[COMPILATION] Final Mod Pack (FMP)

[Solarius Scorch]

is the alien data slate OP or something? it seems like you can just research it again and again too get free researched things.

Only if you don't read the very simple instructions and leave your "spent research items" option turned off.

[The Reaver of Darkness]

As for the Sectopods... There are no good methods to use against Sectopods. Just throw what you have at them and pray it's enough.

I haven't played FMP yet but in vanilla, one of the better ways to fight them is with heavy lasers or laser tanks, and with the improved heavy laser stock mod in Open Xcom, you can really take them down easy. I beefed up the heavy laser in my mod, then added a heavy auto-laser which is like the autocannon but laser. And I added a more powerful laser tank. They're not that much stronger than vanilla but it helps get over the armor cause the original heavy laser isn't actually very strong. I used to use laser rifles for sectopods actually--just have a hovertank burn off their reaction fire, then unload some auto-shots into them. I don't know what laser weapons FMP has to offer but if there's powerful lasers, that's probably the answer.

Also, blaster bombs are the answer to ANYTHING.

[Cristao]

Good luck. Lasers didnt work for me. What worked was incendiary weapons - grenades, grenade launcher, incendiary rocket. Lasers - NAH!!

[Devon_v]

Fire. Kill them with fire.

I'd say that all the mechs should be altered to take WAY less damage from incendiaries, because it's silly how easy they are to drop with flamers.

Alloy Blades are also insanely effective against everything. If you have a dedicated capture agent using the Stun Rod they will end up with great melee accuracy.  Mine ended up with 107% accuracy, 112TUs, and around 100 damage in a Synthsuit. Went into a downed saucer and cut down three Gazers in one turn. Ninja, yo.

High Explosive packs are also highly effective against everything. My grenadier can now carry nine of them and throw them a good 20 tiles. Not much lives through the first.

[B1ackwolf]

hi guys, i want to throw a few things up, again im enjoying so much the mod and everythings feels great...and just a personal thought but i have see a lot of people arguing how strong are the cyberdisc now but i managed to kill one using ONLY standard weaponry (one magazine of LMG at close quarter and three burst from a standard rifle using normal amunnition)  and it got just kaput!.

i want to point out a few bugs i noticed but they are mostly with the "base game" so imma post it in other place ...some of them are for example getting strange colored reports for commendations...or gettint the health bar swaps it color after you got a fatal wound (swaps from red to green).....

but one thing idk if its have something to do with the mod is the actual fact that when you are in a base defense most of your items appears dropped in the floor of the hangars, it would be a minor issue except for the fact most of your enemies tend to appear there,  specially "HEAVY UNITS" (cyberdisk)..and because you tend to drop all your explosion down there to get those basterds down it have the nasty effect of make you lose a lot of items in the skirmish...its pretty lame and also annoying because most of the time you dont have an idea of what items you lost....so if this related to the mod or its something else?.

Ps im playing in superhuman and i already fought my first base defense mission...im loving this thanks again for your work!.

ps2: this is the aftermath of the attack..i managed to survive it, and we finally pin down this MOFO who was personally responsable of the death of my two best soldiers including my captain and  revenge must be served cold 

[AngelicJoker]

Has anyone else been having a graphical glitch with the Large Living Quarters in the latest nightlies?  I tried to reinstall everything from scratch and it still come up.

Edit: Forgot to mention versions!

The facility looked normal in 2016_01_02_0303 but starting new research problems had strange lag before the window would open.

I've tried several newer versions and the research lag is gone but I get the graphical glitch in the screenshot.

2016_01_03_0051
2016_01_05_0120
2016_01_11_0026
2016_01_12_0024

[B1ackwolf]

i can reproduce this

[Dioxine]

I think the new nightly enforces some palette stuff, so you're either 100% down with the original palette or you get penalized like this. This is my guess based on what SupSuper said about new changes. At least it looks like a f*cked up palette, however it worked with Nightlies for more than a year (I'm the author of Large Living Quarters).

[Solarius Scorch]

but one thing idk if its have something to do with the mod is the actual fact that when you are in a base defense most of your items appears dropped in the floor of the hangars, it would be a minor issue except for the fact most of your enemies tend to appear there,  specially "HEAVY UNITS" (cyberdisk)..and because you tend to drop all your explosion down there to get those basterds down it have the nasty effect of make you lose a lot of items in the skirmish...its pretty lame and also annoying because most of the time you dont have an idea of what items you lost....so if this related to the mod or its something else?.

Yes. It's because hangars give some storage space. I think I'll remove it after all.

Congrats on base defence by the way!

As for the Large Living Quarters, I'll look into it... Or wait on Dioxine to do so.

[R1dO]

The palette stuff is due to using lodePNG when loading 8bit PNG's (needed for OSX).

The problem with the png's from those facilities is that the palette is truncated, and the transparency value
is set to something like 255 (if i remember correctly). Apparently SDL by itself honored the transparency layer, while lodepng tries to
set the transparency index before passing it on.

It took me a few attempts to 'fix' those images (i'm not  a pixel guru).
The attached ones should work in the versions before and after commit b3b199c4

[Solarius Scorch]

Thanks r1Do.

If it happens again, would simply using gif format instead of png fix the problem?

[R1dO]

Unfortunately i am to unfamiliar with gif to say anything definitive about that.

If my understanding of the OXC  code is good enough it looks like gif is handled by lodePNG as well.
That would imply that the same errors would give the same results... but that's just speculation.

One thing that i want to try out (hopefully this evening) is what happens in both cases, e.g. before and after specific commit, when flattening the png files.
If that works satisfactory (it should, given how the indexed files are supposed to be build-up according to ufopeadia and the post of SupSuper), it might just be as easy to flatten those images before publishing.

Graphics:
- Use 8-bit PNG (recommended: Photoshop, Aseprite).
- Use vanilla palettes.
- Don't optimize palettes.
- Transparent color must always be palette index 0 (first color).

[Solarius Scorch]

Thanks. But if this means editing several thousand files, then we have a problem.

[R1dO]

Luckily those rules are not different than before. So most files will be ok, and its only needed when errors arise.

[yrizoud]

Unfortunately the exact problem is still not known, and the guidelines seem very vague to me.
Do the color indices of the palette need to match the exact RGB of the game's palette ? AFAIK, no, because sprites are loaded before the game even knows which palette will be used to display them.
The index of pixels expected to be transparent has to be zero, OK, but does this color also HAVE to be transparent as per the PNG specification ? It's the opposite of what's required for GIFs, which must not have transparent color zero 
- Using a "tRNS" chunk ? Does it HAVE to be a 256-byte chunk with 1 time "0" and 255 times "255" ? Or can it be shortened to 1 x "0", which has the same meaning ?
- What if there's an alpha channel which gives an alpha of zero to all 0-index pixels ? Does it more harm than good ? It's not supposed to be PNG standard (color type 5 in Image Header, forbidden), but some painting program make them, and they actually render OK in web browsers.