Terror from the Deep implementation

[AndO3131]

Hi to all. I've recently found out abot OpenXcom. Played UFO: enemy unknown many times over, but always thought it could be little better, ahh, those bugs.... .

Since it's an opensource project I spent some time trying to add my favourite part - terror from the deep and that underwater climax. I must warn here: don't know much about repositories, but tried to make this patch as well as I could. Running game should add two entries in options.cfg - then you need to change
version = ufo
line to
version = tftd
Patch contains reading files from DATA/TFTD/ subfolder (you need the same catalogue names as in DATA/) and changing NewGame screen as it should be. Of course it doesn't work much further, but if the direction is right, I can add more features. Hope to hear some positive reviews

[Daiky]

Hi, SupSuper probably did not read your post yet (otherwise he would have warned you), but I'm warning you in his place. He is currently moving all rulesets to external files, everything that currently was hardcoded. Since a lot of the differences between ufo and tftd are exactly in those rulesets, I'm afraid your code will break the moment you sync up with the master repository. Making it difficult to keep in sync.

But this does not mean you need to stop, and just knowing what problems you encounter and how you solved them could be of great help to the project. A lot of people like TFTD here, so making openxcom work like TFTD at some point is probably a logic step.

So I would say, we'll be happy to follow your progress.

[SupSuper]

As Daiky said, I'm currently overhauling the rulesets to make them external and easily moddable, as a well as other things. I appreciate your enthusiasm but this is probably a bad time to be sending in such major changes, specially since your if-else approach will just conflict with the structure and design we currently have in mind for moddability.

[AndO3131]

Okay, I'll put it on hold. Here are problems I've encountered so far:

First problem - in the patch I specified every file to be loaded. Will you change algorithm reading files in XcomResourcePack.cpp?

Second problem - palettes in Terror from the Deep are different from the ones in Enemy Unknown: colours for various things have different numbers than in Enemy Unknown.

Third problem - only the first palette in Terror from the Deep has colours for mouse pointer. Maybe it should be drawn once, not after every palette change?

Fourth problem - backpals.dat also use different colour numbers.

[kkmic]

@AndO3131: AFAIK, OpenXCOM is intended to be able to run both games at some point in the future. I'm not sure if this will happen at 1.0, or 1.0 will be only an 100% implementation of UFO, but since SupSuper (our "LazyLead" :p) IS a TFTD fan, I have full confidence in the fact that TFTD will surface through OpenXCOM, and your help will be more than welcomed once the core features are implemented "the right way".

[AndO3131]

I have thought about getting OpenXcom closer to Terror from the Deep. I suggest moving file names to external file, eg. 'filenames.dat'. It could look like:
palettes:
  GEODATA/PALLETES.DAT
backpalettes:
  GEODATA/BACKPALS.DAT
....
and so on. If this is something you want in project, let me know. I'll put these changes in github.