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NKF

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Everything posted by NKF

  1. Which is fair enough as it's an old story few here will remember. One of the earlier main X-Com Communities was I think X-Com Apoclapyse Central, the owner went a little batty and started plastering ads for porn sites and his own site that sold essays for people wanting to buy their way through school assignments. Most of the community dispersed to places like XCommand and to here after that. Our last gracious host was also a bit absorbed in his own self interest towards the end, and with something as important as the wiki that we've all spent a great deal of lives on effectively held to ransom, I'm just glad it's currently in capable hands.
  2. I second the notion that it's more than acceptable to have something like a Patreon or similar donation system to help keep the server running. Just as long as you don't pull a Leo.... (no I'm never letting that one go) I do still wonder if should still split the wiki to keep the classics and modern games and their resources self contained rather than having everything in one large death ball database. I know everyone is against this every time I bring it up, but it's mainly from a management perspective as well as potentially a server load perspective. Of course I do not know how the Mediawiki software works, so it could be a very bad idea after all.
  3. The perennial issue rears its ugly head again it would seem. I know nothing about web hosting, but I take it this has been costing quite a bit?
  4. The games I tend to gravitate towards generally fall under the Tactical RPG category rather than strategy. However, many of my favourite TRPG series are held together with episodic or level based mission progression. That's what I love about the original X-Com games, as they are a TRPG wrapped up in a grand strategy overworld later. I'd just name a few series like FF Tactics and Disgaea. Both for example let you build a large ensemble of peons to play with. But you can only handle a certain number per battle. I'd love to be able to manage them on a much grander scale and form small parties and send them all over the place for whatever reasons.
  5. No actually you are on the right course. I had forgotten about the issue around the bios, which is one of the more grey areas you will need to contend with. Most of the emulators I've been spending a great deal of time on such as PPSSPP for the PSP don't have that particular hurdle to cross. Personally, I've justified it by having spare physical consoles (hardware anxiety), so I jolly well want to be able to play the games I've paid for. If you need help or advice, drop me a PM. I feel determined to get you experiencing these classic gems you've been collecting.
  6. In-game the saves are the same as the memory cards are emulated. But the virtual memory cards are files you can make copies of, so you can easily archive away saves you want to keep. With PSX emulation, there are also save states, which I think you might find useful for repeatedly testing things under the exact same conditions.
  7. Emulation's come a long way in 10 years, so I'm sure you'll be pleased with the results if you attempt it again. I have given my PSX copy of UFO a spin and it runs great. Having virtually no load times compared to running it on a physical console is divine!
  8. Completely agreed on wearing full suits of Disrupter Armour. As for cheesing the final mission, as long as you know what you're doing, it's easy enough to do. The easiest is probably with teleporters if you've played long enough to unlock them. Chain teleport your team around one of each generator pair, disable them and then teleport back to the landing area and leg it out of the mission. To cheese it without teleporters, good old dakka is all you need. A bit of mass synchronized blind firing of highly inaccurate dual Devastator Cannons from the landing areas in the general vicinity of the generators should work. You might need to reposition a bit to get better angles.
  9. Having seen some of the aforementioned unpublicised items - there's some things there that I would really like to see preserved as well such as some really neat TFTD early concept images. Alas, Zombie's hands are tied to some degree. By the way, Zombie - have you tried using a Playstation emulator? The issue around PAL or NTSC formats would be a non-issue then. Most PCs these days have no trouble emulating the PSX, even on Raspberry Pis. You can get a tool such as ImgBurn to convert your PSX disc into an ISO file and then get an emulator such as ePSXe to run it. Alternately you can obtain a multi emulator front-end environment called RetroArch on Steam that can download the ePSXe core to emulate PSX ISO files. I've been getting really into emulation these last few years and have been gradually converting my favourite Playstation titles (up to the PS3) into ISOs and have been playing them through emulators. This is mostly as a preservation measure as the hardware and storage media are ageing. Being able to play the games on modern hardware is also a plus.
  10. I forget, but can you have two unitpos objects point to the same unitref entry? In more normal language, you would have to physical unconscious bodies pointing to the same set of unit stats? So if you were to detonate one in a remote location, the other would die with it. This would not happen normally. But if a 3rd party tool like Extender attempts a workaround to keep the unit alive, then that would make this scenario plausible. Also Nox - as long as they are still tasty. That is all that matters to the consumers.
  11. I am going to point an accusatory finger at XComutil for the Xarquid placement issue there. This is one of the many reasons why I stopped using it to play the game. Or at least TFTD - it's fine with UFO but did have a habit making new bugs for TFTD. Bladefirelight did his best to fix some things after taking of the reins, but I think for this day and age the absolute best way to play TFTD is to go as vanilla as possible with just the v2 patch or use OpenXcom.
