March 23, 201511 yr Author I still want to know more about my avatar. Why sharks aren't a primary enemy? Jaws? The entire opening sequence was a nod in that direction. This is according to an interview with Stuart Whyte on Jan 7 2002 from the old XCommand site BS: Why wasn't the Shark alien (seen in the old TFTD preview slideshow) included in the final version of the game? SW: We spent quite a while trying to get him working as we thought he was cool - but for him to really work he had to occupy more than one cel - which, though possible, caused all sorts of nightmare code problems... so we cut him 8-( I'm guessing that by "cel" he means "cell" or "tile". So apparently the Shark alien was meant to be a 2x2 alien, and as a primary race I could see that being an issue as it couldn't fit in standard ship layouts, wouldn't be able to access certain rooms and such. It would have been hellish as all the maps would have to be redrawn to accommodate them. At least, that's my take on the subject. - Zombie
March 23, 201511 yr If the Sharkman was treated as a rare but powerful unit like the Triscene, then it would have worked quite well. In fact, it would have fit the theme of the game a lot better than the Triscene. - NKF
March 24, 201511 yr Author Had the Sharkman been penned to be a Terror Unit instead of a primary race, then yeah it would have been cool. But like I mentioned in another thread, the devs needed something to be land-based. If they would have added the Sharkman it most certainly would have been an underwater-only species, so another unit would have to be switched to land-based to make up for it (or a brand new unit added completely). I could see the Bio-Drone as above water, not sure about the rest though. I was rereading the Stuart Whyte interview Byron did at the XCommand site and was a little confused as why Stuart would say the devs worked "quite a while" on the Sharkman. From my digs in the test disks, this unit wasn't in PLANETAC, and it doesn't look like it was in TACTICAL. It wasn't in the Demo either. So either he's not remembering how long was spent on it, or it was an internal-only test which never made it to the test disks. I suppose the other option would be if it was on the drawing table somewhere in the time frame of December 1994-early January 1995 and was cut then (directly in the "butter zone" between TACTICAL and the demo). Hard to say really. Today I was viewing the images from the TFTD Slideshow and noticed that three of them (SHIP02, SHIP03 & VOLCAN1) look like screenshots from my test disks, so that's a good place to start for now if you are interested in what the battlescape looked like. There are also two other battlescape screenshots which may predate my test disks even. XCOM14 shows an aquanaut shooting a Lobsterman on either a SEABED or CORAL map set. And the other one is XCOM15 which shows... well, here, lemme upload it (enlarged by a factor of 3:1). There's the obvious (but different looking) Gillman, but also what appears to be a Xarquid! The Triton is also missing it's 3 "fans" at the top and the doors too. The Triton looks pretty unfinished, there isn't a UI panel yet and the aquanauts are wearing strange armor which strongly suggests this is a very early screenshot (predating PLANETAC even). What confuses me though is the Xarquid, Gillman and Lobsterman. In my test disks none of the aliens were finished yet (except the Aquatoid), so why are they present? Any ideas? - Zombie
March 24, 201511 yr That armour looks like it's aqua plastic armour. The walking animation however looks very strange. It looks like they tried something different, but stick with the original movement animation. In XCOM14 the armour looks more strange. Possible it could be the basic armour.
March 25, 201511 yr Author That armour looks like it's aqua plastic armour. The walking animation however looks very strange. It looks like they tried something different, but stick with the original movement animation. In XCOM14 the armour looks more strange. Possible it could be the basic armour. Could be, the armor looks more like the standard diving suit than anything. It's quite possible the other one was Plastic Aqua Armor, as the devs were swapping this and the diving suit around in BIGOBS so it's understandable if they mixed it up by accident. I thought about this overnight and I believe that XCOM14 and XCOM15 really do predate my PLANETAC Disk. The clues being that the Triton is unfinished, lack of a UI, different armor sprites, and a different looking battlescape. How the devs managed to sneak in the aliens for these screenshots and then not use them for months is beyond me. I took a bunch of screenshots in PLANETAC and TACTICAL yesterday with DosBox, so I need to go through them, pick out the best ones, enlarge them and run them through PNGGauntlet to optimize file size a bit (when I did the images for the Slideshow, PNGGauntlet reduced the file size by about 80% which is a big savings)! Keep an eye out! - Zombie
March 25, 201511 yr Well I believe they just wanted a terror unit which traditionally isn't a 2x2 alien. So they went with a moronic dinosaur that totally doesn't belong. Right, a dinosaur in a cruise ship restroom is way more realistic than a shark guarding something worthwhile. What pisses me off the most is it's not like a Plesiosaur, it looks like a T-Rex with P.W.T. launchers embedded on it's his waist. Street Sharks Rule! -NoX
