I was thinking on this recently and can't figure out how the equipment pile is generated and how it is placed on a map.

Here's the deal: before a mission starts your soldiers begin with some equipment in their hands and the rest is dumped on the ground. You then have the option of switching the equipment around if you want before the battle starts. When it does, any excess equipment on the ground is moved to the equipment pile on an X-COM ship. But how does the game know where the equipment pile is on a ship? Help!

- Zombie

How are the soldier nodes in the ships stored? It is possible that the the game picks the same location as unit 0 for the equipment pile. It might pay to move that somewhere and see where the equipment pile goes.

- NKF

Good point, I'll try doing that.

There is only one spawn point inside X-COM ships (on the equipment pile naturally). All have a spawn priority of 0 though. Even more strange is that the Skyranger and Lightning have that node set to X-COM, while the Avenger is set to Civ-Scout. Odd...

- Zombie

X-Com units never spawn according to route nodes when you have a craft present. The GeoScape engine places them according to some routines that must be hardcoded into the executable. I'm fairly sure it places the equipment pile in a similar way, though it is possible it uses one of the craft route nodes for that.

You can move your craft around the map by tweaking GeoData.Dat (prior to Map.Dat generation), this'll move the route nodes as well (by memory) but since the unit/equipment pile locations are set by other files this won't affect those. This doesn't rule out the idea that the GeoScape engine uses the nodes for their placement somehow, however... Without reading the EXE the only way to know for sure is to edit those route nodes and start a new mission.

Before a battle begins, ALL your equipment is in the pile. To determine what's in there, my guess is the Battlescape engine reads through the initial item table until it finds something held by a unit - All items from that point on belong to the aliens. Then it "auto-equips" some of your units and then lets you make any changes you want to their loadouts. When that's done, any equipment left over remains in the pile - It doesn't get moved there, because that's where it was to begin with.

Once the pile contents are determined and the auto-equip completed, you get your chance to drop items to the ground via the inventory screen. Remember when you pick an item up, it's map location is still set to whatever it was before? It's only actually updated to a new map location when you put the item down. But during the initial equip sequence, all dropped items go into the equip pile - All the game has to do to put them back there is set them to be on the ground (Obpos[4]). It doesn't have to update their map location because it's already correct.

Well, I screwed around with the Skyranger route file today and edited the the in-ship route from 9,4,1 to 9,5,1 (directly to the right of the old node where soldier #2 spawns). After that, I put 2 soldiers on the ol' ranger along with 80 items of equipment and sent it on a mission. When it arrived everything looked normal: the soldiers spawned in the correct location and the equipment pile was where it was expected. Guess this info is hard-coded in the executable like you mentioned. Worth a shot anyway.

I haven't used XcomUtil in a while, but doesn't Scott T. Jones have an option for loading soldiers on the Firestorm and Interceptor? Was there problems with this feature as well? If so, it may have to do with the spawn/equipment pile info being hard-coded in the executable.

- Zombie

Haven't heard of any issues XComUtil has with soldier/equipment loading.

I decided to pull a test to verify my theory. I smashed a UFO into the desert and saved. I then sent my craft over, started the mission and aborted before backing up ObPosRef.Dat (the pre-combat object table generated by the GeoScape engine).

I reloaded my game and removed all the laser rifles from my craft before sending it over again. The new map had my dropship in a different position.

Then I shut the game down entirely, and restored my ObPosRef to the MissDat folder. After that I manually booted the Tactical engine (without using the GeoScape engine to do it for me).

And so the game built a new map from the last mission I'd run, but using the equipment table from the first. On the initial equip screen all the correct items showed. After I left the equip screen, all my excess items went to the equipment pile - Which was some distance from my drop ship.

So there you have it. The Tactical engine doesn't care where your items are, or how many you have. It works out what's in the pile by showing you all the items prior to those held by aliens, and puts items back in the pile by leaving them at their original map location.