To Use or Not To Use

[BladeFireLight]

Do you use xcomutil?

 

If you don't why?

 

I'm looking to see what I can change to make it more appealing to other players.

 

-Blade FireLight

[Bomb Bloke]

I stay away from it, but mainly because I don't "play" UFO anymore. Whenever I load it up I try and decipher some more of it's data formats. XcomUtil (and most other mods) only stands to confuse matters (I did have it installed at one point, took me a while to work out where my small scout had gone and then I restored my backup...).

 

One thing I've always wondered, can XcomUtil modify the game while it's running, or does it have to do everything in between loading the GeoScape/BattleScape engine? In the case of the former, there's a few things I wouldn't mind seeing...

[NKF]

XComutil would have to become some sort of TSR in order to edit anything in real-time. That would definitely have its fair share of problems.

 

It's a handy tool and I use it every now and then. I use it for its command line features the most. Apart from the bug fixes, the in-game changes (like the new base layout, new ship maps, enhanced weapons, etc) generally don't interest me. I never did quite get the interceptor/firestorm maps to work properly either, often with the squad ending up stranded off the map boundaries or out in the field.

 

The hybrid maps did interest me at one time, but the strange colours got to me after a while. Some processing of the actual image information to replace the old pixels to better match the current game's palette would certainly help.

 

- NKF

[zaimoni]

Once it was properly documented how to cleanly disable the new ships while leaving everything else in place, I had no real excuse not to use it continually. I particularly like "all missions day" as a realism fix (emulating proper nightsight goggles). (I have manually reverted the Small Scout's MCD to original.)

 

I adjust new ships vs. old ships based on how much I'm testing advanced AI changes. New ships is fine against the native AI, but even tweaking aliens to face the craft makes the manned Interceptor asking for a wipeout on debarking. Turnswapping...disastrous, makes no sense.

[Sylph]

I use it all the time. The main feature I use it for is the automatic armament of squad members. That feature just saves *hours* of boring clicking if you're doing a lot of xcom missions.

I also love the automatic naming of soldiers based on their statistics, another great time saver.

 

As for new features - I'd really like an option to automatically turn off all blaster launchers, similar to the option to remove psi powers... That would make a no psi + no blaster game of xcom a lot of fun.

[BladeFireLight]

XComutil would have to become some sort of TSR in order to edit anything in real-time. That would definitely have its fair share of problems.

 

It's a handy tool and I use it every now and then. I use it for its command line features the most. Apart from the bug fixes, the in-game changes (like the new base layout, new ship maps, enhanced weapons, etc) generally don't interest me. I never did quite get the interceptor/firestorm maps to work properly either, often with the squad ending up stranded off the map boundaries or out in the field.

 

The hybrid maps did interest me at one time, but the strange colours got to me after a while. Some processing of the actual image information to replace the old pixels to better match the current game's palette would certainly help.

 

- NKF

 

a TSR is way beyond my skills and would not work on the dos version.

A bug in the installer makes it fail on the interceptors and transports image file copy, especially in dosbox.

As far as the pallet goes. Given significant differences in the pallets, I don't see how to resolve this with out reworking all the graphics, units and weapons included.

 

 

Once it was properly documented how to cleanly disable the new ships while leaving everything else in place, I had no real excuse not to use it continually. I particularly like "all missions day" as a realism fix (emulating proper nightsight goggles). (I have manually reverted the Small Scout's MCD to original.)

 

I adjust new ships vs. old ships based on how much I'm testing advanced AI changes. New ships is fine against the native AI, but even tweaking aliens to face the craft makes the manned Interceptor asking for a wipeout on debarking. Turnswapping...disastrous, makes no sense.

 

My personal setup does the same thing. only the smaller UFO's are woth risking a full crue on an intercept. so I have them reset to the original settings.

 

the hotseat feature was added by scott to give some semblance of multilayer. With UFO2000 covering that very well I see no point in keeping that in xcomutil.

 

I use it all the time. The main feature I use it for is the automatic armament of squad members. That feature just saves *hours* of boring clicking if you're doing a lot of xcom missions.

I also love the automatic naming of soldiers based on their statistics, another great time saver.

 

As for new features - I'd really like an option to automatically turn off all blaster launchers, similar to the option to remove psi powers... That would make a no psi + no blaster game of xcom a lot of fun.

 

Two of my most favorite features, although I like to approach the flagging of units differently than scott. so I may add more to that.

 

As I like to weld my units in to squads, I'm thinking of make the placement of units in the craft so you can control that using something in the names.

 

-Blade FireLight

[NKF]

Regarding the palette, it needn't be perfect. Perhaps a lookup table of the closest matches might be the way to go for the conversion. You'd have to have one for UFO to TFTD and TFTD to UFO conversion. That might be a bit time consuming to put together though.

