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Topics - tarkalak

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1
OXCE Bugs / [bug] Game crashes after exiting fullscreen
« on: May 13, 2022, 10:49:28 pm »
I get the following error and the game crashes:

[q]./OpenXcomEx.sh
[13-05-2022_22-16-29]   [DEBUG]   loadArgs(): config -> ./user
X Error of failed request:  BadValue (integer parameter out of range for operation)
  Major opcode of failed request:  153 (XFree86-VidModeExtension)
  Minor opcode of failed request:  10 (XF86VidModeSwitchToMode)
  Value in failed request:  0x2a00003
  Serial number of failed request:  248
  Current serial number in output stream:  250
[/q]

OpenXcom.sh is a script that simply runs "./OpenXcomEx -config ./user"

I am on Ubuntu 20.04, running the Linux build.

My desktop resolution is 1920x1080, I run the game in 1368x768 fullscreen mode. When I press Alt-Enter to switch to windowed the game crashes and my desktop resolution is switched to 1368x768. If I run it again, or switch game resolution to match desktop it doesn't crash. I would prefer to run it in the smaller resolution, because I don't have to scale down screenshots afterwards.

OXCE Version is Extended-7.5.3-f94c8c56f-2022-02-07-bionic-x86_64
I use the XComFiles mod with version after 2.7.0 (master from a few days ago) and Dark Geoscope 1.0.

2
So my suggestions are:

1. Add a link from the Inventory or the skills screen (that is available in BATTLESCAPE) to the Agent Diary (that is accessible from the GEOSCOPE -> BASE -> AGENTS).
The usecase for the above is when playing X-COM Files or another mod that has Commendations giving skill upgrades. It is to check, for example, which weapon is close to getting "Master of the {0}" commendation and similar other commendations.

2. The Ironman Save And Abandon is pretty useful if you don't want to juggle a few saves and use one main save. I know that Autosaves pretty much do the same, but they are easy to overwrite.

A separate "SAVE AND ABANDON" button in the Options menu or in the "ABANDON" submenu (between Yes and No) will be fine. I think the second would be better since there is empty space there already.

3
Currently, if there are a dead and stunned corpse on the same tile the stunned corpse might be covered by the other (or other higher priority items). This covers the stunned "Zzz" indicator.

I suggest that stunned enemies should be force shown on the top of the pile.

4
Playthroughs / X-Com Files Mod, Superman, Ironman-ish
« on: July 31, 2020, 11:41:20 am »
I am going to play X-Com Files on superhuman and somewhat ironmanish. I will have backups and revert if I manage to missclick or do something very stupid.

Starting off: I have built my first base in Svalbard, but I will pretend they are on Franz Josef Land. According to our good soldier Ċ vejk Austro-Hungary wanted to have some colonies too, but somebody had already taken all the good spots, so they started a colony there that freezes next winter. In reality the archipelago was found by an Austrian polar expedition.

Anyway, it should give me good range to most of the North Hemisphere and (hopefully) Osprey range to the Church of Dagon HQ, and all others. Second base will probably be in South Africa, or South America, or some Antarctica spot. Third will be somewhere in the Far East.

EDIT: Lets add some house rules. Number 1 is from the beginning, next ones will be noted from when they take effect. Number 2 and 3 are introduced in https://openxcom.org/forum/index.php/topic,8430.msg146973.html#msg146973, but also are in effect since the beginning.

House Rules:
1. No armed grenades in inventory, except in hand. Does not apply to flares, flashlights and similar stuff that doesn't go boom. (EDIT: I know that there is an options to make grenades still go boom in inventory, but I prefer to have a little room for mistakes.)
2. Also all "Fuck it" last minute before leaving shots are mandatory. Unless the ammo is extremely expensive or other lame reason.
3. All missions  that can be attempted must be attempted unless there are serious reasons not to. Like lack of agents or no egress available on a tough mission. Being horribly outnumbered and having no chance of success are not serious reasons. At least most of the time. Doesn't apply to suicide interceptions of course.

EDIT: Let's add some trivia too.
1. The superman in the title IS a typo, I wanted to write superhuman, but oh well, I will not change it.

EDIT: Let's add some description of the starting weapons. And lets do it just as they get thrown out.
https://openxcom.org/forum/index.php/topic,8430.msg130961.html#msg130961

EDIT: Notes:
1. The X-COM turn number x will usually be mixed with the Enemy turn x-1. I.e. the first half of the picture is enemy turn then x-1 we start X-COM turn x. That will not be the case all the time, but I made a habit of doing it that way.