May 15, 201511 yr Author Had the Sharkman been penned to be a Terror Unit instead of a primary race, then yeah it would have been cool. But like I mentioned in another thread, the devs needed something to be land-based. If they would have added the Sharkman it most certainly would have been an underwater-only species, so another unit would have to be switched to land-based to make up for it (or a brand new unit added completely). I could see the Bio-Drone as above water, not sure about the rest though. I was rereading the Stuart Whyte interview Byron did at the XCommand site and was a little confused as why Stuart would say the devs worked "quite a while" on the Sharkman. From my digs in the test disks, this unit wasn't in PLANETAC, and it doesn't look like it was in TACTICAL. It wasn't in the Demo either. So either he's not remembering how long was spent on it, or it was an internal-only test which never made it to the test disks. I suppose the other option would be if it was on the drawing table somewhere in the time frame of December 1994-early January 1995 and was cut then (directly in the "butter zone" between TACTICAL and the demo). Hard to say really. Today I was viewing the images from the TFTD Slideshow and noticed that three of them (SHIP02, SHIP03 & VOLCAN1) look like screenshots from my test disks, so that's a good place to start for now if you are interested in what the battlescape looked like. There are also two other battlescape screenshots which may predate my test disks even. XCOM14 shows an aquanaut shooting a Lobsterman on either a SEABED or CORAL map set. And the other one is XCOM15 which shows... well, here, lemme upload it (enlarged by a factor of 3:1). There's the obvious (but different looking) Gillman, but also what appears to be a Xarquid! The Triton is also missing it's 3 "fans" at the top and the doors too. The Triton looks pretty unfinished, there isn't a UI panel yet and the aquanauts are wearing strange armor which strongly suggests this is a very early screenshot (predating PLANETAC even). What confuses me though is the Xarquid, Gillman and Lobsterman. In my test disks none of the aliens were finished yet (except the Aquatoid), so why are they present? Any ideas? - Zombie Quoting myself because I kinda have an answer. My take is that the test disks were used just to determine functionality of the maps and possibly AI and nothing more. The other devs, artists and programmers were all working on stuff "behind the scenes" so to speak but all of those resources didn't make it into the test disks... only a fraction did. And from more research I can say that weapon designs were happening weekly (if not daily) so we can only catch a glimpse or a snapshot in time of the development of them. Alien designs went through a number of revisions as well, but those all seemed to be internal. It makes sense really. I'd imagine the test disk creators just needed one alien to test functionality, the rest didn't need to be included. Because the designs were changing so often it would be hard to get each department to send you the newest resources and include them anyway. - Zombie
April 5Apr 5 I have extracted all the graphics from these two builds. Leftovers from UFO look a bit odd since they are using the TFTD palette. This is truly a fascinating look into the development of TFTD. The strings are also fascinating. Sadly no Shark at all. But here is an item list: Dart Gun Dart Clip Jet Harpoon Harpoon Clip Gas Cannon GC-AP Bolts GC-HE Bolts GC-Phosphorous Bolts Hydro-Jet Cannon HJ-AP Ammo HJ-HE Ammo HJ-I Ammo Torpedo Launcher Small Torpedo Large Torpedo Phosphor Torpedo Gauss Pistol Gauss Rifle Heavy Gauss Magna-Blast Grenade Dye Grenade Particle Disturbance Grenade Magna-Pack Explosive Thermal Imager Medi-Kit Psi-Amp Thermal Tazer Sonic Cannon Cannon Power Clip Sonic-Blasta Rifle Blasta Power Clip Sonic Pistol Pistol Power Clip Disrupter Pulse Launcher Disrupter Ammo Thermal Shock Launcher Thermal Shock Bomb Sonic Pulser Zrbite Molecular Control Implant 1 Aquatoid Corpse Gill Man Corpse Lobster Man Corpse Tasoth Corpse Calcinite Corpse Deep One Corpse Bio-Drone Corpse Tentaculat Corpse Triscene Corpse Hallucinoid Corpse Xarquid Corpse A bunch of items have different names. tftdtestdisk_extracted.7z
April 6Apr 6 Made some more headway. I have managed to make a Frankenbuild by putting together the final game's Geoscape.exe with the prototype Tactical.exe, it is not working 100% but it works better than using the UFO Geoscape. And many missions work. It is full of UFO leftovers, and can get quite trippy. Gauss has infinite ammo like Laser and such.
April 8Apr 8 So in the build there is a peculiar folder labelled TDXCOM_0 (Probably means Terror Deep) This is dated two months before the build, our build dates to November 1994, while this sprite is from September 1994. Here's the extracted graphics file. (It was also in the archive I put out earlier) TDXCOM_0.rar This appears to be an extremely early Aquanaut. There is this early mockup, this is one of the earliest TFTD screenshots and clearly isn't actual gameplay but just sprites and tilesets put together to make a promotional screenshot. The Aquanauts there not only resemble the Ufopedia entry for Aquaplastic armor, but also are VERY similar to this unused sprite. I went ahead and tried to put the pieces together to showcase it. As you can see it is very similar. (I am sure I didn't put it together 100% correctly as I feel like a piece is missing, but you get the gist of it.) This is almost certainly the very first Aquanaut they made, and while the final Aquanaut is based on the X-Com 1 Soldier sprite, these sprites were completely unique and different.
April 9Apr 9 It does look like an Aquanaut, true. Man, kudos to you for the dedication to this game after all these decades.
April 9Apr 9 Yeah these test disks are a gold mine when it comes to early finds and the development of TFTD.
April 9Apr 9 So it turns out that just renaming the files actually works. I renamed it to rebreath.pck and there we go
May 8May 8 I gave up for now on getting help with the exe, so I am trudging on with the final geoscape.exe even if it has lots of issues. Some hex editing had helped a lot but I tried asking in any classic X-Com community to no avail. Nonetheless here's my findings. I found a large landed USO which didn't crash, turned out to be a massive UFO from the first game, with Lobstermen and Tentaculats. (Ethereals and Chryssalids, but they have the correct stats, forexample tanky and no psionics) Interestingly the Disruptor Launcher is not an alien artefact even if I haven't researched it, but the ammo is. I also found the tiny USO variant which was cut from the final game. This would have been the equivalent to the Alien scout. (In this prototype that remains present and this is actually the second smallest USO)
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