armorfiend

aw! Well, I thought it may have been; as I posted it I thought, gosh, I'm really necroing this one. I'll have to go check the wiki again myself

Looking at this, unitref 055 seems to be the damage mod for the aliens/vehicles. Ethereals have a damage mod of 6, tanks are 4, and sectoids, civilians, floaters, and celatids are all 1.

Yeah... I'm trying to find the place in the exe file where a the 'has a turret' versus 'has an inventory screen' is decided. I know it's in there somewhere. My tentative plan at the moment is to eventually give the flying tanks one of the two tank inventory screens, and the crawlers the other (if I can). Not a perfect solution, but I think it'd be a nice touch for them to have the different screens. I'm not really concerned about losing the turret swivel. While it's nice, graphically, it always winds up leaving the tank oriented the wrong way, with its strongest armor facing somewhere other than where the alien's return fire will come from. Also, thanks for the info on LOFTemps. I'm thinking I shall not need to do anything to it, at the moment. huh! A thought... where, in the executable, are the XCOM troopers generated? Maybe if I could compare them to the aliens... Edit: Zombie and Seb75 come through for me again! The soldier modding thread just below this one has the info... You guys rock.

Setting the inventory layout to 1 or 2 has no effect that I can see. I'm guessing that I'll need to convince the game that they *have* an inventory, before that can come into play. Also, what is Loftemps?

Saaawheeeet.... Thanks! I knew someone had pulled these up before

I've come back to this mod. I was unhappy with the way the tanks changed the feel of the game, so now I'm trying to change the toggle that gives them their turret. I'll make them into large infantry and see what I can do from there... ...testing so far: the battlescape values for near some of the tanks ammo amounts are: 117 [6 198 69 118 30 235][10 198 69 118 8 235][4 198 69 118 255 51] 255 199 I put those in brackets because only the 30/8/255 are values where I know what they do. Those are the ammo values for the cannon, rocket, and laser tanks, respectively. Setting the 6 to 1, breaks the infantry, kills the laser and plasma tanks, and breaks the rocket tank. The rocket tank again winds up with 1 ammo. The infantry, however, now get a tank layout inventory screen, with an infantry graphic in it. They no longer appear in the battle map itself, and- for their weapon- wind up with a cannon turret, plasma turret, or laser turret graphic. They wind up with a pistol clip in their off hand, but the pistol clip is actually a weapon of some sort. All in all, thoroughly broken. if I swap the 10 and the 6, which you'd think would just give the cannon tank 8 rounds and the rocket tank 30, instead the cannon tank winds up with 255 rounds and the rocket tank winds up with 1 round. Two thoughts: This number is a pointer, that is also relative to its own position in the file. Also, screwing up the rocket tank always leaves it with 1 round when it enters the battlescape. I don't know why. [scratched a bunch of testing that basically showed it's just a two-byte pointer that I was screwing with] Maybe I should be grouping it like so: 117 6 [198 69 118 30 235 10] [198 69 118 8 235 4] [198 69 118 255 51 255] 199 ...testing saaaaays... no. Swapping the 10 and the 4 crashes when I enter the battlescape. This must be the ammunition that is loaded into a magazine. [198 69 118] must simply be the opcode for 'put the next byte into an address for its ammunition amount' And really, whether the address precedes the opcode or follows the ammo amount, it doesn't matter to what I'm currently trying to do, which is to tell the tank it's not a tank any more. Update: I'm an idjit. BladeFireLight mapped out a lot of the values for the aliens. Which is where the tanks live. His(her?) mapping, and some of my own numbers: 481080 - standard tank : Race : Rank : ?? (0) : Can fly? (0 or 1) : TUs : Health : Energy : Reactions : Strength : Firing Accuracy : Throwing Accuracy : ?? (70) : Armor- Front : Armor - Left : Armor - Right : Armor - Rear : Armor - Under : ?? (0) : ?? (50) : ?? 0 : ?? 1 - setting to 0 does nothing. Some sort of toggle? : ?? (0) : ?? 4 : ?? 4 : ?? 16 : ?? 16 : ?? 0 : ?? 4 : Psi Skill : Psi Strength : [ = 11 - (bravery/10) ] : ?? (30) : ?? 0 : ?? 0 : Tank type - what to die as [74, tank. 70, hovertank] : Big Unit? (0 or 1) : Victory points : Aggression : Intelligence (scratch that last, the 15 starts the male civilian.) I'm betting that some of these ??s here are things like the inventory screen used, the size when crouched or standing, and the like. Also the size for the motion scanner, I would think, would be here. I would expect to find the things that go into the data file.