EDIT: I will divide the story in BOOKS and Chapters. These will be determined by some huge upgrade to our equipment or stage of the game. My perspective, not just the promotions.

BOOK I : Newborn-COM
Chapter 1: The Age of the Pump-action Shotgun and some pistols.
Chapter 2. The Epoch of the Kevlar Vest.

BOOK II: Toddler-COM
Chapter 3: The age of the Shotgun shotgun, Magnum and Desert Eagle
Chapter 4: The Age of the Double Barreled Shotgun
Chapter 5: The age of HUMVEES and Beaches!
Chapter 6: The age of DA HELIKOPTA!
Chapter 7: The age of the DOG!
Chapter 8: The age of the Smoke Grenade, PSG snipers and M-14.

BOOK III: Childhood
Chapter 9: The epoch of the Armored Vest.
Chapter 10. Terminator 1. The rise of the Scout Drones.
Chapter 11. Terminator 1. The rise of the Scout Drones. Cancelled.
Chapter 12. The age of the Knockout Grenade, Dart rifles and pistols, THE HEAVY TASER and Dog Durathread vests.
Chapter 13. The age of the BlackOps stuff. Well some of it. BlackOps Sniper Rifle and maybe pistol too.
Chapter 14: Terminator 1. The terror of the Scout Drones. Relaunched!
Chapter 15: The Long Silence when nothing happened.
Chapter 16: The Return of the Playthrough.
Chapter 17: The age of the Dragonfly.
First UFO Catch of the day, uhm, year or two
Chapter 18: The Age of the UAC Pistol and UAC Rocket Launcher. Some UAC Rifles too.
Chapter 19: The Age of the 007. Spypistols and CAWS too.

BOOK IV: Adolescence
Chapter 20: The Epoch of the Osprey.



EDIT: The list of Ironmanish moments. (I.e. cases where I did reload for some reason.) TBD

The list of outright outrageous cheatings.
1. Giving Survivor Commendation for a failed mission. I felt that it was in the spirit of the commendation. link. Aaand, she died on the next missions. Survivors do not survive for long here.

EDIT:
This playthrough isn't intended to be a full blown tutorial, but here are some tips and tricks:
1. Running and Strafing. Pressing Ctrl while moving will move the Agent faster at the expense of more Energy. If you move just one tile, though it will be treated as strafing, i.e. the agent will move without changing direction, but it will take more TUs.
You may need to enable the option Alternative Move methods in the settings.
2. Pressing Alt will show the direction in which all known units are facing. Any unit detected by Mottion Scanner only will be shown with a smaller arrow pointing down.
This is useful in night combat as well or if a unit is vissible, but his tile is not explored.
3. The game has Night vision for the night missions. Press and hold Space to show it or press Scroll Lock to toggle it. It is purely cosmetic and allows you to see better what is going on in night missions.
I have found that the default key bindings are not good and have changed it such that Spacebar toggles between normal and night vission. You can also change the color of night vision.

5
The X-Com Files / Messengers of Dagon
« on: July 09, 2020, 04:56:12 pm »
I have just researched Messengers of Dagon, but I am about to terminate the cult. Will that cancel the missions unlocked by Messengers of Dagon research?

I think not, because that should be the start of the next aquatic arc, but I have to ask. Better safe than sorry.

6
The idea is to have 2 small indicators of:
1. How much TUs the soldier will have with equipment that he has.
2. How much all of the equipment weights along with the strength.

Right now I can do the second by hovering the mouse on all of the gear and summing the weight, but it is kind of annoying to do it by hand.

Ideally the two indicators should look like the indicators that we see on the main mission hud when we select a soldier, but showing on the inventory screen how much of the carrying capacity of the soldier is used and how much TUs he will have at the start of the turn.

I am not sure if that wasn't suggested before and if it was and is not possible, sorry for spamming.

7
Suggestions / Night combat improvements
« on: June 06, 2019, 04:09:49 pm »
1. A flashlight that works like a searchlight of sort. You use it to illuminate an area briefly and then it's off (after the turn). You can have one guy with a powerful flashlight that illuminates the enemies and draws fire while the rest stay in the dark. That is a bit like night naval combat during WWII.

2. A 1x1 helmet slot for headlamps, night vision goggles, etc. It will allow those capabilities to be separated from the armor.

