum of 10 elerium on psi-amps, but the 200 elerium must still be divided between plasma beams (to help keep score near zero), power armors, and blaster bombs - sheer force must be used, i think. i will also try to keep score high by using 30+ dual avalanche interceptors, but its low number of shots makes it difficult. also, power armors can possibly be replaced by personal armors. one can have as many as 75+ shots for 6+ blaster launchers, and it may provide enough firepower.

5

Playthroughs / Re: xcom1 vanilla single mission

« on: December 22, 2017, 08:20:59 pm »

i managed to do it with the following setup:
10x soldier
1x tank/laser cannon
10x laser rifle
10x stun rod
i got a battleship first with mutons. after a somewhat long battle, i ended up with several live mutons, all soldiers/navigators/engineers, but no leader or commander. the next one was an ethereal one, i managed to neutralize 2 leaders and a commander, lost 3 rookies. it was at the beginning of october, 1999.
i tried cydonia first at the middle of february, 2000, and i was successful, but got most of my crew killed.
next time i had 10 rookies screened with 85+ psi strength and some skill, too, all in power armor, with a single blaster launcher and 12 bombs for it, and 10 psi-amps. this time it was a great experience, without losses.
i made 8 plasma beams, one for each interceptor on every base. other interceptors were present with dual avalanches.
all of these were funded by manufacturing of motion scanners, then laser cannons globally.
the save/load function was extremely heavily used throughout the game.

end result:
victory, 1st aug 2000
difficulty: beginner
average monthly rating: 466
total income: $9 434 725 675
total expenditure: $9 083 686 452
missions accomplished: 2
missions failed: 0
night missions: 0
best mission rating: 1795
worst mission rating: 851
soldiers recruited: 18
soldiers lost: 3
aliens killed: 8
aliens captured: 2
friendly fire incidents: 0
average accuracy: 3%
most effective weapon: psi-amp
deadliest alien: ethereal
longest months in service: 10
sick days: 0
ufos detected: 610
alien bases discovered: 14
countries infiltrated: 5
terror attacks: 6
bases built: 8
craft owned: 22
scientists hired: 0
engineers hired: 1710
research completed: 46

"missions accomplished" should possibly show 3, for cydonia is made up of two.
"night missions" should read 1, because the first part of the cydonia mission goes always at night (but why?).
soldiers, engineers and scientists shown here are counted at the beginning of the final mission. of course i had 200 scientists once, but sacked them after finishing the research. at least 1000 more engineers got sacked/lost.
"aliens killed": it seems that the cydonian kills are not included here.
"aliens captured": the first part of mars was finished by mind-controlling the last sectoid. somehow the 2 leaders and 1 commander i stunned on my only ufo recovery mission ended up as a "2" here.
"bases built" is also inaccurate, because i lost 6 bases to retaliation attacks. of course at the launch of the cydonia mission, there were 8. i would appreciate a "bases lost" entry here.
"craft owned": not accurate either. although i did not lose any, i sacked my skyranger two times.

6

Playthroughs / xcom1 vanilla single mission

« on: December 22, 2017, 04:28:07 pm »

anyone heard about anyone ever trying to finish the game with a single ufo recovery? i thought it was possible, theoretically, but could not find any info here in the forums.

7

Help / Re: reorder sections in ufopedia

« on: December 22, 2017, 08:42:53 am »

great, thank you.
could you lead me to the place where i can request other bugs fixed? i think i've found a small one.

8

Help / Re: reorder sections in ufopedia

« on: December 21, 2017, 10:07:32 pm »

sorry, i don't quite understand. you say i define listOrder for all the up articles. will then their sections get reordered, too?
i tried the following:

Code: [Select]

ufopaedia:
  - id: STR_TEST_ARTICLE1
    type_id: 8
    section: STR_TEST_SECTION1
    text: STR_TEST_TEXT1
    listOrder: 1
  - id: STR_TEST_ARTICLE2
    type_id: 8
    section: STR_TEST_SECTION2
    text: STR_TEST_TEXT2
    listOrder: 999999
  - id: STR_SKYRANGER
    listOrder: 20020
  - id: STR_INTERCEPTOR
    listOrder: 20001
  - id: STR_FIRESTORM
    listOrder: 20002
  - id: STR_LIGHTNING
    listOrder: 20003
  - id: STR_AVENGER
    listOrder: 20004
  - id: STR_STINGRAY
    listOrder: 20025
  - id: STR_AVALANCHE
    listOrder: 20006
  - id: STR_CANNON_UC
    listOrder: 20007
  - id: STR_FUSION_BALL_UC
    listOrder: 20008
  - id: STR_LASER_CANNON_UC
    listOrder: 20009
  - id: STR_PLASMA_BEAM_UC
    listOrder: 20010
extraStrings:
  - type: en-GB
    strings:
      STR_TEST_ARTICLE1: "first article"
      STR_TEST_SECTION1: "top section"
      STR_TEST_TEXT1: "first article up"
      STR_TEST_ARTICLE2: "last article"
      STR_TEST_SECTION2: "bottom section"
      STR_TEST_TEXT2: "last article up"
just randomly reordered the original articles for testing purposes.
both test sections showed up at the bottom of the list. the original STR_XCOM_CRAFT_ARMAMENT section remained at the top.
maybe i'm not doing something properly.