An update, since it's been a week: Still haven't found any new useful values. The more I tinker with the values I do have, the less certain I am that this is the right concept, that I'm moving towards. The greatly increased mobility of the tanks, while it does seem appropriate, means that they leave the infantry behind and take over. It also means that fights are over much faster, and I just don't get the same feeling of 'oh god no, where is the last alien?' any more. I may have to re-scale this somehow.

Well, the curious thing was that setting the cannon tank's - or what I think is the cannon tank's- 6 to a 10, to match the rocket tank, left the cannon tank's ammo count still functional, while it screwed with the rocket tank. I even set the ammo amount differently- I set it to 50, and that was reflected by the cannon tank, even while the rocket tank was still screwed up. edit: Okay, I'm looking at the values needed to load the craft. I *think* I may have found the rocket tank at 241, 530. I'm trying it now. nope. edit again: '198 69' shows up 153 times in the combined executable. I'm pretty sure it's an operation code of some sort, and not a code for 'load this on the dropship' - mostly because I don't think there are 153 different things to put ON a dropship, but even if there was one for each, I'm not even sure there are 51 things you can put on a dropship. That said, the idea that we're looking at two-byte words seems reasonable. If we look at this as a two-byte address, an operation, and two bytes of information, then we'd want to know what that second to last byte is. The three ground-crawlers all have the same code- 118. But, 118 is also really common. I think... I think that 118 is actually some modifier to the 198 69 operation. If we cruise through 198 69 entries, we see that it has these values immediately following: 6, 10, 12, 14, 15, 24, 41-43, 51, 53-64, 66, 70, 80-85, 111-118. 111-118 are by far the most common, with the rest usually only being used twice- references to each other, perhaps? bah. I feel like this information should tell me everything I need to know to find the next series, but I'm missing it. Interestingly, 198 69 seems to show up mostly in 4-byte patterns, with its suffix run in sequence. (198 69 111, 198 69 112, etc).

very cool. Looking at this, after setting my columns at 6 bytes, I'm pretty sure that their pattern goes like this: [6 198 69 118 30 235] rather than startig at 198, but I'll test it to make sure. edit: holy weird crap, batman. Setting the 6 to a 10 in that group, glitched my rocket tanks. Each time I took them to a new mission, they had the wrong number of rockets. The first mission, they had 1. The second mission, they had 14. Third, 230(!!!) Fourth, 220. ...so I have no idea what was going on, there. At a guess, the first digit there is saying 'give to tank X...' or something. No idea, really. Except it buggered the tanks. And they actually did have that many rockets; in the one, firing the single rocket reduced the tank to 0, and in the others, I was able to fire dozens of rockets.

Ahhh, I knew that 144 meant something nothing...

Man, you rock! If you like, I found some other offsets to check. my B-list offsets - these were the ones that didn't quite make it to the list I showed you earlier 29,392 40,474 49,142 49,850 61,773 301,345 470,570 my C-list offsets - pretty much anything that looked like I should check it for a pattern. There's really no rush to look at these. 7,303 10,506 11,568 17,273 20,185 22,489 27,774 29,683 36,322 50,647 51,708 52,363 52,860 59,246 61,871 62,788 70,506 79,878 84,966 86,482 89,450 97,920 108,968 115,672 129,765 132,217 133,752 141,443 154,999 211,407 264,795 430,424 *'s I no longer think likely, as I've seen them as part of other functions.

