TFTD: mapping out the spawn points of USO's and other objects

[Maurice76]

As detailed in one of my other posts, I discovered a huge spawn table within the executable of the game. I've decided to go ahead and actually plot everything on the world map. Below is the fruit of that labor. Each of the 12 ZONAL.DAT entries has their own subset of waypoints and spawnpoints and the images below all hold the waypoints and spawnpoints associated with them. For completeness sake, I've also drawn the Sea they're matched to (based on the Alien Infiltration subroutine).

 

Before I post the images, I will first provide the color legend as well as a disclaimer. The colors that I've used on the image distinguish between the various sub-indices that exist, of which there are 6 in total.

 

Dark red is sub-index 0.

Green is sub-index 1.

Yellow is sub-index 2.

Blue is sub-index 3 and represents the Terror Site locations.

Magenta is sub-index 4 and represents the possible locations for Alien Colonies.

Teal is sub-index 5 and represents Alien USO entry and exit points.

 

Black represents landmass, dark grey represents the seas. Lighter grey shaded areas represent ZONAL.DAT indices corresponding to the displayed spawn nodes.

 

Note that USO's travel to waypoints of other sub-indices as well, depending on their mission parameters.

 

Disclaimer 1: some of the spawn areas are overlapping eachother, in which case higher sub-indices are covering over lower sub-indices.

Disclaimer 2: I omitted maps for North America, Eurasia and Africa, as they contain no spawn points whatsoever.

 

ZONAL.DAT index 0: The North Atlantic

 

 

ZONAL.DAT index 1: South Atlantic

 

 

ZONAL.DAT index 2: North Pacific

 

 

ZONAL.DAT index 3: South Pacific

 

 

ZONAL.DAT index 4: the Mediterranean

 

 

ZONAL.DAT index 5: South China Sea

 

 

ZONAL.DAT index 6: the Indian Ocean

 

 

ZONAL.DAT index 7: the Sea of Japan

 

 

ZONAL.DAT index 8: the North Sea (note some waypoints are way down south here, of sub-index types 0 and 1)

 

 

ZONAL.DAT index 9: the Caribbean

 

 

ZONAL,DAT index 10: the AntArctic (note the two large blue blocks; they are sub-index type 3, i.e. Terror Site locations. However, no Terror missions are carried out in the AntArctic)

 

 

ZONAL.DAT index 11: the Arctic (also has two large blue blocks, like the AntArctic. These aren't used either)

 

 

Something that is rather hard to see is the Terror Sites, since they are only 1 pixel in size. I've highlighted them in the map below, where green circles denote Island Terror Mission sites, and red circles denote Port Terror Mission sites. Note the four blue Terror Site blocks that aren't used ingame. There is actually 1 Terror Site within one such block. I've kept the blocks as they are, although they serve no purpose by themselves.

 

 

Also, it may be interesting to have the possible locations of all Alien Colonies. I've assembled them together in the map below. Note that there are a fair amount of possible locations that are on top of a landmass.

 

 

Finally, the USO's can only spawn in very few locations. The below map highlights all these spawnpoints. Note that most of them occur outside the actual Sea in which they carry out their missions (see the individual ZONAL.DAT maps above).

[Zombie]

Amazing job! Thanks for the info and great pictures!

 

- Zombie

[Hobbes]

ZONAL,DAT index 10: the AntArctic (note the two large blue blocks; they are sub-index type 3, i.e. Terror Site locations. However, no Terror missions are carried out in the AntArctic)

 

ZONAL.DAT index 11: the Arctic (also has two large blue blocks, like the AntArctic. These aren't used either)

 

Something that is rather hard to see is the Terror Sites, since they are only 1 pixel in size. I've highlighted them in the map below, where green circles denote Island Terror Mission sites, and red circles denote Port Terror Mission sites. Note the four blue Terror Site blocks that aren't used ingame. There is actually 1 Terror Site within one such block. I've kept the blocks as they are, although they serve no purpose by themselves.

 

Excellent work with all the zones.

 

Just a couple of observations about those mystery terror zones in the poles. First an interesting thing about the Arctic terror zones that if you switch their latitude to negative (on OpenXcom northern latitudes are negative), you get this:

 

 

Making them appear on the ocean instead of land (like the Antarctic ones), for the propose they were designed. And empty terror zones in the Arctic/Antarctica are actually also present in the first game, according to OpenXCom.

