Apoc'd

[Kane99]

Hmm... Just was messing around with Apoc'd, setting damage modifiers and everything, and noticed that the DD still doesn't work. However, I now have a sort of proof of the DD destroying terrain, in the form of a collapsing building falling on my agents heads. Doesn't look like you can edit the DD's settings yet. Did I miss something, maybe?

 

Going to try setting the damage type in Agent Equipment 3 of the DD back to Dimension Destabilizer (there is an ammo type for it?). Like to find out what that does.

 

Oh, and I've set the settings for Agent Equipment 2 (2/x) so that it has an ammo type, and set the unit damage modifiers for the DD to 100. Going back to see if I missed anything. Is it possible that the DD settings need to be perfect for it to work properly?

 

*edit*: Hmm... I'm going to try setting one of the more useless weapons, the ones nobody ever carries around, such as the Megapol Lawpistol, so that it has the look and feel of a Dimension Destabilizer. I want to see if maybe just that entry is flawed. Is there perhaps a part of the hex code which declares the DD as "Not a Weapon"?

 

*Double Edit* SUCCESS! Upon editing the Megapol Lawpistol to mimic the weapons settings of the DD in every possible way, including picture, size, damage, tail size, rounds, and everything else (of course, not using the same ammo types, so as to maintain its own weapon settings, and not jump to the DD's weapon settings), the Megapol Lawpistol acted exactly as a DD should act. However, my game crashed shortly after. But that may simply be a problem with running X-Com Apoc on XP. I'll have to check that. Anyway, the Megapol Lawpistol acted like I designed it to.

 

However, you should know somthing about the DD's weapon characteristics first. The problem with the DD has nothing to do with its Agent Equipment 1 data. I accidentally set the Megapol Lawpistol to draw its weapon's data from the DD's weapon set for Agent Equipment 2, and it failed. Not sure why yet. Going to see if the problem is in Agent Equipment 2 or Agent Equipment 3 now.

 

*Triple Edit* Think I found out where the problem is. The weapon's inability to damage armor characteristics should be based in Agent Equipment 3. I'm trying to see if the DD will work if I set the Agent Equipment 2 settings to draw from the Megapol Lawpistol's Agent Equipment 3 settings. If this works, this could help narrow down the search grid of what is wrong.

 

*Fourth Edit* While I could get the Megapol Lawpistol to work in the game using it's own settings, the DD refused to work when I set it to the Lawpistols settings. Can anybody explain why this would be? Possibly there's a bug in the DD's command coding, or whatever makes this thing an actual weapon?

[j'ordos]

Probably the programmers just hard-coded the DD to not damage anything but the terrain&shields, they must've thought the damage modifiers wasn't enough... Well in fact it seems the DD does use the disruptor damage type, not the DD one, couldn't harm the terrain when disruptor damage was set to 0% on the two terrain entries.it

Another thing is the DD doesn't make those hissing/crunching noises when it hits someone, all the other weapons do, even when I set their damage type modifier to 0.

For now it seems you'll have to stick to replacing another weapon. Try the Psi grenade, forceweb or tracker gun for other unused weapons. It's always possible they have similar problems though.

Another thing I tried was giving the DD clips, setting 'recharging' to 'no'. This gave some really weird results, pretty sure there's still a good deal of agent equipment data I haven't found yet. There's always the chance the answer to getting the DD to work is somewhere out there

[Kane99]

You realize that you'll make a milestone for the Apocalypse community if you get it to work, right?

[j'ordos]

After a long delay version 2.00 is finally here, check first post for details.

(sorry kane, still no luck on getting the DD to work, that statue will have to wait for now )

[Kane99]

Well, that's too bad. I'm undergoing the rigorous structure of IB right now, so I'm pretty busy. Hopefully, you'll get it soon! Can't wait to research and build my own cannons instead of raiding ships and buildings for them... Thanks for all your work on a "dead" game. Keep up the awesome work!

 

P.S. I'm already halfway done with the statue, though!

[j'ordos]

New version as I found a rather bad bug when saving data both to tacp & ufo2p.exe (in other words: when editing agent equipment, damage modifiers&alien unit stats). Please restore your backup of tacp.exe and download the new version.