I haven't found anything yet either, but crawling through the entire executable this morning gave me ten possible spots (out of 502 total) to try that I'll see about checking soon. I'm still working on a project for work, but if you want to try them... 53,218 73,920 100,597 111,697 137,284 241,450 270,331 * 304,021 322,858 353,524 * this one has a mark next to indicating that I felt it was less likely than the others. I don't know why. Those are offsets inside the gold edition executable, though. They'd be different in the split executables.

sure, let me dig up the start location of one of those patterns. It wasn't what I was looking for, so I didn't write it down, but it's fairly distinctive... At 239,768 you'll see a bunch of 133 192 117 30 104 XXX 0 0 0 items. it isn't *as* common as it feels like, though. A global find/replace of 117 30 with itself only yields 35 matches. So I'm full of it, apparently I dunno, I mean, if you're already decompiling this, is posting these up just silliness? There are several pretty common patterns that are probably compiled instructions of some sort, but I don't want to just repeat effort or clog the forum with a bunch of useless junk.

ooh! I had forgotten about the free ammo bug. And your incoming-outgoing seems right, so... That means that the gentleman (or lady) who did the conversion found the values we seek. Or at least one of them, anyway. Is that person on the forum? Bomb Bloke- does your editor only edit things during a mission? I will go look at it. -fun! the free version of the Neo hex-editor, despite being nag-ware-ish (many features, seemingly at random, will tell you that you can't use them until you buy the full version) has two nice things going for it: 1) find and replace 2) ability to change the colors. I set the colors of the edited cells to background yellow, font red, and replaced all 30s with 30, and all 8s with 8. Now I'm going from 30 to 30, looking to see which ones have an 8 nearby, and of those, which have two 8s that seem to fit in a pattern. Useless trivia: I don't know what 0 117 30 104 XXX 0 0 is, but it shows up a *lot*. XXX is a number, like 138, 148, 157, etc. Seems to be referring to its own position in the pattern, or alternately, something outside the pattern in relation to itself. Could just be 'break, go to X' or something. another thought: their operations seem to follow the pattern of 10 bytes and a spacer byte. and am I correct in thinking that a long line of 144's was just their way of separating one section from another?

Genius, sir. Sheer genius. Guess I'll go hunt other 30s. In the morning.

Thanks for the name, and, kickass. That is fantastic. So what we have here, then, is a table of UFOPedia information. That may or may not affect other things... This will be useful for correcting it to reflect whatever I do with it though edit: okay, so we have 8 fields: 0 with 1, changes weapon name 1 with 0, changes weapon name 2 listed damage amount (not related to actual damage amount- see turret values near offset 447,867) 3 unknown - always 0. Flag? 4 listed ammunition type - does not appear to be related to actual ammunition 5 unknown - 1 (only for ammo-carrying tanks) or 0 (all others) Seems to work with 4, for human tanks. 6 listed magazine capacity (apparently not related to actual magazine capacity) 255 for energy weapon 7 unknown - 0 or 255 (laser and plasma only) for tanks, unknown items above (terror units?) are 0 or 1. When I changed 5 to 0 for the cannon tank, it's listed ammunition type changed to 'ALIENS KILLED' so at a guess, it's related to 4. But, the items above- whatever they are, terror units maybe? are all 0 even when they have a value in 4. I'm going to go off and foam at the mouth... I mean sleep... now.

What I'm wondering now, is... what do the other 7 bytes do? oh! Just realized there's an easy way to figure out how much ammo it REALLY has. edit: I started a new game, loaded a cannon tank onto a plane, and checked base stores. Only 30 rounds were transferred out of base stores. Tactical.exe doesn't come into play until the start of a battle, right? So this should still be in ... the one that isn't tactical.exe that I can't remember because my brain apparently just died.

well, huh. Suppose it's pulling the value from elsewhere for how many it puts in the tank when loaded on the transport, then? That's gotta be the right values, if it shows up there. edit: Zombie, can you take it out on a mission and see if it's got 100 rounds when it gets there? Thanks.

holy awesomeness, man. If this is right, you rock. I'll have to check it against the Gold edition to figure out where that matches on mine, but that sounds right. edit: that matches 479,926 (decimal) in the gold edition. Let's seeeeeee what happens. edit: changed the numbers to 50 rounds for the cannon, 12 for the rocket. No effect on my saved game even after loading and unloading the tanks from the transport, and no effect when starting a brand new game. Oddly enough, nothing broke, either.