 

Why? Because there is an ufoTrajectory used by UFOs on retaliation missions that use those zones as waypoints while scouting for XCom bases, in both games. And since there are no cities in the Arctic/Antarctic, it was required to have something for the UFOs to use for navigation, thus the terror zones.

 

One side effect of the wrong latitude is that USOs sent on retaliation missions on the Arctic will at a certain moment of their flight go all the way across the planet to the Antarctic and back to the Arctic while scouting for XCom bases.

[Maurice76]

That's interesting information! I have to admit that I didn't check to see if the game actually directly referenced those specific areas, as I assumed they were simply left-overs from when they designed the various spawnpoints and waypoints (including Terror Sites). I'll check and see if I can find direct pointers to them in the code.

 

With the information you provided, it's clearly a bug that the two Arctic "Terror regions" are actually in the AntArctic. Luckily, it's not hard to fix, just need to alter the Y-coordinate to occur near the Arctic instead of the other way around.

[Hobbes]

It might be interesting to add a legend for the different zones (colors) and how they are used for UFOs.

 

Type 0 (red) - Waypoints, USO landing areas

Type 1 (green) - Waypoints, USO landing areas

Type 2 (yellow) - Waypoints, USO landing areas

Type 3 (dark blue) - Terror site Port/Island locations, landing zone for Infiltration missions

Type 4 (purple) - Alien Colony locations, USO landing areas for Base and Infiltration missions.

Type 5 (cyan) - USO entry/exit

 

This is based off the ufoTrajectories for the first game, see here for more details.

 

Also, there's a table of locations used for the Shipping Lane/Artifact Site markers.

[Maurice76]

It might be interesting to add a legend for the different zones (colors) and how they are used for UFOs.

 

Actually, I did already . Near the top I wrote this:

 

Dark red is sub-index 0.

Green is sub-index 1.

Yellow is sub-index 2.

Blue is sub-index 3 and represents the Terror Site locations.

Magenta is sub-index 4 and represents the possible locations for Alien Colonies.

Teal is sub-index 5 and represents Alien USO entry and exit points.

 

Thanks for the link, though. Will be interesting to dive some deeper into Shipping Lane and Artefact Site locations, as I haven't pinpointed those references yet.

 

Hobbes, did you read also my posts about the USO Mission control and the ZONAL.DAT file and ACTS.DAT file? I've made some observations there too with regards to the sub-indices of the waypoint markers and how the game uses them in the corresponding control tables.

 

Edit: Lol, seems I am confirming a lot of what you've found for UFO but then for TFTD . I admit that I haven't done any exploration of UFO (yet), so I was pretty much completely focussed on TFTD while uncovering the information in the posts I've made. I guess most of it is pretty much identical to UFO, though.

[Hobbes]

Thanks for the link, though. Will be interesting to dive some deeper into Shipping Lane and Artefact Site locations, as I haven't pinpointed those references yet.

 

Hobbes, did you read also my posts about the USO Mission control and the ZONAL.DAT file and ACTS.DAT file? I've made some observations there too with regards to the sub-indices of the waypoint markers and how the game uses them in the corresponding control tables.

 

Edit: Lol, seems I am confirming a lot of what you've found for UFO but then for TFTD . I admit that I haven't done any exploration of UFO (yet), so I was pretty much completely focussed on TFTD while uncovering the information in the posts I've made. I guess most of it is pretty much identical to UFO, though.

 

Warboy1982 is actually the responsible for most of these discoveries while investigating both the original games to replicate into OpenXCom and I've mentioned your threads to him since it's nice to have confirmation from other people. I created the Alien Missions UFOPaedia page based on the info contained in OXC mainly to help modders understand how missions work.

 

Most of what you posted has been already implemented by him and other developers into OXC, but there are some very interesting bits of information like Alaska or New Mexico not being possible to be infiltrated due to the reasons you posted about ZONAL.DAT and ACTS.DAT files. These 'bugs' are nice to know because TFTD has several of those and someone might design a mod to fix them for OXC.

 

Btw, it would be really nice to get those maps above to the UFOPaedia

[Maurice76]

Warboy1982 is actually the responsible for most of these discoveries while investigating both the original games to replicate into OpenXCom and I've mentioned your threads to him since it's nice to have confirmation from other people. I created the Alien Missions UFOPaedia page based on the info contained in OXC mainly to help modders understand how missions work.

 

Ah, nice to know . Oh, in case I am totally off on what I state, feel free to tell me I'm being stupid and what the data really represents .