For those who are interested:

when reading data apoc'd determines whether it uses data from ufo2p.exe or tacp.exe (depends on which menu you came from: cityscape editing or battlescape editing), including offset data (location within the exe where the piece of data in question is stored). When saving changes it used only that offset for both ufo2p and tacp.exe, while these are in fact different for both files. This is no real problem when you edited that data in the battlescape menu as those offsets go beyond the size of ufo2p.exe, meaning data was actually only being written to tacp.exe. But when you edited through the cityscape menu, and thus used the offsets for ufo2p.exe it would overwrite some other data in tacp.exe. No telling what it affected (though so far I noticed no problems, tacp.exe contains quite a bit of blank data (reserved for future use/stripped out stuff?) so it could be nothing).

 

I also added backup creation for the 'CitymapX.bld' files in the ufodata folder (Buildings). This because editing a blank 'building' to create a new one WILL crash xcom apocalypse, which cannot be undone by resetting the values to 0!

 

On a lighter note, I did make a useful discovery in the savegame -> buildings data: amount&types of aliens present. Should make that tedious 'desinfectation' process much easier. Or just set to 0, problem solved (Don't know what that'd do with the infiltration rate though). Can also be used to create some sort of skirmish, just select amount of each alien type and change building function to get the map you want. Even UFO's can be selected (also quite a few unused building functions, all except for 'people tube' have no map file, and the people tube map has a messed up palette)

Not sure what the maximal # of aliens are in battle, I went a bit overboard once and a good amount never appeared plus brainsucker pods & hyperworms no longer spawned after a while.

 

(sorry, identical to the post in xcomufo, a bit too tired to create a fresh one )

[Zombie]

For those who are interested:

when reading data apoc'd determines whether it uses data from ufo2p.exe or tacp.exe (depends on which menu you came from: cityscape editing or battlescape editing), including offset data (location within the exe where the piece of data in question is stored). When saving changes it used only that offset for both ufo2p and tacp.exe, while these are in fact different for both files. This is no real problem when you edited that data in the battlescape menu as those offsets go beyond the size of ufo2p.exe, meaning data was actually only being written to tacp.exe. But when you edited through the cityscape menu, and thus used the offsets for ufo2p.exe it would overwrite some other data in tacp.exe. No telling what it affected (though so far I noticed no problems, tacp.exe contains quite a bit of blank data (reserved for future use/stripped out stuff?) so it could be nothing).

You know, I kinda wondered why the values for the alien stats were fine when editing in the battlescape (ufo2p.exe), yet the values were all messed up in cityscape (tacp.exe). Screwed up offsets explains it perfectly. At the time, I figured it was that way for a reason and decided to keep my mouth shut.

 

Thanks for the update, j'ordos. I'll test Apoc'd out some more to see if there are any additional problems.

 

- Zombie

[j'ordos]

Thanks for the update, j'ordos. I'll test Apoc'd out some more to see if there are any additional problems.

 

- Zombie

 

Good idea as I already found another one concerning building data, say hello to version 2.02. And while I was at it I also added mass editing again .

[EsTeR]

Hey! Good work on the editor with adding bulk aliens to buildings. If only I would have known that 50 alien eggs in my own warehouse would have hatched. Grrr multiworms.

 

I think i have found a bug (WHERE DO I REPORT BUGS???):

 

What I did: changed the AC-IN clip to explosive damage (option 4, not the other one down the damage list) set at 200. Changed range to 1600 (divide by 16 to get cell distance - I think), set next option down from range, set to 2400 (this is time limit of projectile, I think). Changed weight to 1 for clip, 2 for weapon. Increase accuracy of autocannon (with inserted IN clip) to 95 (actually I set it to 5, because your accuracy is opposite in the editor to what it is in-game), then finally set fire delay to 15 (my understanding is that this is time to elapse before gun fires again - similar to rate-of-fire)

 

What it did: The agent was armed with AC+IN clip (which now fires explosives) with manual control of gun (agent was set to No-Fire mode, agressive, and running).

THE gun fires nice and quick (time set to "normal" in REAL TIME combat). The projectile hits the target (a wall actually) and the a slight delay then the flame-shockwave from the explosion was about 45 cells in diameter. USUALLy, it is only the size of the explosion (ie: 140 explosive strength = 14 cells diameter). Why was the explosion radius so large from a 200 explosive?

 

After about three shots, the game promptly crashed.

 

?? : you may have accidently linked weapon range to explosion range.

[j'ordos]

Thanks for the comment!

Reporting bugs in here is perfectly fine by me

 

You need to check the last field of the agent equipment 3 section (I don't know if it's still called 'Explosion Size (?)' [edit: it is, should've updated the cfg]), it actually is the depletion rate of the explosion. The higher you set it the smaller the explosion will be. Try to find a good value for this field so the game no longer crashes. (How it works exactly I don't know, best to use the same value the vortex mine has and work from there)

 

Hope this helps!

