uly

Well, that sucks. I wonder though why they listed "Ambidextrous melee" in the 1.2 patch log. I presume that, to make dual melee actually possible, you'll certainly need new animation to go with it. As far as I can tell no such animation is included in the 1.2 patch. What's more, ambi melee isn't even available in UFO:AL. If they actually had it with AS 1.2 surely they should have included it with AL. Anyway it's just all very puzzling and dissappointing.

Okay, the forum seems dead... but anyway. I just dug up UFO:AS and applied the 1.2 patch. (I played back in the 1.1 days.) The 1.2 patch info says "ambidextrous melee is possible". I presume that means you can dual wield knives. So I trained up my L2 ranger and put a knife and each of his hands. But guess what? He still attacks with only one knife! As far as I can tell, there's no speed nor damage bonus, either; he's simply holding the second knife for fun. Can anyone confirm this or am I doing something wrong? PS My ranger can dual wield pistols quite effectively, my question concerns only melee weapons.

Two questions: Does anyone know the exact criteria for Rita to show up? And secondly, what exactly is Rita's class? Is she soldier/sci or soldier/tech? There are two "Rita" defined in the gamedata, and the UAL wiki says she's either or. Is her class variable? And what is it determined by? Thanks!

Happy New Years people. That, and, um, when I try to run S2Editor, I get this following message: [OLE DB Error Message] Source:"(null)" Description:"(null)" Help File:"(null)" Help Context: 0 GUID:{0C733A8B-2A1C-11CE-ADE5-00AA0044773D} I'm sorry if this question has been asked before, but I've looked and looked and still couldn't find a solution. Do I have to set up something in the ODBC Data Source in the control panel? I've played around with the options there but no luck so far (and I've restored everything to the beginning after that.) I'm fairly clueless with the database stuff so if anyone can provide any help I would be very grateful. And is there a complete documentation for S2Editor that I can find somewhere? Oh, and yes, I did install MSSQLServer and have it running in my sys tray, and I'm using WinXP SP2.

Hello, I've been away from S2/3 for a while now, and I've forgotten most about it. I used to have this neat custom mod/cheat thing where I bind a key in the input.cfg to open the storage screen (and it works everywhere!) It made item management a whole lot easier. But I can't seem to find it now, though. Can anyone please tell me the console command or script function that opens the storage screen? (something along the line of UIStore or something vague like that.)

That, of course, is the ideal situation. But since developers in general continue to insist on stuffing us with buggy games, unbalanced gameplay, and useless and annoying intros, we'll have to get our hands dirty.

I've reached the point where I've rescued a Reticulan ship, detected the second Wargot ship (but has yet to confront it), fought a battle in my Laputa against cultist converts, and had one of my provinces yellowed by the Starghosts. And it's been months since anything happened since then. In the mean time, I've conquered nearly the entire world (only South America left), and researched all of the available technologies, but still nothing happened. One thing that might be indicative of the problem is that when I got my first province turned yellowed, I got the cutscene with the staff telling me that "the enemy has changed their tactics" or some such, but no one has yet to mention anything about Starghosts, even though I've fought a dozen defense mission with them since then. Similarly, I've been unable to research anything related to the Starghosts, such as autopsy. What am I missing?

Is anyone up to making an intro skip mod? I've had just about enough of them!

Am I the only one who's unable to research the psi equipments and cyborg implants? In my research screen I can see the psi lab being listed, but the required psi equipment item is not present, even though I had picked up numerous psi equipments/devices. I checked the game files to find that cyborg implants require that I already have a cyborg implants, but it is similarly unavailable despite the fact that I've picked up several advanced bodies already. Bug? Or am I doing something wrong? What do I need to do to open up the implant & psi research?

That's strange. My pack.txt extracted as normal ascii, I had no problem editting it. Something wrong with the extractor maybe?

See this thread. (It's the 3rd newist topic at the time of your posting. You could save yourself some time if you look a bit before you post.)

Yeah, indoor missions are about the only place I use a sort of a pincer movement, but that's more because there's not enough space to excersize my full fire power. I think making the Wargots stronger in the front could be interesting, but the problem still lies in the AI. I can already imagine how easy it would be to distract a bunch of armoured wargots with a scout while the rest of my team pick them off from the side. Well, of course that's flanking, but a single scout shouldn't be able to "pin" a squad of wargots down. Basically, the AI doesn't play defensively enough, if at all. As long as they don't learn to take cover, as long as they don't try not to get shot at, sophisticated tactics will never be necessary, if even benefitial. It is very satisfying to set up a good tactic and decimate your enemy with it, but it's distinctly unsatisfying to know that you could have done the same without doing all that. The game is still quite hard, but to me, the difficulty lies entirely with the strategy part of the game; with the always tight resources and base space. The tactical part is always a cakewalk with some simple planning, even when the number is stacked against you.