 

Most of what you posted has been already implemented by him and other developers into OXC, but there are some very interesting bits of information like Alaska or New Mexico not being possible to be infiltrated due to the reasons you posted about ZONAL.DAT and ACTS.DAT files. These 'bugs' are nice to know because TFTD has several of those and someone might design a mod to fix them for OXC.

 

Alaska is easy enough to add to the table, although it does require some patching of the GeoScape.exe file. I'll dig up what's needed for that (replacing the Euro-Syndicate entry that's listed with the USA). New Mexico can be added easily enough by setting the Infiltration chance to something higher than 00 in the ACTS.DAT file. Patch can be made into the GeoScape.exe file to make it persistent, otherwise it has to be added at the start of each new game, when the game generates the file.

 

Fixing up the fact that secondary nations in the Infiltration list don't get hit is something that probably can't be fixed in the GeoScape.exe file, as it does require some coding. But in OpenXCom, it's probably possible by keeping an eye on the corresponding column of the ACTS.DAT file: once the entry gets set to zero for a specific ZONAL.DAT index, it just once needs to be set back to what it was.

 

Btw, it would be really nice to get those maps above to the UFOPaedia

 

They're up for grabs .

 

Just one thing to point out, I do plan to update the maps a bit. Yesterday I spent a better part of the day writing some code in Excel to punch the waypoint table into a BMP format, with color index based on sub-index, which was actually the hardest part. With that one done, generating the actual image was relatively trivial. I obtained the world map from a .gif on the UfoPedia, the one with all the seas on it (I actually couldn't find a base map without them, although I think I should be able to extract one from the WORLD.DAT file ). After making all the seas white, I decided to use dark(er) colors for the waypoints. Only near the end did I make the seas darkgrey (and I am kinda pleased with how that map turned out to be).

 

Looking at the maps now, I wonder if I shouldn't use brighter colors for the waypoints.

 

In any case, I do plan to make more maps, zoomed in on each region, with the blocks actually having transparency, so they can be distinguished from one another. With the code I wrote it's relatively trivial to generate layers for each sub-index, which can then be merged in a graphics tool.

 

The only map that looks "finished" is the one with the Terror Sites (although I am pondering adding the names of the sites ).

[Hobbes]

Ah, nice to know . Oh, in case I am totally off on what I state, feel free to tell me I'm being stupid and what the data really represents .

 

Oh, you most likely know a ton more than me, I just learn what I need for modding and to satisfy my curiosity about the original's mechanics. Warboy1982 would be the best person for corrections.

 

Alaska is easy enough to add to the table, although it does require some patching of the GeoScape.exe file. I'll dig up what's needed for that (replacing the Euro-Syndicate entry that's listed with the USA). New Mexico can be added easily enough by setting the Infiltration chance to something higher than 00 in the ACTS.DAT file. Patch can be made into the GeoScape.exe file to make it persistent, otherwise it has to be added at the start of each new game, when the game generates the file.

 

Fixing up the fact that secondary nations in the Infiltration list don't get hit is something that probably can't be fixed in the GeoScape.exe file, as it does require some coding. But in OpenXCom, it's probably possible by keeping an eye on the corresponding column of the ACTS.DAT file: once the entry gets set to zero for a specific ZONAL.DAT index, it just once needs to be set back to what it was.

 

This should be easier to patch on OXC - I'll mention this to Warboy to see if he has noticed it already.

 

They're up for grabs .

 

Just one thing to point out, I do plan to update the maps a bit. Yesterday I spent a better part of the day writing some code in Excel to punch the waypoint table into a BMP format, with color index based on sub-index, which was actually the hardest part. With that one done, generating the actual image was relatively trivial. I obtained the world map from a .gif on the UfoPedia, the one with all the seas on it (I actually couldn't find a base map without them, although I think I should be able to extract one from the WORLD.DAT file ). After making all the seas white, I decided to use dark(er) colors for the waypoints. Only near the end did I make the seas darkgrey (and I am kinda pleased with how that map turned out to be).

 

Looking at the maps now, I wonder if I shouldn't use brighter colors for the waypoints.

 

In any case, I do plan to make more maps, zoomed in on each region, with the blocks actually having transparency, so they can be distinguished from one another. With the code I wrote it's relatively trivial to generate layers for each sub-index, which can then be merged in a graphics tool.

 

The only map that looks "finished" is the one with the Terror Sites (although I am pondering adding the names of the sites ).