3. The ability to switch on/off flares and similar items (like some mod's flashlights).

4. The ability to shut down the landing craft's lights.

8
Tarkalak's How to add the 0.9.9b countries to older saves.
EDIT: Same procedure works for 2.5 countries.


Note: I have not played till end of month so the below might break up something. Use at your own peril. It's fine.
Note2: There is ranomization in the initial funding that you get. You can use the coefficients that I have put below or If you want to be more precise you can recalculate the coefficients yourself. Thanks to karnaugh_map for finding that.

The saves can be found in %OpenXCOM_directory%/OpenXcom_XFiles/user/xcom1
In order to backup your save you need to copy paste it, then rename it, then open it with a text editor (Notepad, Notepad++, gedit, whatever you prefer) and change the name

name: %your_save's_name% <- change this or it will have the same name in game as the original file.

Step 1. Make a backup of your save. Actually make second one just to be sure.
Step 2. Start a new game, save it and exit.
Step 3. Open the new game save and your current game save. Copy paste the new countries' entries from the new game save into the old save.
Fortunatelly they are at the end of the list, except of Poland which is mixed with the old countries. I am sure that Solaris being Polish is a coincidence.  ;) Using a compare tool like Meld or WinMerge helps. The country entry looks like this:

NEW Game:
  - type: STR_USA
    funding:
      - 132000
    activityXcom:
      - 0
    activityAlien:
      - 0

The old game ones will likely have several lines in funding, activityXcom and activityAlien.

Result: Hurray!!! :)

Also note how many  rows there are in funding. Add " - 0" values above the last one to have them all to the same number.


Find the entry "graphCountryToggles:" and change it to:

graphCountryToggles: 0000000000000000000000000000000000

NOTE from 2022: Just copy the above line from your newly made save, since OpenXcom developers might have added more countries. The actual values 0s or 1s show which graph is shown and which isn't, it is only important to have enough digits for all countries.


Each 0 represents whether its corresponding country is displayed on the Graph or not.

You must do the stuff explained in the below spoiler or the Graphs will crash for countries.

Spoiler:
I have 11 values below funding, activityXcom and activityAlien that correspond to the 11 months of the game I played.
In order to fix the Graphs each new country should have the same number of entries below funding, activityXcom and activityAlien.

  - type: STR_CANADA
    funding:
      - 83000
      - 83000
      - 97000
      - 97000
      - 116000
      - 116000
      - 121000
      - 143000
      - 170000
      - 181000
      - 207000
    activityXcom:
      - 0
      - 55
      - 0
      - 40
      - 0
      - 0
      - 0
      - 0
      - 0
      - 0
      - 0
    activityAlien:
      - 0
      - 1
      - 1
      - 2
      - 28
      - 0
      - 0
      - 0
      - 2
      - 0
      - 0

Now all new countries look like that:

  - type: STR_IRAN
    funding:
      - 51000
    activityXcom:
      - 0
    activityAlien:
      - 0

You must add " - 0" after funding:, activityXcom: and activityAlien: or the Graphs will crash. The new IRAN will look like:
  - type: STR_IRAN
    funding:
      - 0
      - 0
      - 0
      - 0
      - 0
      - 0
      - 0
      - 0
      - 0
      - 0
      - 51000
    activityXcom:
      - 0
      - 0
      - 0
      - 0
      - 0
      - 0
      - 0
      - 0
      - 0
      - 0
      - 0
    activityAlien:
      - 0
      - 0
      - 0
      - 0
      - 0
      - 0
      - 0
      - 0
      - 0
      - 0
      - 0



New countries added. The only problem is that we have more $$$$ than we should do. Just check the funding of your backup and the modified save. Note the difference between them. I have $453000 more and I will use X for that value here.

We can get rid of the extra income in two ways:
Step 4a. Remove the same amount of money from the old countries. Decrease the spending until you *waste* the X amount of money.

Did any country refused to pay enough for protection during the game? I look at you USA.

In order to change the current funding go to the funding part of the country article and change the last value accordingly:

  - type: STR_USA
    funding:
      - 110000
      - 110000
      - 110000
      - 110000
      - 110000
      - 128000
      - 138000
      - 154000
      - 164000
      - 186000
      - 204000 <- Change this one to whatever your heart desires

NOTE from 2022: A few posts below there is an excel sheet that automates (and improves a little) all the following instructions. So use it instead, but then you are not allowed to do Step 5. Link:https://openxcom.org/forum/index.php/topic,7161.msg146109.html#msg146109


ATTENTION !!! ATTENTION !!! HIGH SCHOOL MATHEMATICS DETECTED !!! ALL AGENTS TO LEAVE THE FACILITY IMMEDIATELY !!! SCIENCE PERSONNEL TO DON LAB COATS AND PULL OUT THEIR PENS !!! ATTENTION !!!

