jos

Thanks BB that did it.

Here you go: http://postimg.org/image/hzdlz1d01/ http://s24.postimg.org/hzdlz1d01/Screen.jpg Thanks for any help you can offer BB.

Hey Bomb Bloke, I'm trying to use your PCK extractor and i'm getting a: exception in thread "main" java.lang.nullpointerexception Any idea what's causing this?

Funnily enough this is for OpenApocalypse - i'm doing some initial tests of upscaling the artwork resolution. I'll ask on their forum. But i posted here because Bomb Bloke still seems to be the Apocalypse expert when it comes to game files... Thanks Silencer.

No I haven't - But this for Apocalypse, not EU. Do you think they can help with this Silencer?

Hey Bomb Bloke (or anyone else on these boards) Do you know if there is still no way to extract the agent animations?

Ok, thanks j'ordos. I've managed to correlate the IDA and hex-editor hex-adresses. I'll continue my hunt and post any findings here. a) do you have an idea what part of the .exe what i'm looking for might be? b) is it likely to be in the UFO.exe, or TACP.exe?

Thanks insidious one! But - the problem is I have no idea how to use PMODE/W - or even what it is! what should i do with the files once i've downloaded it? Do i copy the files somewhere into the IDA directory? BTW j'ordos - when using apatcher, the 'guards present during investigations' seems to have a problem - no matter what i do i can't seem to stop security soldiers from always being present in buildings when I investigate for alien infiltration. Whether i say yes, no or 'A' (abort?) they're there.....

Ah ha! You guys are still around. Ok, so yes - I know that 64 00 is 100 in ASCII (I did do a little research before I started, luckily) And yes - I had already used IDA pro to have a look at TACP. Unfortunately I have no clue what all that crazy stuff that IDA tells me is! And I have MUCHO respect for anyone who can interpret any of those hieroglyphics!. So, I've gone back to IDA and followed you guys instructions above. Now, by doing an immediate value search in IDA it comes up with only 8 or so 100's (why only 8?!? - when a regular hex editor finds over 700?!?) So by double-clicking on the "mov [......], 64h" it takes me to the appropriate hex's in the hex view. Here's my problem: a) If i change it in IDA i have no idea how to recompile the IDA file back into a useable .exe. So, i open it in good old FlexHex and .... b) I can't correlate the offsets! If I go to say, 000182F2 (from the bottom left location box) in IDA, and then to 000182F2 in Flex hex - there's no 64 00's to be found! It's almost like I'm looking at different .exe's. Am I missing something obvious, guys? @ j'ordos - so are you basicly saying i should look for 64 and 72 together, and where the two are next to each other, is probably the value i want?

Well, this part of the forum seems pretty quiet - I guess most XCOM modders seem to have moved on. I'm continuing on my crazy quest to mod the morale system In XCOM Apocalypse, and need a little help with Hex-editing. Here's what I want to do: - change the amount of morale points a soldier gets at the beginning of every mission from 100 (out of 100) to something else. Here's what i've done: - Using a simple Hex-editor i've painfully been through every 100 in TACP.exe, and changed it do a different value. Usually 10. Sometimes, of course, this crashes the game, so I have to identify those hexs, and skip over them. There are 700-odd 100 values in that damn .exe, and if J'ordos were here, i'm sure he'd agree it's a tedious process. So .... after hours and hours of the above: changing pretty much every 100 in the .exe, none seem to change what i want. Even more frustratingly, I did manage to pinpoint the value that morale is "out of" - but this seems totally useless, and from testing seems only to control the graphic of the morale bar. So am I doing anything wrong? From knowledge of the EU and TFTD, should there be a 100 value to find and change? Does anyone have any experience of the .exe they can help me with?

Thanks for your analysis, NKF. The tile-based palette change would work excellently, I think. The main complaint about Apocalypse is the graphics, as a graphics guy, I can say the some darkness would probably be the single thing that would improve the visuals the most. I would have no clue where to begin with what you describe unfortunately as i'm only a beginner in programming. Is there an Apocalypse fan out there who would like to help make this happen? I could provide extensive testing, tweaking, and other palette-related work....

Hey J'ordos -(or anyone who has experience of Apoc'd) I have a question concerning editing armour in Apoc'd: Essentially, I want armor to loose durability quicker. Unfortunately, when I decrease megapol's armor damage resistance (by increasing the number, which it seems means % damage taken - so 200 means it takes 200% more damage) it seems to work fine by degrading the armor more severley. But the problem is it seem to add a load of damage to the soldier underneath! At least, this is what appears to happen, and in my tests the soldiers also seem to take 200% damage therefore dying really fast. Not what i want. I only want the armor to take more damage. Do you have a better understanding of how the damage modifiers work in Apoc?

Interesting. Ingenious in fact! Do you know Apoc handles its cityscape day/night the same way though? Ok. But I suppose the key question is, will this just darken everything uniformly? As you say above, the UFO/TFTD palette swap cleverly allows 'light sources' such as agents and electro-flares and fire. How does it do this? And do you think we could we set up the Apoc palette swap to do the same thing? A uniform darkening of the screen during night missions without light sources would probably not be worth doing as it wouldn't create the awesome atmospheric lighting we see in UFO/TFTD.... Right - in fact, a small amount of colour change to the UI could actually be quite cool, as in TFTD! Unfortunately I wouldn't have much idea how to set it up to change the palette. Can you give me any leads Bomb bloke? I've modded alongside an expert engine hacker on the game Fallout 2 but I've only done game scripting. She creates the extraordinary little program (called sfall) that, presumably, gets triggered when a certain offset changes (like day to dusk) and tells the game to do x or y. Unfortunately it's mostly magic to me... Honestly, that would be nice, but far from essential. I'm mostly trying to add atmosphere to the game (which i think it is sorely missing in comparison to EU/TFTD) Ranges reduced by 50% at night would be sweet, but a bonus only.....

Ok, so after playing around with the Apocalypse editor unlocked thanks to J'ordos's fabulous work, it's clear that the day/dusk/night graphics in the game change using a palette swap. (you can switch between them in the editor) So, as we know, It works perfectly on the cityscape but no palette swap happens in the battlescape. If there was one thing I could change in Apoclaypse it would be this. I'm sure we all love/hate night missions from XCOM 1, and it looks like Day/night got cut from Apoc along with lots of other cool stuff. What a damn shame. So given that we have a working palette swap function in the game, could we set it to work in the battlescape? Does anyone have some idea how this could be achieved?

Thanks for the reply, Bomb Bloke. Yeah, i thought they were basicly layered sprites - presumably working like the Diablo 2 character sprites. In fact XED seems to be able to decompile some of the CoS soldiers and you can see torso, legs etc seperated. Oh, well, scratch that