GazChap

Just received mine this morning, and rather surprisingly it's the Collector's Edition A DVD-ROM in a big box with a poster, comics, playing cards and some fan fiction for £17.99? Can't be bad!

Well I've just been notified by Play.com that they've shipped out my order, so it should arrive by Friday with a bit of luck.

I always thought of the Harvester room as either being an observation room, or just a required "hole" in the hull so that the examination room equipment could be installed - perhaps it's supposed to be taller than one map level in the game.

I've just ordered Aftershock from play.com - I was expecting it to say "Due for release on 21/10/2005, pre-order now" but it actually says "In stock, usually dispatched within 24 hours." Anyone else seen this and ordered?

Sorry I've not been around much! I've been a bit ill over the past few weeks so haven't had much computer time at all You are all free to change the pages around however you want. Removing the "(UFO Defense)" part is probably a good idea. I'd forgotten that there are no "Heavy Weapons Platforms" in TFTD, they are called SWSs aren't they? So yes, it's a unique name. I'll hopefully be able to contribute some stuff now that I'm feeling a bit better, although I've now got a metric ton of work to catch up on too!

Yes, unfortunately it doesn't seem to be incredibly easy to use! There is a Wiki on the MediaWiki website which gives some useful information on organising and creating articles. Thats what I used to learn more about how to do stuff.

Don't think you can do that unfortunately. I'll have a detailed look in the configuration files and see if there is anything like that.

I can certainly change the Wiki so that you need to create an account to create new pages, but I think that is pretty much the only security system it offers, unfortunately. Thats the problem with Wiki's in general - the idea of them is that everyone can contribute.

In that case I would suggest the pages to just be named as "Mathematics" or whatever without any suffix. Most definitely. I will add as much information as I can but unfortunately I am incredibly busy with work at the moment. Of course, one of the bonuses of using a Wiki is that everyone can contribute so people can pick up where I (and others) leave off.

I can see where you're coming from. However, obviously there are going to be Heavy Weapons Platforms for different games - UFO Defense and Terror from the Deep I know have them, not sure about Apocalypse. The idea was to have game-specific pages and general pages that encompassed all games - so "Heavy Weapons Platforms (UFO Defense)" would just be HWPs from UFO, and "Heavy Weapons Platforms (TFTD)" would be from Terror. And then "Heavy Weapons Platforms" would just be all HWPs from all games. Category:Heavy_Weapons_Platforms should not be used, I don't like the way MediaWiki sets out category listings.

What is the URL for the UFO2K boards? I've not heard of those ones. Just noticing your sig there BB, it would be good to have a sort of download area on the wiki too, including such stuff as your map viewer and the various editors scooting about.

Good point. I did originally intend to split it up into each game, but the way I've done it at the moment might make that a little difficult. Still, the beauty of a Wiki is that it can be organised however you like without too much hassle. The other stumbling block of course is that I am only familiar with Enemy Unknown. I've played a little bit of TFTD and can't say I liked it. Nor Apocalypse for that matter

Haha, I didn't realise ufopaedia.com was another X-COM site until I saw Danial mention it in the "Nice site" thread I figured it would be a "proper" UFO site like ufopedia.com Wish I'd got something more unique now, heheh.

The domain name appears to have sorted itself out now so I have updated the original post with the correct URLs.

As informative as possible Your modifications to the Lightning entry are good, well written too I'm hoping that any and all information pertinent to the games will end up on there eventually, whether its tactics, information on editing game files etc. and the calculations that I know you like working out

I put the idea forward in the thread about Earliest Base Attacks, and today I've taken a small amount of time to set up an X-COM based Wiki. It is now available at http://www.ufopaedia.org I'm quite new to this Wiki lark so I'm still learning about how to use it (the software used is MediaWiki, the same as the excellent Wikipedia). Over the next few days I'll be adding as many articles as possible relating to items in the UFOpaedia itself. I've already put some general info. on some of the crafts in it. If anyone would like to add a page to the Wiki about a topic of their choice, please do so. To do this, go to http://www.ufopaedia.org/index.php/Topic_Title, where Topic_Title is the name of your topic. It must start with a capital letter and spaces must be changed to underscores(e.g. Heavy_Plasma) You don't need to create an account to add pages, but if you do create one it will be much easier for both myself and you to manage your contributions. I'll shortly be posting this over at the XCOMUFO forum, and then I'm out on the beer with my brothers whilst they are all in town //EDIT: Fixed URLs now that the domain name has sorted itself out.