 

I guess I was too subtle - what I meant was: it would be nice to have someone to add them to the UFOPaedia. I'd do it myself (I was the one who added the .gif you mentioned) but right I'm too busy with a ton of other stuff

[Maurice76]

I guess I was too subtle - what I meant was: it would be nice to have someone to add them to the UFOPaedia. I'd do it myself (I was the one who added the .gif you mentioned) but right I'm too busy with a ton of other stuff

 

Ahh, now I get you . I don't have an account on the UfoPaedia, nor did I ever work with updating a Wiki, so I am a bit clueless on that part as well.

 

By the way, I think the images I linked are actually a shrunk format, from when I uploaded it. If so desired (by whomever wishes to put the images on the site), I can also supply the original images I made (2880x1440 format).

 

Below is an update that I've been working on. It includes transparency on all areas. One thing that I did notice was that some areas (especially in the two polar regions) are exactly overlapping. With transparency for each, the eventual color is hard to break apart into the original colors that formed it. Would you say the images below are better? Note that I also wiped away a black stripe near the AntArctic, just below Africa, which I missed when cleaning out the oceans .

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Notice the pink in the two images of the arctic regions. They are a composite of green, magenta and yellow.

 

 

 

 

 

[Hobbes]

Ahh, now I get you . I don't have an account on the UfoPaedia, nor did I ever work with updating a Wiki, so I am a bit clueless on that part as well.

 

By the way, I think the images I linked are actually a shrunk format, from when I uploaded it. If so desired (by whomever wishes to put the images on the site), I can also supply the original images I made (2880x1440 format).

 

The best size for UFOPaedia images is around 800, so those should be fine. I might just add them myself but right now I'm in the middle of playtesting my expansion for OXC so I'm kinda busy.

 

Below is an update that I've been working on. It includes transparency on all areas. One thing that I did notice was that some areas (especially in the two polar regions) are exactly overlapping. With transparency for each, the eventual color is hard to break apart into the original colors that formed it. Would you say the images below are better? Note that I also wiped away a black stripe near the AntArctic, just below Africa, which I missed when cleaning out the oceans .

 

Notice the pink in the two images of the arctic regions. They are a composite of green, magenta and yellow.

 

I'm not 100% sure about this, but your mention of the black stripe reminds me of a post/thread in a distant galaxy about some errors with the regions overlapping one another, but I can't remember where I read about this or if it applied to TFTD, To me at first sight I don't see much difference between the original images and the new ones, but it's not easy to compare.

[Maurice76]

I'm not 100% sure about this, but your mention of the black stripe reminds me of a post/thread in a distant galaxy about some errors with the regions overlapping one another, but I can't remember where I read about this or if it applied to TFTD, To me at first sight I don't see much difference between the original images and the new ones, but it's not easy to compare.

 

You can see it where areas are overlapping eachother, or crossing the border between a landmass and the sea; partial transparency is noticable there as well as a slightly visible edge around all areas. The black stripe I meant was a left-over from wiping out the sea textures . In my effort to get the areas placed correctly, I didn't identify those stripes as left-over sea textures, until this afternoon. I've cleaned them out of the second set of images.

 

But I also just noticed a glaring mistake on my part. The Sea overlay areas are colored lighter than in the originals. Only after I saw that did I remember that I changed the color index to somewhat darker in my graphics program, after having generated them with my code for the initial set of maps. I forgot to change that when I generated the new set this evening.

[Hobbes]

You can see it where areas are overlapping eachother, or crossing the border between a landmass and the sea; partial transparency is noticable there as well as a slightly visible edge around all areas. The black stripe I meant was a left-over from wiping out the sea textures . In my effort to get the areas placed correctly, I didn't identify those stripes as left-over sea textures, until this afternoon. I've cleaned them out of the second set of images.

 

I can't recall exactly where I read it, maybe it's in the talk pages of the UFOPaedia but there's something about the areas/zones. And it's not the black stripe nor the overlapping.

[Zombie]

I can't recall exactly where I read it, maybe it's in the talk pages of the UFOPaedia but there's something about the areas/zones. And it's not the black stripe nor the overlapping.

 

Probably the Geoscape wiki page for EU and TFTD. In EU there's a regional "strip" the game didn't mark as Australasia which it should have. Also there is overlap in the following countries: Russia/China, China/India and France/Germany. This really isn't too bad all things considered. TFTD on the other hand, looks like the GEO map programmer was drunk or incompetent (or both)! It's a total mess.

 

Ahh, now I get you . I don't have an account on the UfoPaedia, nor did I ever work with updating a Wiki, so I am a bit clueless on that part as well.

 

If I can figure it out, so can you! It really isn't too hard, and if you mess up, there's always a undo button!

