Skonar

Thing is, would it be possible to use your editor to edit the MissDat somehow? I was hoping to actually engineer stuff that wasn't really in the game, like, for instance, a city-map with a subway station full of civillians to clear with heavy entrenched bugs in a building overlooking it. I am quite hopeful about your toolset which I'd never encountered before, though! I will certainly be scheduling some time to play with it.

61. --- New York City, Manhattan, Middle of Central Park, December 23rd 2000, 16:34 EST. It was one of the sergeants, or at least Ellen thought it was one of the sergeants. She wasn't sure, she didn't know how to read rank insignia. In any case, the Japanese Sergeant came back out of the Tennis Courts's changing room and started yelling. "Listen to me, you four all that's left out here? We've got one last ranger incoming and then we're out of here, and we are not babysitting you people through the park!" A few soldiers, like the australian sounding guy who hotwired a car a few hours ago, were glaring out at the dusk-shrouded park with night-vision goggles dangling around their necks or up against their helmets. Every so often another of those... those grinning monster bug things came close and the soliders started yelling, shooting as if the worst thing in the world was on its way. Ellen knew she didn't want to even try and get across the park, babysat or not. "So, grab whatever you've got and get inside the changing rooms, when the ranger touches down you wait at the door and when everything's secure I will wave you aboard like this," he swept an arm sharply. "There are seats inside with seatbelts - do not try and buckle them yourself, pull them up over your lap and before takeoff we will do them for you. Any questions?" Rodney lifted a hand. The sergeant pointed at him. "You?" "A ranger is that, that plane that was here?" "Yes, that's a ranger. Sorry about that, plane, ranger, same thing." A person Ellen didn't know, a guy in jeans and an overcoat, someone else who hadn't been on the cars that got out of the park, blurted out, "Where are we going? I want to go home." "McGuire Air-Force Base, apparently it's in New Jersery. Trust me buddy, you do not want to be in New York right now." "New Jersey? Fuck! What about my girlfriend? My parents?" The sergeant's face hardened. "You can't do anything about them right now, and I can leave you here but trust me you do not want me to leave you here either." Rodney shouldered past the other guy, eyes blazing. "Can we get our cameras back?" The Sergeant's eyes narrowed. "No. Now go wait." When the sergeant's back was turned Rodney gave Ellen a grimace. "Fucking hell. Story of the century and we can't even-" Ellen held up a hand. "No, Rodney. No. People are dying. You remember those kids, at the crash site?" Rodney faltered. It took him a moment to find his voice. "Yeah." "We all just need to get out of this alive." She glanced back at Sid. "Right?" Sid nodded rapidly. "So long as I don't have to lock myself in the van again." She forced out a laugh. "If we ever see the van again."

I've just been thinking that every attempt to give people a bit of a 'competetive' angle when playing X-Com has been limited to non-specific challenges - can you win the game while playing as a technophobe, for instance. I'd just adore having a kind of... 'competetive' X-Com frontend like that, where people could take on the same missions or scenarios and compare notes on how they did. Or, alternately, surely one could then produce new campaign structures? Sequential 'story' mode type missions would be rather interesting, so far as I'm concerned. Anyway. What sort of elements would be in the pre-battle files? Wasn't something like this done with XComUtil, to do stuff like switch sides?