[EsTeR]

Ok, that was the problem, THANKS!

 

but...

 

- explosive value of IN clip = 200

 

The vortex mine had a explosion value of 19 (power=150), the boomeroid was 9 (power=70).

 

Using these two default values i was able to work out the when RATIO=7.8, then at explosive power of 250, the explosion size should be 250/7.8 = 32

 

Just tested: WORKS!!! the diameter of explosion was about 12 cells.

 

Conclusion: divide explosion power by 8 to get suitable diameter for explosion size.

 

EXTRA: for smoother gameplay (when using resource hungry DOSbox), divide power by 5. Explosions aren't so big!

 

Cheers!

[darq_uan]

HI, Im just trying to change armour weight. Making megapol slightly heavier and disruptor armour alot heavier and armour value only a little better then megapol. But adjusting the weight stat in agent equipment 1 hasn't changed the ingame stats. Do i need to change something else too, should it have worked or is it not possible?

[j'ordos]

It works fine here, both cityscape and battlescape stats are altered properly. Don't forget to save the changes. Can't think of another reason why it didn't work for you... Are you using the latest version? (2.03)

[j'ordos]

Tried to upload the latest version (2.31b) to the files section, but I don't think the file itself was added (It never showed up in the preview at least)... If any of the admins could check I'd be grateful.

[Bomb Bloke]

Files just aren't visible in previews, don't worry about it.

 

I admitted the new version and deleted the old. For whatever reason the description text was full of "

", I advise you don't use that in the future as the files section doesn't seem to like it... I replaced them all with proper line breaks.

[j'ordos]

Thanks BB! Sorry about the <br /> stuff, I simply copied the description from the forum post, I'll try to keep it in mind next time.

Thanks again.

[Bomb Bloke]

No, thank you.

[Zombie]

Note to BB and j'ordos: due to safety concerns, members cannot post html encoded text (which is rendered in forum posts and websites). So cutting and pasting from the net into the text fields will result in a loss of formatting and a raw dump of the code. Admins can post html, so a quick dummy-edit of the file in question (after reviewing the code for possible backdoor trojans and such) will properly reformat the fields and everything will look the way it is supposed to. The best way to avoid this is for members to dump the text into notepad first then cut and paste it into the file fields.

 

- Zombie

[j'ordos]

Small question, how do you format the descriptions in the files section? Do you use the forum syntax? (

• , , ...)

[Zombie]

Nope comcode links are not allowed, but if you want formatted text in your description send it to me encoded in html and I'll be happy to add it.

 

- Zombie

[j'ordos]

Just adding the latest 3.0 beta version for those that want proper support for the steam version without having to create an account at xcomufo

edit: get latest version instead

[j'ordos]

Updated the beta in the previous post to include import&export functions.

 

Users upgrading from a previous apoc'd version should also download migrate.rar. Extract this to your apoc base folder and run migrate.bat to copy over your old backups to their new intended spot, so apoc'd won't create new backups from your modded files. The batch file offers to delete the old backups afterwards, but this is not recommended until the new backup system has proven it's worth.

[j'ordos]

And v3.00a version of apoc'd is finally out! Get it from the files section

[Gazz]

This is umm... bloody amazing!

 

The sheer scope of the thing blows away 99% of all editors for any game period.

 

For instance I could turn the Wolfhound into a flying, lightly armoured and unarmed truck, just to cart my agents around on the cityscape. No more micromanagement there...

 

You seriously should put a Paypal donation link in the readme. You might be surprised.

Oh, and then submit it to more cheat / tip / editor sites. This editor was far too hard to find. =)

 

 

Getting XCOMA to run on XP again was a quest in itself. For almost a week I had been tinkering with my old CD version when I remembered that I had also bought it as part of the XCOM bundle on Steam. (Christmas firesale for like 5$)

Taking the CD ISO and configuration from that installation, I had an instant XP/Vista-compatible config for ye olde CD version... without the need to "be online" with Steam. I mean seriously... online activation for a 1997's game? =)

[j'ordos]

Thanks, I'm fine with just positive comments instead of donations (for now )

I'm afraid turning the wolfhound into a flying truck is impossible though, there's a separate set of images for ground and flying vehicles. So you can turn it into a flying unit but you'll have to use one of the existing flying vehicles as a graphic.