 

- NKF

[Bomb Bloke]

Figured I'd have a go at the terrain issue (seeing as palette re-writing is already one of the main functions of my PCK converters), ended up getting myself confused...

 

After a bit of messing about to work out which palettes TFTD uses for which displays, I figured I should check out XcomUtil's current implementation before going any further.

 

According to the manual:

 

When playing Hybrid games, randomized and prompted terrains include both

the XCOM and the TFTD terrains. This was accomplished by mapping the

palette of one game onto the other. Not all of the colors are exactly the

same, but it is unlikely that you will notice many differences except when

the soldiers lights and flare put unusual highlights on objects around them.

I do not even know if it is possible to fix this bug, but it is not a major

problem.

Though when I got a TFTD map to load in UFO, I got a nice red sea bed... In PCKView the images also appeared the same, so does XcomUtil attempt to re-map the palette or not?

 

On another note, due to the DOS version of UFO crashing on me all the time (I'm away from home without my usual software resources) I tried using the UFO maps with TFTD CE. That turned out to be a royal pain in the ass.

 

First off, XcomUtil refused to use f0dder's patch. I upgraded from 9.5 to 9.6 before working out what the actual problem was: Although the patch is bundled, "patch.dll" is not - and XcomUtil's batch is dependant on it being there.

 

(Even after adding this extra file, I got patch time out errors. Had to go and grab a fresh copy online. I really need to sort out all the versions I have of that thing, one has a "musfix.dll" as well though I was never really sure what that did...)

 

I just now noticed the files "patchxc1.dll" and "patchxc2.dll" with the same file size, perhaps the install process was supposed to rename one of these...

 

With the graphics sorted, I ran into a fresh problem. Whenever I went to start a mission the GeoScape engine would shut down, a command prompt window would appear, and there it would hang... Just a cursor blinking at me (window title of "Command Prompt - runxcom").

 

Back to 9.5 and it seemed to work, though it didn't seem the least bit interested in randomising the terrain (let alone using the UFO maps).

 

For what it's worth this is a XP SP2 auto-updating box.

[BladeFireLight]

seem a number of people are complaining of breakages in 9.6 however I don't have the 9.5 source.

 

I'm going to ask Scott for a copy so I can do a diff and see where things broke.

[Zombie]

I voted No. Much like Bomb Bloke, I don't really play for fun anymore and only test. For this reason I always need a totally unmodified copy of the game. The only reason I used it in the past was to split the CE executable and now that BB's exe splitter/merger accomplishes this I can't even recall the last time.

 

That said, I'm more inclined to frequently use an editor if it is easy to understand and I can control/oversee/manage what is being changed. Sorry to say that the DOS command line interface is too hard to figure out and is antiquated by today's newer windows-based editors out there. I realize you are still catering to the folks who must use the dos version of the game and it probably wouldn't be worth the effort to rewrite all the code for windows, but that is yet another reason why I don't use it: I test with the CE primarily.

 

- Zombie

[Danial]

I like playing games un-modified, so I voted No. Plus, as Zombie and BB said, you need the un-modified data when looking through the game files (which is something I was doing with Mike not long ago).

[Knan]

I use it. Absolutely.

 

Adding challenge (research help from captured aliens is a neat idea), fixing the dos difficulty bug, re-equipping and reordering soldiers...

 

Then again, I play for fun

[Bomb Bloke]

Here we go, a terrain/unit/equipment image converter!

 

I'd stick it in the files section only at the moment it doesn't seem to like my password for some reason.

 

Next up I reckon I'll make a geoscape map which covers both the land and sea, as being able to do missions in both areas makes no sense if you can't actually land there...

 

And now I'm off again for a few days. Toodooloo!

 

 

(Edit: The tool is now included in my primary pack, accessible via my signature).

[Bomb Bloke]

One download - Well that was popular.

 

seem a number of people are complaining of breakages in 9.6 however I don't have the 9.5 source.

 

I'm going to ask Scott for a copy so I can do a diff and see where things broke.

I killed the "silent" command in the "runxcom" batch in the hope that it'd be an easy fix. Turns out it is.

 

The latest version uses "xcopy" commands to copy folders about. However, if the destination already exists you get a prompt (silent, thanks to the pipe) asking you what you want to do about it. Tapping "a" on the keyboard sends it merrily on it's way.

 

A more permanent fix is to go through the batch and add "/y" as a third parameter to the affected lines. For eg,

 

xcopy xcubef missdat >nul

Becomes:

 

xcopy xcubef missdat /y >nul

(It's been an age since I used xcopy, and while refreshing myself on the arguments it takes I was surprised at the variety - It's actually an extremly useful tool. Beats the GUI with the "/c" option alone).