60. --- New York City, Brooklyn Bridge Approach, December 23rd 2000, 16:26 EST. Thump. The world went searing white and Darren's skin stung, he could smell smoke, burning meat, and there was blood in his mouth. A wave of heat, like standing behind a goddamn jet's engines, then nothing. "Boss!" He wiped at his eyes, skin stinging like he'd fallen asleep sunbathing, and managed to squint back up at the sky. An XF-23 Black Widow, sharp wings and sleek frame cartwheeling out of the air, blazed as chunks of fuselage sloughed off the back end. The cockpit popped open, an ejector seat blazed for a heartbeat before the bright red and white panels of the parachute began flowering open. "I see it Jon," Darren murmured back. Jon was squatting by the street corner, holding his face, waiting for his vision to return. "They can hit fucking jets now?" Those blasts were worse than flashbangs at close range, in terms of light. And the heat they put off was incredible. God only knew what kind of radiation accompanied that, but at close range it was certainly enough to cause skin burns. Close range being somewhere outside the fifty metre wide kill zone. The dull rumble of an aircraft crashing echoed back over the city. "If you see the blue flash before it hits, shut your eyes!" Darren grabbed Jon's shoulder and pulled him along after Alex Guerrera. "Yes sir!" Walsh belted out in a crisp, clean American style, glancing over his shoulder to check on his buddy Harrison before sprinting after the other three getting across the street. Darren thudded to a halt behind Alex, standing in the open now that they had buildings between them and the civic looking building the bugs were on. Getting close enough to set off a smoke grenade had been a nightmare, and even though the pilot had apparently seen it he'd been shot down. Any hope of an airstrike seemed remote. The situation was intolerable. They'd all been in the van, the blasts, Jon had pulled it back onto the sidewalk and they'd all ran, just another blot of humanity in the sea of targets the bugs were shooting at. Sometime between getting out of the van and catching burns from the blasts he'd tried his radio and found out it was dead. Darren's laptop, too, even his fucking wrist-watch. And now there was the screaming, filling up every gap of sound there was.Civilians whipped past every so often, running like the blazes. There were pale faces huddling fearfully in every other storefront. On top of all that, the bloody pilot who was meant to have saved them from this mess just got shot down. "I don't suppose a Radio Shack would carry spares?" Harrison asked hopefully. Darren tugged at his radio pack on his belt, angled it to see the display... the display was dead. Maybe those blasts really were some kind of nuke, he'd heard that EMP effects would neutralise electronics. "I doubt it." "What's the plan now, Boss?" Darren sucked down a breath and risked a glance back up at the sky. He heard another thump, felt the tremble in his feet of a blast. "Well we came down here on that report of a saucer at the bridge, and we've found the goddamn bugs, so..." Darren grimaced. Nobody else seemed to like that idea either. The now familiar whine of a Jet's engines became audible. Close. Darren's heart leapt, he backed up to the corner and stuck his head around just in time to see the specks of light before the rolling thunder washed over him. A second black widow was diving on the bugs's position, lines of tracer rounds were battering into the roof and chunks of masonry and flame were gouting into the air. The jet pulled away and a moment went by. Another. Darren twisted around. "Jon!" But Corporal Money was already behind him, rifle up with his eye glued to the scope. "Hold on, hold on..." The civvies were still screaming, but the patter of masonry falling from a few blocks down filled the air with hope. Moments ticked by. Jon bit his lip. "I don't see anything." "That's going to have to do. Come on. That first pilot didn't go down far from here, and if he's alone much longer he might end up in a lot of trouble." Besides which. With any luck, someone would send a ranger to pick him up. Maybe they could hitch a ride.

Would it be possible to write a new geoscape type frontend that would call on the battlescape and set up battles and take the results to a saved file, or does our extensive knowledge of X-Com Hacking not extend quite so far? For example, Aaron writes a Battlescape scenario and posts it online. People can then download it, run it, and post their results to a challenge board. Or, could similar functionality be put together with one of the save game and map editors?

Thank you! I am very glad to have the siege returning to active duty. That 'longest five minutes' of Colonel Deerman's life was... well, it was a doozy. Edit: Also, internal strife in X-Com... far later on down the line, when FA picks up with some of his stuff set in the decades after the first alien war, you can see some significant internal strife and strife with the US government. Did I rip that off?... We call it homage.

