Fraktal

It was originally like that, but from version 1.32 onwards Tycho started pushing an all-or-nothing approach where you either use the Extender the way he wants you, or don't use it at all. First it was putting most new features under a single Apply=1 option, then taking away the choice entirely by hardcoding them into difficulty levels. And ironically enough, the pre-hardcoding versions were far more stable and bug-free than the 1.34 betas he left us with before bailing.

What I meant is that Tycho deliberately took out HWD detection to make the game harder.

I seem to remember that being deliberate.

I know those are easy. What will not be as easy is that I want all terrestrial items to be manufacturable.

I'll give this patcher a try too.

The tech tree above does not include any mechanics not already present in the engine. Even the "item must be in storage before interrogation completes" thing is borrowed from TFTD. FYI, this would also be the mod into which the rocket/blaster mods I mentioned in the Extender thread would go. As well as swapping the accuracy stats for laser and plasma weapons. And making UFO power sources violently explode when shot. And overhauling the in-game Ufopaedia to more accurately describe the aliens' weaknesses. Oh, and switching around UFO speeds: Battleship is the slowest. Even a Skyranger can catch up to it, but only barely. Terror Ship is the next; you now need an Interceptor. Small Scout, Interceptor can still catch it but only barely. Supply Ship, you now need a Lightning. Harvester, Lightning is still enough. Abductor, can narrowly outrun a Lightning but not a Firestorm. Large Scout, Firestorm is good. Medium Scout, Firestorm can catch this too but really needs to haul ass. You might wonder what is the purpose of this. It's so that before you can get advanced craft, the only UFOs you can catch without them landing or slowing down to sweep an area are also the ones you will not have the teeth to take out in a tactical mission. Ergo, the early game is going to be considerably harder.

Where did Tycho disappear to, anyway?

I'm familiar with the feeling. Can't count how many times my Java teacher bitched at me in the past not to hardcode values... I just thought that if Tycho managed to do it, it should be possible.

Assembly is indeed not my strong point. Am I to assume then that the research tree is in an area of the executable that hasn't been deciphered by you guys yet?

Aliens use the same item as you do, so yes. With this, the Blaster Launcher would still be more powerful than the Rocket Launcher, meaning that getting hit with it would still really hurt; it's just that the title of absolute murder machine would go to the Fusion Ball Hovertank now. Regarding the Rocket Tank... should I also give it manual guidance akin to Blaster Bombs on the principle that heavier platform means bigger missile means room for warhead guidance electronics? The handheld Rocket Launcher would still be dumb-fire. And while we're at it... would there be objection against me renaming Fusion Ball Launchers to Fusion Detonators? Just a simple ENGLISH.DAT edit.

After reading about the alternate laser weapon research order in the Extender, I started thinking of what could be done with the research tree and came up with something I feel is pretty good. Problem is, I can't find any resource about where project prerequisites are defined. Neither Ufopaedia's articles on RESEARCH.DAT nor Zombie's executable table are forthcoming with that critical piece of information. The Extender's source code is no help either, as the latest-released version of the source code doesn't have the alternate laser research yet. Can anyone help? In case anyone cares, this is what I'm trying to do (forgot the Hyperwave Decoder, it's immediately after UFO Navigation).

I can confirm that the same bug is present in the newest version. Meanwhile, I keep coming up with more ideas on how to modify the game. At this rate, I might end up actually writing a .dat mod... Anyway, my latest idea is to swap the damage values of the Blaster Launcher and the Fusion Ball Hovertank, as well as crank up the Rocket Tank's damage to that of the Large Rocket, on the basis that a vehicle-mounted weapon should be able to pack more destructive warheads that would realistically be too heavy to be man-portable.

I did read those messages but to be honest, I'm thinking of downgrading back to 1.31.9. I also took a peek into the latest publicly available source code. What's your issue with programming? C++?

