Enabling melee for Reaper?

[zaimoni]

I saw, in another thread, that putting a stun rod into the Chryssalid's hand(s) enabled the melee attack.

 

So...try that by hex editing a stun rod into the "right hand slot" of a Reaper. I got an 18 TU "stun" attack...and no reliable way of using it. [Due to testing circumstances, I was only able to get the SW and SE corners of the Reaper adjacent to the target]. I wasn't able to find a facing that actually used TUs.

 

Any idea what I should have done differently?

 

(If this isn't a reasonable subforum, please relocate.)

[Zombie]

Let's see, the Reaper has 62 TU on beginner and the Stun Rod uses 30% TU to use. That's 18.6 or 18 TU. At least the math jives: the MC'd Reaper will be using the Stun Rod characteristics.

 

Melee-only aliens will always prefer to use their own integrated attack system irregardless of what is occupying their hand slots. (Exception: if they have a gun they will use it for reaction fire). So placing a Stun Rod in a Reaper's, um, "hand" would have no effect on its behavior. The Reaper would use it's own melee attack over the Stun Rod. With a MC'd Reaper, you only have access to it's hand slots and not the integrated melee attack anyway, so you would be stuck with using the Stun Rod against enemies.

 

Did you try moving the target enemy around the Reaper until you found a spot which works?

 

- Zombie

[zaimoni]

The Reaper was down to 19/21 TU (this was a crashed Floater Terrorship) by the time it got to the target. No, I didn't think of teleporting either around this time.

 

The notion that either the NW corner, or the "turret attack sector", was relevant did come to mind.

====

I was testing an MC'ed Reaper (using XcomUtil to swap sides).

[Bomb Bloke]

I'd guess the best way to test this would be to surround the Reaper with units (twelve in all) and then use the attack.

[zaimoni]

Bomb Bloke: certainly the fastest way to test this.

 

Zombie: alas, it is indeed the stun damage that showed up. No good for the application I was thinking of.

 

The owning quarter that works is the NW corner. The stun attack worked on the facing in front of that.

 

The other three quarters as owning quarters...crashed out. [Assuming that I wasn't assigning ownership to dead Reapers...assuming that index is to record in unitpos.dat, not unitref.dat. The two would have different semantics.]

[Bomb Bloke]

Items are indeed assigned to units via unitpos records. So I suppose it makes sense that the functional area is the part you give the gun to.

[zaimoni]

Which doesn't, by itself, explain why giving the stun rod to other corners isn't sufficient to prevent crashing from clicking on a phantom stun rod. [Although if this affected tanks as well, that would be a good reason to disable tank inventory....]

[Bomb Bloke]

The item table records where they are, be it on the ground, or carried by a unit.

 

The item images you use to activate the weapons are recorded via unitref (which stores the majority of unit data), as opposed to the rest of the inventory (which is exclusively stored in obpos). So, you can make images for items appear, even if the actual items don't exist in the item table.

 

When you click on them, the game grabs the relevant unitpos record number for the unit, and uses that to hunt through obpos for the item in concern (which, yes, is inefficient, but not so much that it slows the game down). But in the case of a large unit, there are four possible unitpos entries, and no way of knowing which one the item is going to be assigned to.

 

Hence the game checks for the first unitpos record number (NW corner). If the item doesn't happen to be assigned to that segment, the entire obpos table is read without finding a match, and UFO falls over (probably with a memory access request sent to an out of bounds location). The game wouldn't catch this error because it can't happen in normal circumstances, and so isn't really a bug.