  12. Ah, the age old tried and true art of save scumming. It is certainly a good way to force the encounters for sure. Feel free to add this to the ufopaedia wiki if you want. Perhaps as its own guide. The wiki lives and dies by user contributions, so you are perfectly welcome to add anything you want. Us oldtimer wiki editors may seem intimidating, but we mean well.
  13. Fair enough. They're also not really for everyone. Truth be told I have been actively avoiding MMOs all my life. However I was a little more open about this one as I did come with some prior knowledge of the series and the general game loop, having played some of the console releases. All completely offline as standalone RPGs despite being MMO capable. Time-wise, with this being a lightweight MMO, I am finding it's a bit like a sandbox game. You do what you want at your own pace. There's just other live players around.
  14. Hey everyone, When I'm not playing tactical RPGs/combat simulators, I play other genres too! Shock horror, I know. This pandemic nonsense has me finding other ways to fritter away my time. In this case I want to bring up Phantasy Star Online 2, which is my very first foray into an MMO. A fairly lite and more cooperative focused MMO which amusingly has Blizzard's Diablo credited as one of its inspirations. The tone of the game is the polar opposite. I was wondering if any fellow Strategycore members are also playing? If you are on the Steam player's default ship, the Ansur, we will probably cross paths from to time.
  15. First of all, I am only one voice amongst a community run effort, however I will be brutally honest with my own opinion here and say no. It is an X-Com-like, but it's not really in the X-Com universe. Including it would mean having to open the door to the many other X-Com inspired games that have since appeared thanks to the success of the reboot series. From a management point of view for both the admins as well as the editing experience for the wiki users in general, things could get out of hand. I feel it would be best to keep the wiki's focus mainly on the X-Com series. That said, I do think Xenonauts deserves its own wiki. As long as there is a devoted fan set willing to work on it, I see no reason why a separately run wiki should not be set up. edit: Before anyone brings up UFO: AI - I felt the same way about it when it was added as a featured project. However I wasn't too fussy about it at the time as it was put up during an era where there were few successful X-Com projects out there.
  16. I have no idea what's going on. In which case, have at thee with this turret and a mighty 1d12! *crack* Um - I think perhaps have a hug instead.
  17. Hey, there's plenty of nudity in the classic X-Com games. Granted none of it human.
  18. Might be something to do with the host in general. Even the Openxcom forum is down.
  19. I don't have the same level knowledge of this game as I do with the earlier two games, so cannot confirm anything. I will however offer the theory that if the evasion matrix has an effect, then its effects are small enough that they are barely perceptible. Jamming effect likely has an influence on missile turning rates. How much, I don't know. But let's say it is percentage based. An evasion matrix would reduce a Janitor Missile's 24 to 19 while a cloaking device would reduce it to 4.8. Assuming the jamming effect activates within a certain radius of the craft, the effect of a 24 dipping to 19 may not make a great deal of difference at such close range.
  20. Looks like the wiki was upgraded. I'm not overly keen on the new look for the recents page myself, but after a bit of play around with the filters it seems to be functioning all right on my end. Tested in Firefox on my PC and Chrome on an android phone. The main page doesn't seem to want to let me check the recent revisions, but normal articles show these just fine. Also it seems my account is auto-patrolling all of my recent edits. I'm not sure if this is standard behaviour for a mod account, but the notifications being visible are certainly new to me.
  21. I haven't had any recent gameplay experience to say for certain, but no. I suspect they are exclusive to Mixed crews. What I can say for certain is that I have never seen them until the Mixed Crews start showing up. To throw in a guess here, if there have been any reports of them being paired with Tasoth on a terror mission, it likely a Mixed Crew that rolled mostly Tasoth.
  22. Thanks to the recent Black Friday sales, I can now count myself a member of the 2-tub club. I managed to get a 2TB Crucial MX500 SATA SSD. *Insert angels-descending-with-trumpets-blaring* I am thinking of potentially getting a Raspberry Pi and setting up a rudimentary NAS with my growing collection of old HDDs. Seems like it might be a fun project.
  23. NKF

    Music

    I listened to Yogcast's Diggy Diggy Hole for the first time a few months ago - now it's stuck in my head. Thinking I had finally found a bunch of new songs to replace it, out comes an official metal cover: Some of the other songs that I tried to use to replace it with were the Axis of Awesome's song, Eifel64's and most of the extended lyric music videos on the playlist.I've also tried some of Cab Calloway's . Then there's the War of the World musical with and Horsell Common and the Heat Ray All I have achieved so far is to create a playlist of ear worms. To be fair it is not a bad selection.
  24. Browsing through general news feeds this morning, I noticed a few news articles indicating there is now a real XCOM satellite in orbit. One such article being: https://kotaku.com/theres-an-actual-satellite-in-space-called-xcom-1834625603/amp It is worth noting that the choice of the satellite's name is deliberate and not just coincidental.
  25. Ha - I had only just impulse purchased a copy of TFTD for the Playstation. Now this. You can never go wrong with redundant copies on different platforms. Thanks!
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