Too bad. In the meantime, I came up with a quite more complex tech tree than Tycho's Alternate Research Tree, mostly in the form of requiring a ton of interrogations to get everything. Specifically... Weapon research: interrogating any alien soldier unlocks for research all alien weapons in base stores at the time, except for the Small Launcher. If a weapon is not in stock at the time, you need to get one and interrogate another soldier. Plasma ammunition and blaster bombs require E-115 to be researched first, in addition to the requirement of interrogating an alien soldier. Small Launcher and Stun Bomb require an alien medic instead of a soldier. Armor research: researching Alien Alloys and dissecting a Muton unlocks the Personal Armor. Researching Personal Armor and UFO Power Source, then studying a Sectopod wreck, unlocks the Power Suit. Researching Power Suit and New Fighter Craft unlocks the Flying Suit. Craft research: interrogating an alien engineer unlocks UFO Power Source. Interrogating an alien navigator unlocks UFO Navigation. Interrogating enough alien engineers to acquire all UFO schematics (ie. completely fill out the Ufopaedia's UFO section) unlocks UFO Construction and Grav Shield. The Avenger only becomes available for research once the Cydonia mission is unlocked. Psionics research: researching and using Mind Probes requires dissecting a Sectoid and interrogating a Sectoid leader or commander. Dissecting an Ethereal unlocks the Psi Lab and the Mind Shield, but not the Psi Amp. Interrogating an Ethereal is what unlocks the Psi Amp. Endgame research: Interrogating and dissecting enough aliens to acquire detailed data about them (ie. filling out the Ufopaedia's section on alien lifeforms, with medic interrogations substituting for terrorists that cannot be stunned) unlocks Alien Origins. Interrogating enough alien navigators to acquire detailed intelligence on alien operations (ie. filling out the Ufopaedia's section on alien missions) unlocks The Martian Solution. Interrogating an Ethereal Commander unlocks Cydonia or Bust. So if you want to finish the game, prepare for a long haul How's this?

Do you happen to know which version was the one where Tycho started forcing per-difficulty modifications?

Oh, thank god someone's still working on this. This latest release is a mess and Tycho seems to have pulled down all earlier versions. If you don't mind me asking, what caused the Elerium bug? Here you go. divzero crash.zip

Just in case Tycho hasn't abandoned this project yet, bug reports from a completely new game. When trying to build a Living Quarters, the game put down a Hangar's bottom left corner. My money still got deducted for a LQ, the dismantle message identified it as a Hangar too and dismantling it didn't return my money. Looking into BASE.DAT with a hex editor reveals that while the relevant facility slot's content was set to 12 (Hangar bottom left), the "time until completion" value was set properly. So the game recognizes which facility I picked, it's just that something seems to be hardcoding the facility's ID to 12. Did some more testing on this one. Non-Hangar buildings placed next to existing ones get affected by this bug, buildings that get queued via the Base Building Stacking mod do not. Hangars and Access Lifts are unaffected, queued or not. [*]Game crashes with a "patched 0x00401307 twice" at the start of every tactical mission. Reloading the nearest savegame and entering the same tactical mission does not crash - but the next tactical mission will, 100% of the time. Reloading a saved tactical mission also crashes the game, but restarting the game and loading it again works. [*]Neither UFO recovery nor ground assault missions provide ANY Elerium. I had to edit some into my base inventory to even get the option to research it. [*]First terror mission did not spawn any civilians, but I still got points for saving them. [*]All mission briefings say the mission is being carried out by Skyranger-0. [*]Snakeman terror mission, access violation crash at 0x3 (trying to access 0x00000003). Have one snake and one zombie left; killed the snake first and ended the turn, crash. Killed the zombie and its chryssie to make sure it's not the auto-hatch acting up, crash. Killed both, crash. I ultimately hacked UNITREF.DAT to set every alien's health to 0 at the end of the turn (turns out there were another 2 somewhere in the darkness), which resolved the mission successfully without a crash. [*]Skyranger shadowing a UFO on what seems to be an infiltration or base mission over Australia. The moment the Skyranger tries to return to base, divide by zero crash at 0x453B8E. I have a backup save for this if anyone wants to look into it. If you want to get past the mission but don't have any other save, send it over and I'll hex-edit it for you to end the mission successfully so that you can continue.

