Modding weapons in S2

[Bushi]

Just got S2 (I know I am very late to the party) and from the initial look on it, its everything I could have wanted from new XCOM gameplay wise.

The first problem I noticed tho when I made a shot at an enemy.

Not only enemy survives headshot from kar or multiple bullets from stern, from the look of it there is some weird levelling up thing going on, which increase not only skills available to your soldier (that alone would be ok) but boost stats as well (which is not so nice) when the same gun can deliver twice the damage when fired by more experienced soldier.

I set up editor, I got blueshell dataguy, I opened My new mod in it and found RPG weapons/ammo/armour and other stuff that seems important in general.

 

The problem is, from the look of it, devs took a really bumpy road when it comes to moddifying this game which killed off modding community right at the start, as a result S2 have very poor amount of information available to potential modders (went trough this whole forum).

 

Now to the business, Is there a person who could kindly explain to me how ammo damage correlates with weapon damage and soldiers VP or would point me to such resource (english/polish/russian languages are acceptable)

I though about boosting ammo damage stats but with levelling up it would be impossible to come up with a standard value.

 

Where I can find table responsible for leveling up?

I want to boost basic character characteristics up to something from level 15 which should result in good marksmanship and long distance shootouts, disable further VP, AP, Aim, etc leveling up, at the same time letting them level up their skills from 0 (Same for enemies).

That would hopefully provide me with a standard endurance for everyone on which I can adjust damage dealt by guns.

 

I want to boost damage dealt by guns on ammo values since I really dont want to edit every and single weapon min/max damage.

Any shortcomings of such solution?

Will a shot from pistol start levelling down living blocks or something?

I think there are damage values dealt by pistol/riffle/mg to environment that are separate from general damage dealt by weapons but I might be wrong, I havent tested anything yet, all I said its just preliminary assessment.

 

I want to boost base VP to lvl 15 as well because, from what i understood, later there will be some powerful enemies coming at you so, if I want to have standard health and endurance for enemies at first and later levels as well as my soldiers, I have to set it to some reasonable value from the beginning.

 

I admittedly haven't played it yet much so any cues regarding why my initial approach might be messed up later in game are welcome.

I dont want to play it right now because this situation where enemies survive a headshot really kills it for me (especially that from what I gathered its only gets worse later in game).

 

In armour section I noticed there is only 3 armour rows for thin, medium and thick armour, from what i read some of it is shared by PK and materials in game (like metal stairs), one user reported that reducing PK amour resulted in metal stairs falling down under his troops weight.

Any useful input on the matter, from what I learned I can just create new materials to prevent it but I haven't tried it yet, just learning what there is I can work with.

 

I am planing on leaving everything in the game, PK included, just mod them a bit so they serve as a sectopod of sort, like this one particularly tough and dangerous enemy that is still perfectly beatable with conventional weapons.

Just reduce armour, give some weapon with wide spread (with realistic damage that would be a must) and have fun with it.

 

If there is not enough info for me to start modding or if it takes too much time to come up with anything I can use, I will just drop the idea and play it, as it is so, I can jump to later games in the series which supposedly somewhat tonned down the problems I mentioned.

But as for now, I really hope I can make it more realistic, difficult and by proxy more enjoyable for myself before I actually go trough it.

Especially that the game looks really promising.

[DuchessOfKvetch]

You got further than me, amigo.

 

I never was able to get the editor up at all, due to my OS being too modern, it seems.

 

And since I can't install MSDE either (security restrictions in Windows 10 means it is not verbotten), I spent quite a bit of time just figuring out how to load it into SQL Express. To make things more fun, the current versions of SQL won't read the old database, since Microsoft stopped supporting SQL 2000 era files many moons ago - had to install SQL 2008. Furthermore, you can't install it with a blank 'sa' password, and the devs originally thought it would be brill to hard code the login and pw into their utils.

 

And the whole ODBC connection deal is more or less no longer supported either. Used to be required for connecting to the db using MSDE or Access, but it doesn't really work anymore either (you can, however, attach to the core database directly).

 

Ultimately I got around a lot of these issues through brute determination, only to be flummoxed by the DataImport app terminating on me whenever I try to run it. I've run ProcMon against it, as well as looked at SQL logs, and it's either a Named Pipes issue or another fight over blank 'sa' passwords.

 

I think I need a much older and less security conscious machine.

[BlunterII]

Duchess,

 

You might want to check out this Steam forums' page. It helped me salvage my mod after my old WinXP machine suddenly died.

BTW, I am running Win 7 64 bit. Don't know about Win 10 though...

 

Good luck!

__________________

~ Blunter ~

[DuchessOfKvetch]

Read that article and I think about everything else on this website, Steam, and GOG already.

 

I flat out can't install MSDE 2000. It is considered more ancient than dirt by Microsoft, and a huge security risk (probably full of juicy buffer overflows). They don't want you running obsolete software because of liability concerns. SQL 2000 and MSDE were some of the hardest hit databases back in the days of serious online database viruses, a decade ago - they were highly vulnerable to injection attacks and whatnot. When Microsoft upgraded to SQL 2008, they dropped a lot of support for older database files, but I was able to load the .mdf via using a legacy compatibility mode.

 

The security restriction on using a blank sa password are so onerous now that I can't even configure a datasource to work with the SS database, even with full rights. The SQL service rejects insecure logins as well. Some folks seem to have had luck with old versions of MS Access, but I don't own a copy.

 

And either way, with DataImport failing, there's no way to actually create a mod. I have wracked my brain trying to figure out just what sort of arcane format the game.db files are in - since it would seem they'd just be XML/YAML/SQL query files of some sort, with schema data, but they don't correspond to any known encryption or compression format. Even tried running them thru Trid, which says they're RPGMaker XP files (!). Since that app didn't come out until 2004, I doubt that's the case.

[BlunterII]

I hear you, Duchess.

 

Win 7 might be your best solution at this point... it's $100 at Newegg now.

Just saying

________________

~ Blunter ~

[LCJr]

VirtualBox with WinXP. No need to buy anything if you've got an XP disc lying around.