If you do not want to make some (ok, a lot of) arithmetics with a calculator skip the rest of this post

Step 4b. Alternatively, and only for the brave, who fear no math (and calculators), we could change the money spending proportionally to how each country's spending was changed in 0.9.9b.

Step 4bI. For the Old countries.

We need to calculate a coefficient for each country and multiply their current funding with it.

How I calculate the coefficient:
Spoiler:
This is done by dividing the country's new starting funding with the country's old starting funding which gives us the coefficient of change. We then multiply this coefficient with the newest funding to obtain the new money.

Example: USA started with 110000 in the old game and with 132000 in the new one. her coefficient is 132000/110000 = 1,2. Then we multiply the current funding 204000 * 1,2 = 244800, but we remove the values below 1000 so it becomes &244000. I have put down all the coefficients below.

My coefficients of change are below:
Multiply each contry's current funding with the value below and change the last 3 digits of the result to 0.
STR_USA = 1,2
STR_RUSSIA = 1,1814
STR_UK = 0,3125
STR_FRANCE = 0,479
STR_GERMANY = 0,7065
STR_ITALY = 0,5932
STR_SPAIN = 0,1837
STR_CHINA = 0,9242
STR_JAPAN = 0,7875
STR_INDIA = 0,4318
STR_BRAZIL = 0,7273
STR_AUSTRALIA = 0,4128
STR_NIGERIA = 0,5357
STR_SOUTH_AFRICA = 0,372
STR_EGYPT = 0,2955
STR_CANADA = 0,9639

Example: In my game STR_UK is paying 177000 "protection" money. In order to adjust the value we do:
177000*0,3125 = 55312,5 ~= 55000
  - type: STR_UK
    funding:
      - 80000
      - 80000
      - 80000
      - 80000
      - 93000
      - 106000
      - 114000
      - 114000
      - 127000
      - 152000
      - 177000 <- change this to 55000

Do that for the rest of the countries

Step 4bII. New countries. We should calculate the money that new countries should give.

After doing the above changes open your modified game and note the total funding, then open the backup save. Calculate the difference and add X (X is the sum of money that the new countries give at startup):
original backup funding - modified funding + X = money that the new countries should give.

Each new country has a coefficient that should be multiplied with the total calculated above.

Spoiler:
The coeffiecient is calculated by deviding the starting money of that country by X. In my case X = 453000.
At start all new countries pay 453000 and Poland gives 32000. So Poland's coefficient is:
32000 / 453000 ~= 0,0706
I have put my coefficients below:
STR_POLAND = 0,0706
STR_CUBA = 0,0662
STR_MONGOLIA = 0,0287
STR_NEW_ZEALAND = 0,0132
STR_ICELAND = 0,0199
STR_PORTUGAL = 0 <- this is a special case because they start at 0
STR_MEXICO = 0,022
STR_INDONESIA = 0,0243
STR_IRELAND = 0,011
STR_UKRAINE = 0,1037
STR_TURKEY = 0,181
STR_ISRAEL = 0,0971
STR_ARGENTINA = 0,0751
STR_IRAN = 0,053
STR_FINLAND = 0,0684
STR_LIBIA = 0,0155
STR_SOUTH_KOREA = 0,106

Example:
I had originally $2 782 000 and after adjusting the Old countries I got $2 263 000. So:
2 782 000 - 2 263 000 + 453 000 = 972000
The new countries should in total give $972000 money.

Of these money Poland will get cough up 972000 * 0,706 = 68623,2 ~= 68000
In the STR_POLAND we change:
  - type: STR_POLAND
    funding:
      - 32000 <- this becomes 68000

Step 4bIII. Adjusting spare change.

Open your modified game and see the total funding and compare it with the backup funding. The difference is due to rounding errors because we round at 1000. Add the difference to some countries.

Example:
In the backup I have 2782000 and after all the changes I got 2750000.
I had Portugal with 0 at start so I gave them 32000

Step 5. Pat yourself on the back and reconsider becoming a Mathematics Major at the nearest (or elitest) University.

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