I'll need something to do this weekend so I'll probably have a crack at something. Anyone else got any interest in it? Obviously everyone will be able to update articles and suchlike but if no-one is interested then there is no point

What is the earliest time that you have had one of your bases attacked? I started a new game last night (on Experienced level) and played as usual. Took down a couple of small UFOs and recovered the artifacts. Then, out of the blue - on January 11th, the "Your base is under attack" screen pops up. WTF, I think? I've just sacked four soldiers for low stats and am awaiting their replacements, so I've only got four soldiers to defend the base. Because its so early I don't even have laser weapons. Two soldiers got killed early on, after taking down 2 sectoids a piece. A third soldier was rendered useless because of repeated psi-attacks. I disarmed him first opportunity I got and just let the aliens use him as a play-thing. Which left this one heroic soldier with only one and a half rifle clips left. Don't ask me how, but she managed to clear out the rest of the aliens. The last alien was seemingly just loitering in the access lift psi-ing my other soldier (how do they do that if they can't see them?!) and had his back to her. I just couldn't believe how quickly they found my base and attacked! -- Oh, and has anyone ever thought about setting up an X-COM wiki? I've been toying with the idea for a while. Creating an online UFOpaedia has been done, but you could put the UFOpaedia into a wiki and then have other topics for hints and tips. I see NKF talking about the Base Commander Handbook in a recent thread - that could fit in well with a wiki? Would anyone be interested if I set one up?

On terror missions, if I take down a Cyberdisc and a couple of civilians get killed in the resulting explosion, who gets the blame? Is it classed as an alien kill or an X-COM kill?

This never used to happen on this computer, but after re-installing Enemy Unknown (Collector's Edition) I've found that it runs far too quickly. Even setting the scroll speed down to 1 doesn't help in the Battlescape, and the Geoscape runs too quickly too. I'm using f0dder's loaders, but I've also tried running X-COMUtil and that doesn't help either. My system is an Athlon 2200+ with XP, but the strange thing is that my laptop which is actually faster (2600+) runs the game excellently! Can anyone suggest any options for getting it running at the right speed?

A few things would be ideal: A map editor that allows us to not only create "static" missions (like the Area 51 mission and other story elements) but also create "random" missions. This would work by allowing you to set up various variables (similar to Sim City 2000's terrain generator) such as how many trees, how many objects, etc. etc. and then it will randomly create missions for you. The ability to change all elements of the game. Attributes of weapons, attributes of aircraft on the geosphere, attributes of aliens, attributes of transgenants, attributes of everything The ability to add new elements in to the game, especially map objects (a Skyranger that appears at landing zones, anyone? ) The ability to create missions of as many stages as you need. I've only seen missions of up to two stages in the main game. It would be good to have a three stage mission to capture an alien base - secure the perimeter in Stage 1, secure the base in Stage 2, and then escape to the LZ in stage 3 (where perhaps, the alien commanders have called for reinforcements) There are many things that would be good to have, but its debatable as to how easy some of this stuff would be to do. The engine they've used looks to be quite flexible, with the VFS templates and all.

Has anybody had any luck extracting the contents of the VFS files? I've had a brief look at them with a hexeditor and I can definitely see where some of the files start (WAVE files, mainly) I'm presuming that somewhere in the file (most likely the start) is a "table-of-contents" area, giving the offsets for each file. I'm ultimately looking just to extract the great music from the VFS file, but it'd be great if you could inject files into it as well. I'm going to keep investigating to see whether I can write an extractor/injector, but if anyone has any information I might find useful, please reply

I classify my guys into various groups: Sc - Scout. As - Assault Sn - Sniper Md - Medical Gr - Grenadier Then I just add the name of that soldiers primary weapon on to it. This allows me to quickly find my guys in the heat of combat, without having to try and remember whether its Steve whos the sniper, or Raveena So, a sniper with a Remington 870 would have Sn-870 as his callsign. If he has an Excellent or Heroic rating for marksmanship, I'd put an S on the end (for Superman )

I can't access the official UFO:AM forums for some reason. I think DNS is down somewhere at my end, so if someone can forward this on to them, that'd be great I was outfitting my soldiers, shortly after discovering a weapons cache and getting some shiny new combat armour and I had 1 combat helmet left, and 2 combat armour. I put the combat helmet onto a new recruit, who had no equipment or armour. Then (as I'm still getting used to the interface!) I accidentally dragged some clothing on to him instead of the regular armour. The clothing got put on the dude, and the combat helmet disappeared off his head. I went to try and put it back on, and it wasn't in my stocks either. It was like it had just disappeared into thin air. Reproduceable every time, even with regular helmets, but obviously with those its not so bad because you don't run out of those Game version: UK 1.0.

Its a DirectDraw issue. Go to f0dder's site at http://f0dder.cjb.net/ where you can download patches from the Misc section. Or, you could go to Scott Jones' site (http://members.aol.com/stjones/xcomutil/) and download XCOMUtil, which I believe has f0dder's patches integrated, and offers a whole lot more stuff too. There is a way of manually fixing it, but you have to do it every time you play the game, and I can't remember how to do it anyway