59. --- Nova Scotia, X-Com Base 'Nova Scotia': XF-37, Base Command and Control Center, December 23rd 2000, 16:24 EST. "Oh my God." "Is this live?" The news presenters had lost it, anyone could see that. Javier leaned low over one of the intel staff's shoulders, glaring at the screen. A live feed from a helicopter. Just then there was another flash. Another swathe of traffic disappeared from Brooklyn bridge, was replaced by ash and wreckage. "It's like some kind of nuclear device." "What's happening there?" A ticker started playing across the bottom of the screen, 'Incident in New York'. Javier chewed his lip. "Why hasn't this been censored yet? This has been going on ten minutes." "I'm guessing the War Room doesn't have this keyed in on their automated program. I mean there's nothing we can actually see right now as alien activity, as it's defined by the system, sir." The Camera panned across the mouth of the East River. Two ferries, crossing the river, were masses of ash and flame. Others were fanning away from the coast like desperate gnats. "Oh God. Oh God, those poor people." "This can't be terrorists, can it? Do we have anyone on the scene?" "We had a correspondent at the plane crash but she's lost contact with us, and-" "Cut that chatter," Javier ordered. Amongst the rising buildings that began to grow into clumps of skyscrapers, then the concrete Jungle of Southern Manhattan proper, there was something there shouldn't have been. The helicopter's cameraman had picked up on it too, zoomed in. Gouts of red smoke at the base of something not quite a skyscraper in height, built with white pillars and domed rooves like all those American governmental buildings, the whitehouse, you name it. "Can you zoom in?" "Uhm." The intel officer ducked his head. The display quartered, one of the quarters grew to fill the screen. Red smoke, a thin plume - not concealment, a marker. As issued to X-Com soldiers. "What is that building?" An officer nearby consulted a map on a seperate computer display, glanced up across at the display from CNN, the map again. "One center street. The... Manhattan Municipal Building. Database says that is some kind of governmental address. Tax offices, that kind of thing. WYNC radio station transmits from there." "Do we have access to the station?" "Uhhh. Christ, sir, you're not asking for much. Give me a minute, maybe off one of the team's whips..." The image from CNN disappeared in a sudden wrenching blur of green-tinged static. Javer thumped his fist on the desk. "Fuck! What was that?" "No idea, sir. That wasn't the censor program." "Hold on, they're back..." An unsteady camera image now. Very unsteady. Pieces of wreckage were hitting the East River, a few moments passed, another flash on the bridge. One of the officers, the one dealing with the radio station, pressed a hand against the earcup of his headset. "Sir, I can't get anything for WYNC. It's dead air." "They're a goddamn local news station, aren't they? There's a lot of goddamn local news!" Javier grimaced. Reached up and pinched the bridge of his nose. "That's roughly the location Throop's squad lost contact in, wasn't it?" "Roughly, sir." "Damn. The first thing you do in a coup is take over the news stations, the TV, announce your victory to everyone, isn't it? Maybe the bugs were paying attention. Do we still have any ordnance in the air, after the strikes?" "No, they'd be down to nose-cannons, sir." "Well turn them around, we've got a marked building, and they have to be firing those damn blasting things from somewhere. Get one fly-by and have another on station to strafe." "Yes sir." Javier crushed the heel of his palm against his forehead and backed off a few steps. A nervous looking secretary from the other side of Command and Control, a young man stationed with admin who'd been transferred over from Houston a month before, held out a folder. "Sir? You need to look at this." "What is it?" Javier asked, taking the folder and automatically flipping it open. Faxed copies of hand-written notes? "These, uhh. These are the orders coming through in fifteen minutes from the War Room, sir. They're being typed up now, I have a buddy over there and-" Priority One - Arrest Colonel Javier Deerman 5831-9ct-XCM on war crime charges. Transfer command for operations at landing site 1811 to Colonel David Powers 9427-ju9-XCM. Javier froze. "Shit. I didn't think Colonel Eddings would do this to me." "Sir." The secretary grimaced. "That's not Colonel Eddings's handwriting, it's Powers's." Javier blinked. "War Room's in Washington, Powers is the commander at Houston. You're sure?" "I typed his memos for him for six months." "What the- get me a line to Colonel Eddings on the double." "Yes sir." Meanwhile, one of the air controllers was glancing back for him. "Sir, we've got our flyby, pilot reports multiple figures on the roof of the marked building with some kind of heavy equipment and- Shit, he's lost power, he's ejecting-" The main GEOSCAPE display abruptly lost another yellow diamond marking one of the fighters. The air controller was frozen. He pulled off his earpiece slowly, lay it down. Crushed a hand against his mouth. "Put a strike on there immediately," Javier snapped. He glanced back. "I need that line to Colonel Eddings now!"