Awesome information, Zombie, thanks. And I'll check out that page. I actually started looking for 30s that have an 8 nearby, figuring that the rocket information should be some multiple of 8 bytes away, minus 1. So far... I've discovered how to make the game crash intermittently. ...go me? Someone mentioned stacking multiple weapons in a character's hand. How is that done? Might that be applicable to the tank, do you suppose, to give it that secondary fire? -in fine-tuning my tanks' armor, I think I'm getting close, but now I have a new puzzlement. How exactly does armor work? Is it a percentage reduction? A straight reduction? Or is it a 'chance not to take damage'? I've been testing by driving my tanks into a gaggle of aliens armed with plasma rifles. Sometimes the aliens make an absolute hash of the tank after a few hits, other times the tank seems to shrug off the hits. Yet in both cases the hits are to the same face of the tank's armor- if the dead tanks had been hit on the flank and the survivors had been hit on its front, then that would be grand. But as it stands, my results aren't reproducing themselves very well. edit: After reviewing Zombie's info, I'm going to update my OP here. Looks like he already has more information than I do But I'm still looking for more tank tweaks edit the second: This 'inventory layout' seems intriguing. What is it, and where can I find more information?

The turrets seem to have 20 bytes devoted to each of them... 10 numbers with spacing 0's at the front. Quoting from your other post: 0: Damage Type 1: Ammo Type 2: Damage 3: Snap Shot Acc. 4: Snap Shot TU's 5: Auto Shot Acc. 6: Auto Shot TU's 7: Aim Shot Acc. 8: Aim Shot TU's 9: Blaster Effect Ammo type is being clarified somewhere that isn't here, and I'm guessing that's where the amount is defined. Though, changing the rocket tank's ammo type to the same value as that of the cannon tank didn't give it a 30 round magazine, so I'm not really sure. But then too, tanks are loaded with ammo when you put them on the craft. I only changed that value when it was already onboard.... huh. I will go test that. edit: Okay, tested that. Giving an ammo type of 4 (whatever that is) to mimic the cannon tank did not increase its magazine even after loading and unloading it from the craft. Honestly, I'd think the item limit wouldn't really be a problem- taking one tank with two guns would still be a lot fewer items than four fully equipped troops... Here's a thought- would it be possible to un-override the tank's left and right hands? I don't know if there are enough unused weapons in the game to redefine them all for tank use, but it might be worth a try... Or, would it be possible to make a normal troop into a tank somehow?