I agree that enemy detection is probably the most important part of any tactic in AS, which makes it worthwhile to have an almost dedicated scout early on. Later, you can detect enemies across the map with infra-red vision easily and pick them off with your snipers. I regularly have 3 snipers in my squad, so it's quite common for me to eliminate all the enemies in open field maps without ever seeing them. Infrared is almost overpowered. (Please don't nerf it though!) I disagree about flanking though. I don't see any valid point of flanking in this game. The whole idea of flanking is based on two things: 1) it is assumed that the target is weaker on the sides, and 2) that it cannot react to threats from the side quickly. Since neither of these are true in this game (even the power armors turn on a dime here), there's really not much point of flanking the enemy; running up close to it, just a bit out of the line of fire, is more effective than trying to waste the time circling to the enemy's side and back. Furthermore, since the enemies don't know how to take cover and will always run up to you until they get you in their firing range, you really can't pin them down, either. As such, there's really no difference which direction you attack them from, as long as you can get a good shot.

Squad management screen crash bug: the game may crash when you drag one soldier in the squad over another to switch them around. Do it several times in a roll and you're bound to crash the game sooner or later. Modded equipment bugs: very often, a soldier may switch his/her modded equipment to a normal one for no apparent reason. You can of course switch it back yourself but it is nevertheless very annoying. In my experience, this seems to happen especially frequently whe you fail a mission. Equipment dissappearing bug: I don't know the cause, but once I lost ALL of the equipped items; weapons, devices, armors, all. There is no root or immediate cause that I can identify. I had to hack the savegame to get the items back. Glossary bug: someone stated this before, but to clarify: every single modded equipment you've ever made is entered into the glossary, even the ones that are completely identical. Play around with the modifications enough and you're going to end up with a 100+ items long weapons section in the glossary. Cultist invasion bug: I'm not sure if this is a bug or a feature, but sometimes when one of my undefended (without defense buildings) bases, the invasion will simply dissappear with no effect a while later and leaving the tracks and everything else intact.

Other than some stuff about Starforce, almost everything here in this forum are either exclusively AS or AM. So why have these two games share one support forum? It only adds unecessary confusion.

The more I dig into it, the more I realize how much AS and AM differ in terms of modding. I'd say this is a very good case for having separate AM and AS modding forums; having them in a shared space only adds confusion and very little benefit.

Nobody has a real number on the rampancy of software (especially game) piracy, and every estimates I've seen so far all have very suspect methodologies. It seems common sense to assume that a significnt number, if not the great majority, of pirated game users won't be playing said game if he/she was not able to obtain the pirated copy in the first place. The disproportionately high amount of downloads of obscure games on big torrent sites seem to substantiate this. But however effective or ineffective copy protections are at stopping piracy and increase sales, one thing is indisputable: they ALWAYS hurt the legitimate buyers. It hurts EVERY legitimate buyer by robbing them of the right to make backups, which is fair use, and it hurts a minority even more by causing the game not to work, or worse causing problem on their systems. That still won't be as bad if it wasn't for the fact that the developers almost universally refused to provide support for these innocent buyers. To them, and to their publisher, they've already got these victim's money in their pocket, so there's little cause to fuss about. They're only a minority, and no matter how vocal these minorty may get, they know that the other players who could play the games without problem will happily ignore the cries of the victim. As such they are always more than willing to forsake the victims. Having been both a minority and a majority gamer in the past, I know how frustrating it can get. Well, I personally can't stand MMO games, and I'm not a business analyst to come up with a model that could stop piracy. But then I am absolutely sure that piracy cannot be stopped anyway. Most, if not all of the cracking groups don't make a dime from the pirated warez and crackz they release. They, like most of the hacker communities, do it for the challenge, the pride and the love of the "scene". They also have nothing better to do, but then people wouldn't be sitting in front of their computers for hours on end making computer character shoot other mutant computer characters if they had something better to do. To these cracking groups, a more difficult copy protection simply means a more interesting challenge; it feeds their drive by challenging them to be the first to crack it. So I believe it's safe to say that piracy will aways be around. Then what's the point of copy protections anyway? Surely anyone net savvy enough wouldn't have problem finding the cracks (and porn for that matter) they needed in a matter of minutes. I think the people who pay for their games come in three kinds: the ones who are simply ignorant of the world of piracy, the ones bound by obedience to the law to commit such crimes, and the ones who would pay and support certain games despite the fact that they could get it for free. Copy protections are mainly targetted, and effective, against the first group. Starforce is a good example, they not only make the nastiest copy protection around, they also actively maintain a reputation of being "uncrackable" despite the reality. The hope is that many would-be pirates will simply give up thinking that the only way to get the game is to buy it. But really, that's more of a strategy based on an education/ignorance campaign than anything else. Since anyone determined to find out how to play pirated games will be able to eventually, copy protection will only stop the people who won't make the effort at all. As such, any other token copy protection would do, ones that don't also hurt the legitimate buyers. Personally I don't mind a bit of copy protection here and there, even though I invariably resort to the nocd cracks for games I bought and own. (Let's face it, CDs are just too damn cumbersome, and why should the pirates have all the convenience?) I draw the line at the copy protection that hurt legit buyers, though. Their effectiveness is debatable, but the harm they cause is very, very real.

