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

Ok, thanks anyway J'ordos. Apoc'd has allowed us to change some really important stuff and make the game much harder (which was always my no.1 wish) There is hope BTW for the future of Apocalypse modding: http://openxcom.org/forum/index.php?topic=287.0 Maybe you could contact these guys and offer your extensive knowledge of the .exe, J'ordos? I've already offered my help and am really hoping this project comes to something!

I'm keen to tinker with the Apocalypse agent animations. Does anyone know how i can extract, edit and recompile them? I've looked through XED's functions and can't find a way to do it. I've found what I suspect are the agent animations but XED says it can't extract the images. Also - does Apoc use layered sprites?

Hey J'ordos. Would it be at all possible to change the characteristics of fire using Apoc'd? I would love to be able to mod either of the following: a) make fire do more damage to creatures that are set on fire. As it is, soldiers on fire take almost no damage due to their armour. Possibly there's a way to make the armour less resistant to fire? b) I experimented using Apoc'd to try to give the incediary grenade the 'damage type' of the entropy ammo. So the effect would be that creatures in the blast radius would have armour burned off by the fire. But no joy. It seems to mess up the explosion graphic and the game effect. Do you think it's possible? c) make fire spread faster. Could this be done by tweaking the terrain's vulnerbility to fire? Thanks for APoc'd! It's awesome.

Yes, NKF seems to have a pretty convincing summary here. For so long myself and my fellow apoc'ers were convinced, for example, that good relations with sanctuary clinic would make your soldiers heal faster, that lifetree would provide faster training, and so on. This is dissapointing news indeed. But after a few tests i believe NKF and silencer are correct. most organisations do nothing at all. And more than anything I also wish we had just one assembler guru interested in deciphering apocalypse. It's easily the best squad-level strategy game i've ever played, and is so much in need of some tweaks, such as making all the organisations provide important functions to xcom ..... *dreams* Oh well .....

Quite simple: does anyone know from experience (testing) or investigating the code what each organisations do? I've read alot of guides that seem to guess ... but i'm wondering if anyone has some conclusive knowledge. I seems certain Mutant alliance and SELF don't supply mutants/androids when hostile to XCOM, for example. But what about sanctuary clinic, gravball league, lifetree etc?

Hey J'ordos: I recently saw you've expanded apoc'd and it's great! Every time you make more things tweakable it gets me and my freinds back into the best squad-level strat game ever! So, @ j'ordos, bomb bloke or NFK: In your hex-explorations have you any insight into what controls the rate of morale recovery, and morale loss? (i.e injuries to self, loss of comrades etc) I'm still hoping!

Good tips - thanks guys. But even when hostile, corporations just don't attack enough, dammit! Maybe they're restricted by cashflow problems? And the aliens very rarely drop on an xcom base - i'm not sure if it's becuase they can't locate it or the AI just doesn't often run 'infiltration' missions....

I'd like to second this question. I too would like to be able to modify the morale values in Apocalypse. Could this be hex-edited? If so, does anyone know where the values are? If not, how would i go about finding them? Jos

What i would like to know is: does anyone (j'ordos, maybe?) know how to increase the frequency of attacks on x-com bases by hostile corporations and the aliens themselves? I really enjoy defending against base attacks, but they are an extremely rare event and happen, maybe once or twice in the whole game on superhuman, even if the aliens control 4 or 5 organisations. Is there a simple offset hack we could do to increase the rate?

Hey, J'ordos!! Great to see you here again. With your technical skills anything's possible! I've dreamed of making an apocalypse remake for years now. My ideal XCOM game would be a hybrid of the original game and Apocalypse. Essentially, i would like to use the framework and game structure of Apocalypse and the 'cartoony', comic-book style visuals from the original game. I love Apocalypse as a game. For me it has: a) Depth of game mechanics - the way the gunfire, smoke and explosions work IMO are intricate and very realistic. b) Detail - down to the individual peices of a soldiers armor being worn down by absorbing continual punishment - now THAT's cool. c) Desctructible, gravity re-acting terrian. I haven't seen this in any modern decent strategy game - and we are talking about a game that was made for Windows 95!! d) A game system that makes the player pay for collateral damage caused. THAT is awesome. I love the dynamic of needing increasingly heavy weaponry but having to pay for damage caused! I love Enemy Unknown (UFO Defense) because: a) The visuals. The comic book style animation and characters just brings the game to life! In contrast to Apocalypse's clunky characters i adore the dynamic, hand-drawn characters. b) The atmosphere. The darkness - everyone who's played this game knows about the darkness! creepy, scary, chrysalids coming at you out of the dark ... excellent!! Things i'd like to see improved: a) The morale system. I love the morale system in both games, but IMO in both games it was weak and could've been MUCH better. I would like to see it be more dynamic: with the morale of individual soldiers fluctuating continuously during a mission - not just at the end when you've already lost 75% of your soldiers. b) Soldiers tougness. In the original game, soldiers died all over the place. In apocalypse, they were maybe too tough. IMO a balance between the two would be ideal. c) Story. I think both games plot's could've used tightnening up. But i really liked Apocalypse's micronoid story. The idea of aliens within aliens is a great concept - and could be developed further .... Does anyone have any ideas to add??