 

By the way, I think the images I linked are actually a shrunk format, from when I uploaded it. If so desired (by whomever wishes to put the images on the site), I can also supply the original images I made (2880x1440 format).

 

Please, 2880x1440 would be great for these pics as smaller images wouldn't show the details as much.

 

Below is an update that I've been working on. It includes transparency on all areas. One thing that I did notice was that some areas (especially in the two polar regions) are exactly overlapping. With transparency for each, the eventual color is hard to break apart into the original colors that formed it. Would you say the images below are better? Note that I also wiped away a black stripe near the AntArctic, just below Africa, which I missed when cleaning out the oceans .

 

Take a look at the Geoscape pages I linked to above and check out the images there for how overlap was handled. If you could make it apparent where the overlap areas are by using transparency, please do!

 

- Zombie

[Hobbes]

Probably the Geoscape wiki page for EU and TFTD. In EU there's a regional "strip" the game didn't mark as Australasia which it should have. Also there is overlap in the following countries: Russia/China, China/India and France/Germany. This really isn't too bad all things considered. TFTD on the other hand, looks like the GEO map programmer was drunk or incompetent (or both)! It's a total mess.

 

Ah thanks for the links. Yeah, that's what I was talking about, the overlaps can be understandable but there's quite a few gaps on TFTD.

 

Regarding the Arctic retaliation mission, where all UFOs will go to Antarctica and back to the Arctic during their flight paths, I did some testing to see if those UFOs could detect XCom bases during their flight between the poles and the answer seems negative. Which is a bit a relief considering that the alternative meant that those retaliations could happen against XCom bases located anywhere that happened to be on the UFO flight paths.

[Space Voyager]

Guys, I have nothing of value to post here except to express my admiration for the dedication. As far as craft and missions are concerned, I only cared about one thing; "Ah, here's one!".

[Maurice76]

I think there's some confusion, lol. I think you guys are addressing an issue I was yet unaware of. Interesting in its own right, of course, but I guess what you are talking about is the information contained in the WORLD.DAT file. That one contains the vertices of all the polygons that make up the various seas, which probably has the overlapping polygon structures that you guys are talking about.

 

What I was talking about was about the .gif on the UfoPaedia, with all the seas on it. I copied that one to obtain the landmasses and simply colored all seas white. After clearing out (most of) the sea textures, I turned the image into a 2-color image (black/white only), so the remains of the sea textures that I forgot to wipe out turned up black, like land masses, in the resulting image. I overlooked one such accidental "sea-turned-landmass area" between the AntArctic and Africa .

 

The removal of the sea textures lowered contrast, so when I then drew all the waypoint areas on it, they would stand out more. Some of those waypoint areas are overlapping with one another (a number even completely), so when you draw each with partial transparency, they tend to show up in a sort of composite color. Like many green (sub-index 1), yellow (sub-index 2) and magenta (sub-index 4) areas in the polar regions are stacked, the result shows as if it's a pink area instead, masking the three base colors.

 

But I will try and see if I can examine the WORLD.DAT file in closer detail. Create a map of that one, too, should not be too hard. Coming time is going to be busy though, so no promises; won't have much time tonight or coming weekend. Coming monday, Heroes 7 also goes live, which will likely gobble up a lot of my free time as well .

 

Edit:

Take a look at the Geoscape pages I linked to above and check out the images there for how overlap was handled. If you could make it apparent where the overlap areas are by using transparency, please do!

 

I am not sure I am following you here. When I check the links you provided, I see (for TFTD) the Sea charts and Region charts, already showing the overlapping areas. If you compare the images I provided, you can clearly identify the light grey blocks in each with the Sea chart image. Or do you mean to also show the images with Regions superimposed on them?

 

Edit 2: I just noticed that my Arctic maps are missing one strip, the one numbered 30 on the UfoPaedia. That's odd, since I am simply reading out the table with all the defined areas and 30 should be in that list. Also, the Sea of Japan is missing out on area 21. Will need to debug my code to see why it misses them.

 

Edit 3: I found out ... my code assumes that the Y-coordinate of the bottom right corner of each area is below the Y-coordinate of the top left corner of the area. For those two particular areas, that's not the case. I will need to update my code to consider that exception as well. Not difficult, at least, but means I will need to generate the affected maps again.

[Maurice76]

I've made a bunch of new images with the various coordinates, over the weekend. Now to find some time to merge the various layers and post them. When I do, I'll also remove all images posted so far, as to avoid confusion.