9

Help / Re: reorder sections in ufopedia

« on: December 17, 2017, 10:24:44 pm »

thank you too. will have a look at.

10

Help / Re: reorder sections in ufopedia

« on: December 15, 2017, 01:40:30 am »

thank you for the quick reply.
i've done exactly that, and was just curious if it is possible to do it properly. i see that it is not the case. hopefully later there will be an option for this. until then, my STR_UFOS will contain "X-COM CRAFT" and so forth...

11

Help / reorder sections in ufopedia

« on: December 15, 2017, 12:19:19 am »

is it possible [by using .rul files] to change the order of sections themselves?
i would put "base facilities" to the top, put "alien research" right below earth technology sections, and possibly insert something somewhere for new topics that don't fit in any vanilla ones.

12

Work In Progress / Re: Adding countries to Open-XCOM

« on: November 24, 2016, 12:12:09 am »

being a perfectionist/completionist, i'm somewhat dedicated to replicate the 1jan1999 earth situation on polylines and countries, and to include much more cities.

i've already gathered some of others' work on the subject. i've checked, fixed and severely expanded Hobbes' Terrain Pack v4.1 mod [country names, coords, and the like. not terrains themselves].

i've found some polylines for country borders, i can't remember where it is from and there was no copyright information in the file. i plan to correct it a little and expand it heavily.

the biggest problem is that the funding and graphs screens don't have enough space for long country names. even multi line split would work, as far as i can tell. just think a bit about "commonwealth of independent nations" (shown as "russia" in vanilla). or "democratic republic of the congo". display routines of country/city names on the globe should also support the {NEWLINE} thingy. i think it is already working, just gets cropped both horizontally and vertically for some reason.

those countries that likely had too low contribution could be omitted from the funding and graphs sections, but not from the globe itself. the fundingCap property could be used as a semaphore if the given country should be included in the funding screen or not. certainly a country with a fundingCap of zero does not have a reason to be included there.

another great idea is the zoom parameter for cities. it is already mentioned in the ruleset reference, but i checked the code and it seems to be still hard-coded as:
polylines show at zoom levels 1+
country names at zoom levels 2+
city names at zoom levels 3+
https://github.com/SupSuper/OpenXcom/blob/master/src/Geoscape/Globe.cpp
Globe::drawDetail()
beginning at line 1242

i also need suggestions on a number of topics.

for example, "usa" is shown as a single country, but the european union is not. i understand that the connection is a bit different between the states of usa from the connection between eu members, so eu members can decide about their level of funding separately while usa states are too 'united' for that. but what about african countries? their contribution may be a bit low when measuring them one by one, but could easily add up to something useful if treated as a whole, or as several communities (possibly the communities could be used for regions, too). the "organisation of african unity" still existed in 1999 (replaced by the african union in 2001, but it is still the future when the game begins). i've already made a list of african countries for the globe, and some for funding, but it will not be possible to fully develop until the zoom function gets activated.

what about north korea? i would say that north korea is not contributing to the xcom project, but south korea does. but i need the opinions of others, too, so please.

13

Released Mods / Re: [GLOBE] Improved Nations Mod

« on: November 17, 2016, 01:07:58 am »

thanks, will check on the Terrain Pack and modify/strip it to my needs. i already saw that the nightly has the cities inside missionZones and i will not be able to include all cities.
thank you for the info.

14

Released Mods / Re: [GLOBE] Improved Nations Mod

« on: November 16, 2016, 11:55:01 pm »

thank you for the quick reply.
what do you think, is it possible to make it compatible? could missionZones be altered to include the cities without seriously changing missions themselves? i'm a bit into this ruleset thingy but does not quite understand the structure of regions (and i don't want to dive inside).
or do you happen to know of other mods that include cities?

15

Released Mods / Re: [GLOBE] Improved Nations Mod

« on: November 16, 2016, 05:06:07 pm »

please confirm that this mod is working with the latest nightly build. nations and regions seem to change, but no cities show up beyond vanilla ones.