While I'm no AI programmer, I am studying software engineering and want to make a turn-based game sometime in the future, just for fun. Of course, that means I'll eventually have to develop an AI for it as well (right now, even the core engine is less than 10% complete). I also almost never play multiplayer myself, so I have experience with the AI of lots of games (mostly strategic ones). There were some AIs that show promise, despite not actually being all that good. One such example I've seen is the AI of Dawn of War: It adapts its army composition to counter the player's. If its anti-infantry soldiers are getting decimated by my tanks, it starts to roll out anti-vehicle infantry and melee walkers. It doesn't waste troops on minor probing attacks but keeps building up its army, attacking only once it outguns me or once I aggro it. If either of those conditions are met, its entire army attacks all at once in a huge wave, so no luring individual units away for piecemeal annihilation. In team games versus a single human player (like most campaign missions), attacking one AI instantly aggroes its teammates as well. So if you build up your army and attack one AI, the other will counterattack your base while you're away. AI teammates also tend to gang up on the same player to ensure a kill overwhelming numerical superiority; I've played several human-vs-AI 3v3 matches before and saw multiple instances of all three AI players attacking the same human player simultaneously. It concentrates fire on low-health targets but splits firepower to take advantage of hard counters. If a mixed army of anti-infantry and anti-tank guys are fighting an infantry blob who suddenly get armored support, the anti-tank guys immediately switch targets. If it gets into a fight that has it outnumbered, the AI actively tries to kite the attackers back to its nearest armed structure to add that structure's firepower into the equation. And the AI already pulls these behaviors off at the second difficulty level out of four (on Easy, it is practically brain-dead; Standard difficulty is where it gets unshackled and the fun starts). Now this is what I would call a pretty damn good AI... would. Unfortunately, in-depth observation of the AI's behavior reveals that it is actually rather rigidly scripted. To use the kiting one as example, the AI somehow instantly knows if you give an attack order onto one of its units and withdraws that unit. The withdrawing unit immediately stops fighting and runs to the structure above all else before turning around and coming back, so you can abuse this by giving an attack order onto an enemy unit then cancelling it; the unit will still disengage and make the round trip, putting it out of the fight for several seconds. Another bad example of scripting in Dawn of War is units capable of jumping or teleportation. Unarmed units and units with a ranged attack more powerful than their melee attack AND set to ranged stance are designated by the AI as priority targets. If the AI has a jump- or teleport-capable unit and a priority target comes into range, the AI instantly jumps/teleports next to that unit. Considering that most jump/teleport units are melee and attacking infantry in melee forces them to stop shooting and melee back, this would be an excellent way to tie up shooter-type units, neutralizing their firepower. Unfortunately, the AI is hardcoded to use jump/teleport whenever the above condition is met, resulting in nonsensical behavior. Behavior like fleeing units unexpectedly teleporting right into the middle of the army they're trying to flee from, then resuming fleeing (and getting gunned down from behind). Or units with two jump charges using one charge to jump next to the priority target, then promptly using their second charge to take off and land ONE METER AWAY. It is painfully evident that whoever programmed the AI didn't take a lot of variables into account, like how far away the target is or what the jump/teleport unit itself is doing right now. So then, I had an idea. I think that the best way to force the development of a good AI is to write one that isn't embedded into the game engine. I always felt that basing the AI's behavior around data the human player has no access to is lazy and cheap. But if the AI only has access to the same information the player is also legitimately able to obtain, it becomes much more challenging for the programmer to write its behavior, plus it would curb occurrences of superhuman AIs. Ideally, the AI programmer team should hire a tournament-level online player of the game's genre as consultant on how the AI should utilize the information it does have access to for maximum effect: when to build resource gatherers and how many of them, what build order it should use, etc.. Related to this, another one I was thinking of is to dispense with the "if X happens, do Y" kind of AI programming. Instead of events directly triggering scripted responses, the responses all get weighted probabilities, with certain events increasing the priority of some of them. When the AI needs to act, it uses this probability table to decide what's more important to do now and bases its actions around that; in other words, base the AI around emergent behavior instead of pre-programmed responses (Black and White already used this in 2001, I think; I read one example of the AI being taught not to do something it liked doing resulting in the AI only doing it when the player wasn't watching). This would make the AI's actions seem more fluid and natural, instead of being predictable. For example, if an AI is programmed to prioritize damaged enemies but somehow doesn't have access to the HP level of enemy units, it could actively note how much damage it saw the target take and use that to "guess" the target's current health (and if it didn't see the target being healed, the AI would obviously guess wrong - exactly like a human player).

