illegal youth

ah sorry, heh. i was getting an outer shell crash before the game loaded. i don't recall exactly what it said, which isn't much help... it was something to the effect of direct draw not working properly. i had deleted ufo defense through steam yesterday, thinking that i could remove the xcomutil files and try again with a fresh install; however, when i reinstalled ufo defense through steam, all of the xcomutil files were still there. i loaded up the game and it worked this time, xcomutil running. so it's fixed; i don't know how, and i can't recreate the error from yesterday.

right.... but i assumed that if xcomutil could fix the difficulty bug, then steam could've just applied the xcomutil patch to the game beforehand. speaking of which, i can't seem to get xcomutil to run with the steam version. i've done what i usually do -- copy the files into the directory, run the xcusetup.bat file, and then edited the dosbox.conf file to call runxcom.bat instead of ufocd.bat. am i missing something? (maybe it's because steam uses ufocd.bat instead of ufo.exe/geoscape.exe/tactical.exe?)

i just thought of something... any word if the steam x-com games fixed the difficulty bug in UFO and TFTD? i searched the steam forums and came up empty. its not too big a deal, since we can always just use xcomutil... EDIT: oh, and the research tree bugs in TFTD?

hmmm. i wonder why?

no prob!

strange. well, we know it's a top seller in at least the US and norway, but not croatia, heh.

gimli, i can see it just fine. the regional codes only appear when you click the link for the complete pack. if you just go to the main page: http://www.steampowered.com/v/index.php scroll down and click the "top sellers" tab. i see the x-com complete pack at the top.

i'm not sure a new voice patch is necessary... i have the dos version of ufo defense, and i was able to successfully apply this voice patch without any problems. my game still runs in dosbox. i'm also using xcomutil with that version... does that make any difference? if a new voice patch is really necessary, i'm pretty sure that i have a clean dos version of ufo defense at home, but i'll have to check. i'm at work now, so i won't be able to access it until later tonight.

after reading this post and all the links included, i've been inspired to write a little something about what i think makes x-com the game it is (and hoping that these game mechanics make it into any new x-com that may or may not be being developed): http://illegalyouth.blogspot.com/2008/05/x...buzz-again.html feel free to comment on my thoughts.

just thought that i'd point out that XCOM's visibility system was not random -- it was based on a fixed number. during the day, sight was even between XCOM and the aliens -- 20/20 squares respectively. at night, it was 9/20 squares respectively.

regarding squad command, if you click the link i provided above, there are DS screen shots available.

since we're still on a front mission kick, i thought i'd mention that another front mission has been annouced for the DS -- front mission 2089: border of madness. no one knows anything about the game except that it shares the name of mobile front mission games for cell phones (front mission 2089 and front mission 2089-II). it could be something new or a port of the mobile games to the DS. as far as i know, only front mission 3 has been released in europe, which is arguably the best in the series. in the states, we'd only had front mission 3 and 4 until recently, when front mission DS was released back on october. ok, i'll end my thread hijack here, heh. to get this back to the gollops, i was looking through the rock, paper, shotgun website and came across this link in another post on UFO: ET. a very interesting discussion about whether or not another XCOM is even possible, given today's gaming industry.

an XCOM DS homebrew project was in the works, but it's been inactive for nearly 3 months now.... THQ has squad command coming out in about a month or so. i'm not sure that they'd have the rights to do an XCOM DS port. oh, if you're looking for a game of a similar genre for the DS, front mission was finally released in the US. if you're unfamiliar with front mission, it's bascially a squad-level, turned-based game that uses "wanzers" (i.e. mechs) instead of foot soldiers.

chaos gate is pretty good, but there are a couple of game-crashing bugs that you cannot get around. i was able to install the game only through virtual PC, using my old windows 98 SE as the OS. its fun, but the game crashes make it difficult to sustain longer gameplay. i think there are some websites that still host the patches too, and you'll need them if you want to avoid the bugs that can be fixed. you're thinking of the second version of space hulk, the one that had better graphics and free-movement instead of square-based movement. it's called space hulk: vengeance of the blood angels. it's another title that i could only get running with virtual PC. it also has a few game-crashing bugs that have no way to work around, but the crashes are not as frequent as with chaos gate. i'm definitely looking forward to squad command. i bought a DS specifically for it! (it's just much better suited for the genre than the PSP)

thanks!

i haven't had a chance to test it out yet... but i thought i'd mention that the link you provided in your last post is broken.

making money is pretty difficult in UFO: ET. no produced item can be sold for a profit (after factoring in engineer salaries). the only other ways to make money are to sell researched alien artifacts (if you sell them before you research them you won't get as much money) and the money provided by the different territories. if you put a base in each territory, you can make a maximum of something close to $600k or $700k from each territory. your best bet to compensate is to install bman's mod and give yourself an alien bounty (i put the bounty at $20,00 -- the same price you'd get for selling an alien corpse in XCOM). with the bounty, just going on missions should be enough to make a decent amount of money.

only vipons ("snake guys") will have green commanders. the other races who have commanders (preachers, phantoms, maybe one other... i can't recall) have a different indicator -- usually the commander is a slightly different color than the soldier of that race. still, it's difficult to tell with preachers and phantoms. bman's mod has a feature that puts a gold box around the alien sighted graphic that appears in the bottom right corner of the tactical screen for commanders. that'd be the easiest way to know if the alien you see is a commander.

thanks again! i'll give that a try next chance i get and report back the results.

it's at 3.14 now good thing you held out for awhile, heh

no i didn't, but the dos32a extender says that if you can't find the dos/4gw file that it's probably in the executable, so there's a bind function that puts the dos32a extender in your xcomapoc executable by creating a .bat file. that's what i tried, but it didn't work either. look here: http://dos32a.narechk.net/manual/index.html

thanks bomb bloke. i tried the above method and i still got the same error message. i even tried installing the DOS32a extender to replace DOS/4GW, but still no luck. maybe i'll try the DOSbox method and see if i can get it working that way. i'm not sure what else to try for the VM method at this point.

its not buried deep at all. the path is C:\XCOMA. and the xcom3.cfg file just has this line " C:\XCOMA" exactly (with the space). it was " D:\" but since i installed the crack to bypass the CD check, i changed it to my game directory. i found this support page at atari.com: http://www.atari.com/us/support/faq/xcomapocalypse_pc.asp how do i create a minimum configuration bootdisk? what's a TSR? and there's no link i can find for their "bOOTALL" disk... not that i expected there to be one, heh.

i've tried this several times and i keep getting this error: http://i153.photobucket.com/albums/s219/illegalyouth/xcomapocerror.jpg i've installed windows 98 se on my virtual computer. i've installed dos mouse drivers. i used the xcomcrk to bypass the cd copyright check. i've copied the missing maps, the music file, and the smk folder from the cd over to the game directory. then i shutdown to ms-dos mode to run the game, and every time i get that error message directly after the game intro finishes playing (or if i click through the game intro). i do not have the vmadditions stuff installed either. any idea what i can do? did i miss a step somewhere?

well, to be fair, space voyager says he wants a "new XCOM." so for that, i'd suggest your mod, bman.