One of the things that has always felt a little off for me was that we could buy HWPs for ten times the cost and four times the size of the soldier, but without any real advantage. What I'm working on now is trying to adjust the way the tanks work in the course of play. The goal is: Each tank should have a primary weapon and a secondary weapon. The primary weapon is (whatever the tank is). The secondary weapon is a coaxial machinegun for tanks or a coaxial light laser for hovertanks. Maybe I'd modify the pistol and the HC, or something. Weapons that the player wouldn't use anyway (and then I'll make them too heavy for a human to carry around, because I'm a dick like that and don't want to break the game ) I want tanks to have a life expectancy beyond 'hey look, is that an alien?' and I want them to have a utility beyond 'so, I fired 8 rockets. Who's up for a weenie roast?' I'll update this as I tinker. I'm very interested in hearing your thoughts and advice on it. I'm not interested in making tanks an 'I win!' button, but I'd like to make them something more useful than early-game disposable scouts. ............................... update Thanks to J'ordos and Zombie, we now know more about the tanks. Each tank has four places that refer to their ammunition. One that says how much is needed in storage for the tank to be loaded. One that says how much ammunition the tank has when it gets to the battlescape. One that says how much ammunition is listed in the UFOpaedia. And one that dictates how much ammunition is *actually* removed from storage when the tank is added to asquad. The table below will be updated as we find more info. TANK/LOCATION UFOPAEDIA BATTLESCAPE NEEDED REMOVED Tank/Cannon 479,920 322,858 241,450 Tank/Rocket Launcher 479,928 322,864 Tank/Laser 479,936 322,870 Hovertank/Plasma 479,944 Hovertank/Launcher 479,952 ............................... Still working on... 1) Finding the rest of the values in that table! 2) I'd love to know where the tank's right and left 'hand' are defined. From playing the game and looking at these editors, it looks like the tank is basically treated as a 2x2 soldier who happens to be carrying a tank turret in his right hand. What I'd love to do, would be to put a secondary weapon in the tank's left 'hand'. caveat it sounds like the tank's own turrets override this. Whether this can be altered remains to be seen. .......................................................... what I've got so far: Tank chassis: Way more accurate, more HP, better armor. An automated, computer-guided, stabilized gun platform should be substantially more accurate than the average human shooter. Flanks weaker than the front, rear weaker than flanks, under armor much weaker, on the off-chance an alien ever actually manages to roll a grenade under one. Hovertank chassis: More accurate than before, though not as accurate as tanks. They are subject to air currents, after all. Armor even on all sides, weakest underneath. Less armor and hitpoints than tanks, but much faster (or they would be if I could catch the issue with energy) Cannon tanks: Can now put a round through UFO armor. It's a freaking tank, after all. May be changed depending on ammo load issues and/or if I can't put on a second weapon (if I need to increase its ammo capacity, it'll probably lose the ability to put a round through a UFO, because I don't want them used to just shred everything in sight. Has autofire capability, though less accurate than aimed or snap. May or may not keep the autofire, depending on how it plays. Rebalanced the TU % of all attacks to make the tank function as if it's faster than its human counterparts. Rocket tanks: working on balancing out the power. Ideally, it'll pop a hole in UFO armor, and lay waste to the smaller buildings. Not quite there yet. Added an autofire capability, and am currently cranking down the accuracy. The goal is to give the tank a bombardment attack, where it spits out a significant fraction of its ammo to saturate an area that the player can't necessarily see. Finding the right accuracy to make the rounds wind up in more or less- but not- the same place is fun. The civilians at the terror sites disagree, but they're wimps. Rebalanced the TU % of all attacks to make the tank function as if it's faster than its human counterparts. Laser tanks: Very slightly increased the damage. Vastly increased the accuracy- it's a frikkin' laser, after all. Added an autofire, to allow it to engage other tank-sized foes without the player having to click 'fire' every single time. Arbitrarily decided that the laser tank should NOT be able to punch a hole in a UFO, mostly because it has infinite ammo. Rebalanced the TU % of all attacks to make the tank function as if it's faster than its human counterparts, and set it to be 4 to 5 TU's less per shot than the cannon tank. Plasma hovertanks: Still trying to find a unique role for these guys that doesn't completely overshadow the cannon tank. Blaster launcher hovertank: A friend gave me a great idea for these. Napalm-bomb tank. Disable the blaster effect, and it becomes another rocket tank. Change the damage type to fire, and then ramp up the damage 'til it can burn out an acceptably large chunk of the landscape. I'd have to see how it played, but at the very least it could be useful for night missions. Other concepts that could help give this tank a unique role would be very welcome. ......................................................... Thanks to: NKF in this thread: http://www.strategycore.co.uk/forums/Editi...anks-t5985.html Zombie has a great list of tank stats, already identified, here: http://www.strategycore.co.uk/xcom/pg/ufoalienstats Hatfarm has a great editor, and a website with file information: http://hatfarm.xcomufo.com/ Jennifer Stein's editor. J'ordos has been great for finding more information and offsets as well Bomb Bloke, and everyone else not mentioned above who's participating in this thread, for helping me learn more about modding.