Tycho, I have a feature request. Would it be possible to implement an option that allows the player to reorder the list of crafts on the Launch Interception screen? If manual reordering is not possible, how about an automatic sorting option that runs in the background whenever the player aquires a new craft? Option 0 does nothing as usual, option 1 sorts craft alphabetically, option 2 sorts craft by base (crafts in same base are sub-sorted alphabetically). Also, is it possible to rename crafts? Also also, how about an option that disables the "force Low Fuel - Returning to Base state after mission" feature? Few years ago, I remember that I almost lost a campaign because a terror mission popped up while my transport was returning to base after a mission and the game didn't let me redeploy until the transport landed and finished refueling, about 12 hours after the terror mission disappeared and I got the score penalty.

Tried to see if the base defense crash still happens with base defenses turned off. It does and the bad instruction (still 4A2835) is now trying to access 00000002. So the problem is not there. Also, the crash happens regardless of whether the base is attacked by a battleship or a terror ship. I could surrender the base (since I already have a second base set up and operational) but I'd rather not, seeing as it would set me back more than a month AND the aliens just established a base right next to mine (as in, literally right next to; it's less than an hour away by Skyranger and I already raided one supply ship meant for it). Tycho, here's the save you asked for:Base Defense Crash.zip

Unfortunately no. Since I used the workaround (uloading the invisible items from the Skyranger then putting them back in), the issue has disappeared. For now, anyway.

I have a save 1-2 days before my base gets attacked and I can't proceed with the game due to the crash. WIll that do? There's the catch: there was no death scream either. All fixes are enabled. I just checked.

I also have a crash report: crash at 42B71C with error C0000005 trying to access 00000034. Happened when a sectoid used psionics on one of my soldiers during turn 3 of a terror mission. Had a save game from turn 2 which I reloaded, sectoid used psionics again and the game didn't crash this time. Also reporting that the phantom items bug is still present: five grenades and two smoke grenades are invisible from the inventory window but are displayed and usable from the battlescape interface if in a hand slot; unloading the invisible items from the Skyranger then putting them back in fixed the issue for now. Game is still crashing at the beginning of base defense; the error is at 4A2835 every time. Looks like a null pointer exception (it's trying to access 00000000 and gets an access violation) but I could be wrong. I also noticed one instance of a soldier getting caught on the fringe of an alien grenade explosion, the "*** is unconscious" message is displayed - but the corpse disappears and the soldier is reported as KIA at the end. Stunned Units KIA is on and there was no "*** got blasted" message, nor a death scream. More recently I had another stunned unit mysteriously disappearing, this time the cause of the stun was a Small Launcher and the soldier was uninjured before being stunned.

I have some ideas for your perusal. Improved Laser Tank -> Improved Tanks: aside from what it already does, also decreases manufacturing price for Launcher Hovertank ammo to $6000/200 hours/2 Elerium apiece - still expensive but cheaper than standard Blaster Bombs to compensate for the reduced destructive power. Essential Alloys: all items that require alloys to manufacture now require alloys to be researched before those items are available for manufacturing. Not that unbalancing, considering that most players go for the alloys very early on. Alternate Plasma Research: if 1, all three alien plasma weapons need to be researched before the Plasma Cannon becomes available for research (since the scientists now have extensive knowledge on how the technology works). If 2, an alien engineer also needs to be interrogated (to figure out how the aliens apply the technology on this scale). Self-sustaining X-COM: all terrestrial items except crafts (Interceptor and Skyranger) can be manufactured as well as bought, though manufacturing is more expensive. Aside from being able to procure Rocket Tank ammunition on a whim, its effect on game balance is practically nil. Armor Upgrade: manufacturing a Power Suit requires a set of Personal Armor on top of the usual price/materials/worktime. Flying Suits similarly require Power Suits to build. This makes high-end armors much more expensive and time-consuming to make, as well as giving the player a way to recycle obsolete armors. Flying Suits in particular will cost $122,000, 14 alloys, 21 Elerium and 3,200 hours PER ARMOR. Makes the game much harder. Item Recycling: items that require alloys/Elerium to produce sell for a lower price but refund two-thirds of their alloy/Elerium price when sold. This makes Elerium marginally more abundant, as the clip recovery fix means you probably have more than enough Heavy Plasma clips to recycle. Pay Grades: the higher a soldier's rank, the higher his monthy salary.