Yeah, your tactics is sound, and it looks nice. But I'd say you're giving the game AI way too much credit. With few exceptions, the enemies only come from one direction; you just have to find out which. That's not hard to accomplish with a halfway decent scout. While you are frequently outnumbered and outgunned in this game, you always have the advantage that the enemy won't coordinate and will rush at you whenever they see you. My tactic is thus very simple: one scout (and later katana-wielding commando), three rifles (and later snipers) and three machineguns (later gunner). I have the scout's speed pumped as high as I can, and he simply runs around full speed without stopping. Forget perception and all that, anything becoms visible when you're 5 ft away from it. The enemies are very rarely quick enough to react to a rampaging scout, and even if they do you can usually dodge their bullets (without needing the Dodge ability) by running away from their line of fire when they take aim. This, of course, has the added bonus that once you have his speed maxed out, you can even run circles around most enemies to draw their fires in random direction. As for the three snipers and three machinegunmen... well, I really don't think much explanation is necessary. With the scout causing general confusion in the enemy line, my snipers always have plenty of time to get into good firing position. They are usually enough to keep the enemies away that the machineguns never fire a shot in outdoor maps. But when they do get close, the three machine guns will of course be there waiting. Indoor missions call for a different tactics -- an even simpler one. Instead of using the scout, I simply do recon en force with the three gunners, three very trigger-happy gunners. There. Later in the game (where I am now), the enemies become very generous with explosives, so a close formation will just be invitation for rockets. Keep the squad spread out. I'd tried to have a designated medic, but I realized that it would never work. The medic will more than likely be out of reach or be the one knocked out. Basic med kit on everyone is the way to go. I don't use explosives much myself, since they are overkill on weak mutants but don't cause enough damage on Wargots and up. The only use they have is to knock the enemies down and/or burn them to death, but they're usually not packed close enough to justify the effort. Crazy streaking scout is infinitely better.

I got a mission to defend one of my provinces from Wargot invasion. Once the map load, it's one of those two-area maps. I generally start near the exit point that I have to get to, and sometimes right on top of it. Anyway, if I ignore the enemy coming from outside and go straight for the exit point, the next map will load. Since there is no enemy in the other map, I immediately get the victory screen and everything's nice and happy. (Which is very stupid considering that the only thing I did to "defend" the province is to run away and hide in the base.) BUT, if I killed/incapacitated the enemies in the first area before I go to the second area and finish the mission, the game will crash to desktop when I click on "No" in the victory screen or when I click "Finish Mission" manually. It's not a show-stopping bug, since there's a workaround. But I hope someone might spend the time to fix it. I doubt it.

Yeah, that would be the case idealy. Except what happens to me most of the time is my superheroic speed level 3 stalker/commando runs up to a Wargot and then just stands there doing nothing. Either that or, when the enemy is moving, he runs up to the enemy and tells me that the target is out of range because it has moved two inchs away. Infuriating.

As of now, the melee weapons are quite useless most of the time. But not because they're weak or it's hard to sneak up on enemies, but because the game AI is completely retarded at targetting and attacking things at melee range. I've seen too many times my katana-wielding commando fumbles about in front of an enemy because he can't decide how to attack the bastard. Enemies on the move are even worse, no matter how slow they move. Try meleeing a lumbering Wargot. My commando can run circles around them but can never catch up enough to stab them. Anyway, I think one possible solution is to increase the melee weapon range slightly; up to 3-4 ft would still be realistic. I looked into the equipment.txt but found that melee weapons don't have a range at all... Any idea how that may be done?

Yep, I got the idea from that mod in the first place. Unfortunately he hasn't touched about the color-coding yet...

I really don't like the red-orange-yellow... color-coding for the squad interface. Is there a way to change it? Or, at least, I'd like to reverse it so it starts with purple-blue-cyan... Help?

Um, you're not making too much sense. What exactly have you modded and what exactly is the problem? In any case, you need to mod the localization file as well, check localizationpack.vfs.

You need to convert them to dds files. .dds files are DX9 texture files. Do a search on google, there are several standalone tga/dds converters as well as Photoshop plugins. I think you can get one from nVidia's site as well.