Strange Blobby Artifact in X-COM TFTD

[3371-Alpha]

Does anyone know what in god's name this is?! Or better yet, what causes it?!

[Zombie]

I've never seen it or encountered it before. Is that supposed to be a USO? If so, something is corrupt and you'll need to reinstall the maps, terrain and possibly routes folders.

 

- Zombie

[3371-Alpha]

It doesn't seem to be a uso as my soldiers/aquanauts can walk through it. It does, however, only appear to spawn over enemies. It also causes cursor lagging whenever the pointer crosses over it. I once had a similar problem in Enemy Unknown (though not as bad) when I installed both xcomutil with your combo patch. Disabling the "new" desert & farm terrains seemed to fix it so I didn't bother to post it anywhere. I'm not really sure what's causing it to appear in TFTD however.

[NKF]

While not exactly like this, I have seen both games go unstable and draw the sprites rather oddly. Usually the result of some memory leak or a messed up save file. Are you using any mods or editors to run the game when this graphic glitch shows up?

 

- NKF

[3371-Alpha]

Well, as I said before, I'm using xcomutil 9.6 as well as the "TFTD USO Routes Fix" and a few of the other community patches. The reason I installed the uso patch was because it seemed to be more complete then the one supplied with xcomutil (at least by the description it seemed more complete). I also used XcomUtil Undo to remove xcomutil's built in uso patch.

And my DOSBox/Boxer config file is below:

 

[sdl]

fulldouble=true

priority=highest,normal

output=openglnb

 

[dosbox]

memsize=64

 

[dos]

ems=false

xms=false

umb=false

 

[cpu]

cycles=max

core=dynamic

 

Any settings that aren't specified were left at their default values.

Also my system specs are below in my signature.

[NoXTheRoXStaR]

I think that's what happens to games when Electronic Arts escapes.

[3371-Alpha]

Any further advice guys?

[NoXTheRoXStaR]

My guess is either some of the mods are conflicting with each other or....did you happen to minimize the game while running a different program? It's a long shot but I've done that before and it will sometimes mess up the game's graphics. Only things I can think of.

 

-NoX

[NKF]

Anything you do now will probably not fix the issue in that particular tactical mission as the glitch information will already be in the save data. It should sort itself in the next battle if it's just a one off occurrence.

 

If it keeps repeating, all I can really suggest is to perhaps try reinstalling the game, XComutil and any other patches and see if that helps. If not, try adding or removing the patches in different combinations.

 

If you're just wanting to set the game up to be as stable as possible rather than for accessing any of the special functions provided by Xcomutil (re-arming, stat tags, etc), then I highly recommend leaving XComutil out entirely. Stick to the v2.0 or v2.1 patch. The routes and alien sub map fixes are also fine to apply.

 

An alternative might be to try OpenXCom, which should have reasonable support for TFTD now. I understand it has an OS X port.

 

- NKF

[3371-Alpha]

An alternative might be to try OpenXCom, which should have reasonable support for TFTD now. I understand it has an OS X port.

As cool as OpenXcom sounded, there's a problem with using it on my current hardware configuration. You see I'm running on the (now obsolete) PowerPC architecture as well as running an old version of OS X. OpenXcom requires an intel Mac with minimum 10.7 ("Lion") installed. I'm still running 10.5 ("Leopard"). Although I've made a thread here to ask for back porting help, I have yet to successfully compile it. That's why I've resorted to DOSBox emulation. Surprisingly, despite the fact that emulation is generally hardware demanding & especially slow on alien architectures, both Enemy Unknown & TFTD run extremely well on my current hardware config.

My processor is also the same reason I can't upgrade to xcomutil 9.7 (as I mentioned in previous threads) as it requires the setup process to be done in Windows. Although there are utilities (such as WINE & Crossover) that allow UNIX & UNIX-like OS's to run native Windows apps, they still require a x86 processor. WINE is not an emulator (no pun intended) so although it provides a Windows API compatibility layer it can't translate the x86 instructions inside the executable into PowerPC ones.

 

Edit: I seemed to have solved this issue. What you need to do is install xcomutil first and then install the uso routes fix overwriting xcomutil's changes. There doesn't appear to be any other way.