58. --- New York City, Manhattan, 155th Street, December 23rd 2000, 16:23 EST "Was that another airstrike?" "No. That had to be them, some kind of anti-vehicle weapon, has to be." "What the fucking hell kinds of vehicles are they shooting at, man?" Porter winced at the sound of another blast, turning to gaze south. They were practically on the northern tip of Manhattan island. Well, they were moving to try and cut it off, anyway. Sergeant Nigel Capstain, 1824-cjr-XCM, was not looking forward to trying to clear that objective with just four men. But Lieutenant Cyr didn't have the manpower for more. Hell, nobody had the manpower, at his last count there were, what, maybe thirty X-Com troops on the ground in New York? And out of that, ten casualties, medevacs, the works, easy. There it was again. It wasn't the sound of thunder, like other plasma weapons. The noise was this single low thump, like someone slapping your chest. Barely audible, really, but it was carrying for miles and freaking miles. Thump. And every time, a flash on the horizon against the darkening sky. Corton and Howards were working their way down the opposite side of the street, ducking their heads to glare into the cars crawling along towards the Macombs Dam bridge. 155th, right here, was elevated to keep it straight as the island slumped down to the river. Nigel leaned over the railing to glare down into a small, open park with a baseball pitch... field, whatever, laying abandoned. Nothing. Corton ducked her head, stepped out into the road, waving at a driver. "Yo, yo! Could you wake him up please?" The driver nervously rolled down her window, glanced aside at the bloated looking man in the passenger seat. "He's..." Fear knifed into Nigel's gut. He paused, casting a glance up and down the row of cars that'd suddenly halted behind Corton's. Corton pulled a tight smile through her application of urban camouflage. "Wake him up, please." "Honey?" The driver shook her passenger. He came to with a start, shook his head. Slumped back down lethargically. "Mmn?" "What's your name please, sir?" Corton angled her head under the level of the car's roof. "Geor- Hey. Hey, why I got to answer to you?" Porter shook his head. "Well, that's not the right kind of combative unconscious maniac," he muttered, glancing south again. Corton's smile loosened. "That's fine. Carry on." She sidestepped a slow-moving van and got back onto the sidewalk with Howards. "He's just narcoleptic, that's okay, isn't it?" The driver craned her head out of the car window. "Yeah, it's fine," Corton yelled back before resuming her steady pace, eyeing the cars as they went be. The driver hesitated. "Is it true aliens are invading? Only I heard-" Corton pointedly ignored that, stepping along. "I heard people been getting abducted, you know? The aliens are pissed off, and-" Another driver rolled down his window, yelled, "Hey, lady, will ya friggen move it?" New York drivers. Best in the world. Nigel loosened his grip on his G3. "We need a roadblock." "What we need is some kind of miracle. Where are these Chryssalids we're looking for, anyway?" Porter looked south again, caught a flash against the sky. The low thump followed a few moments later. Nigel bit his lip. Plumes of smoke were crawling up the horizon. The city was dark, most streets that didn't lead out of town were eerily empty. "I think they're busy, Porter."

Apparently some concept art forum was having a contest, and they picked Julian Gollop to give 'em the theme - Chryssalids! Chexxor --> http://www.conceptart.org/forums/showthread.php?t=84308

57. --- New York City, Manhattan, Madison Avenue and East 102nd Street, December 23rd 2000, 16:19 EST. Brewer felt like shit. "A chemical agent has been released inside the hospital. Please move away in an orderly fashion. A chemical agent has been released-" It wasn't the message, or the supposed chemical agents floating around. It was the pair of dead ops officers in the back of the NYPD's Emergency Services Unit van. "Christ." "No kidding." Detective Jackson fidgeted with the safety catch on his shotgun for the twelvth time. The street lamps came on with sharp pings overhead, while the sky started going from a blazing orange to night black on the horizon. Their eyes were drawn up to Mount Sinai hospital. Everything was still, even as flashing lights from their patrol car swept the building's facade. Not many lights were on in the hospital, only the ones on automated timers. The lobby, which had pools of blood visible even from out here on the street. Corridors. But all the wards on the higher floors, everything else was dim grey. Jackson glanced up curiously. Another plane? The world heaved an inch, a sonic boom clapped Brewer across the ears and sent him sick to his stomach. "Fucking hell, not again! That's like the eighth one toda-" "Brewer." Jackson started backing away, pointing up at the sky. Brewer followed the line of Jackson's finger. Weird shapes took a placid arc down off the jet's line of flight. Cross-shaped twirling aerobrakes holding back on broad, stubby missile-like objects. Growing bigger. Brewer's legs jolted him around the ESU van and he was only just curled up like a frightened baby when the interior of the hospital stopped being dim grey. For a second it was blazing white, then red, and the windows, all of the windows, blew out in plumes of flame followed by hellish black smoke and the noise had already made Brewer deaf, but he knew the sounds must have been terrible because the ground was quivering. Something picked up the van and rolled it over him, crushing the air out of his body and even if he was deaf he could feel the cracking noise splitting around his back, feel the abrupt pain, the moment of weightless wonder while he was thrown aside like a piece of kindling and the awful thudding of his body on rough ground. There was nothing but choking dust all around marked by blazing flames everywhere the hospital had been. Brewer couldn't move his arms, he was limp like a fish. He thought he gasped out Jackson's name, he didn't even bother trying to stand up because his leg was all the wrong angle and tears were pouring out of his eyes like he was a baby but the pain was too awful, his gut was rollicking and heaving and for the first time in his life he felt like a coward. He found part of an arm, insensibly he thought it was his until he realized he was holding onto it with two hands, then he dropped it. The dust cleared a little, and he could see other burning plumes in the sky, some near, some far away, and it was then that he really understood that his city was under attack.

56. --- Nova Scotia, X-Com Base 'Nova Scotia': XF-37, Base Command and Control Center, December 23rd 2000, 16:17 EST. The last five minutes had been the longest of his life. Every second seemed to crawl by like an hour, from the second November One dropped off the communications network with babbling about Blasting Bombs it felt like a year and six months had vanished in the snap of a finger. "Colonel Deerman?" Javier bit his lip, watching the simulated line of shadow between night and day passing over New York on his GEOSCAPE interface. This had been Throop's idea. Throop's insane plan, and now the bastard was dead and the responsibility was off the lucky... Too many people had died. He'd feel the pain later, right now he was angry, angry that his leader on the spot had gotten himself killed. "Sir, we need confirmation from November Sierra Actual." A flight of yellow specks were arrayed over Westchester New York, sweeping down on the city like a set of scythes. "Sir, we need that confirmation now." Their targets were picked out in orange crosses. Orange crosses fixed obscenely over every major hospital in New York, none of which were responding to the city's emergency despatch services. He'd had the liaisons with the US government confirm that, twice. He'd had it confirmed. He didn't have any choice. Javier swallowed down the bile in his throat. "November Sierra Actual confirms ground strikes on civilian targets. Execute." The ops room staff member turned away, shielding his face while he relayed the order on. Javier hadn't been a religious man, particularly not in the last few years. The existence of aliens had seemed to make petty human things like who did what a thousand years ago a little insignificant. But he didn't feel guilty about never going to the tiny base's chapel. After all, there was no way he was getting out of going to hell now.

--- Phase Four: Nightfall

... Great... ... Thanks... I think...

Let me know what you think of it. I certainly haven't run across any games like it for a good few years now.

Interesting little Indy game. Basically it's a turn based strategy game with some CCG type elements - units, structures, etc etera are represented by virtual cards which you can then lay down on a hex-board with a certain expenditure of resources. It's got some quirks, but I've been enjoying it. Single-player only, mind. http://www.crypticcomet.com/