Rifle butt to the face!

[FullAuto]

In the UFO manual (Page 34 in mine), there's a screenshot of the battlescape, with most of the screen taken up by the various shooting options. But above 'aimed shot' there's an option entitled "hit" which I have never ever seen. Now I presume you have to be next to the alien to get it, but I've been right up close, with the standard rifle, and that option has never appeared.

Anyone know what's going on? Was that option taken out before release or what?

[Jman4117]

It was taken out after they made the manual I guess.

[FullAuto]

Spoilsports. Cold-cocking sectoids into submission would be so much better than using stun rods

[Pumpkinhead]

It's obviously from a very early version of the game because it has:

 

Hit

[NKF]

AP = action points, I guess. Games like Fallout use AP's. Same thing really.

 

One of the things on top of my todo list if they ever release the code is to re-enable all the melee combat commands for the guns. You'd be surprised, but every weapon has melee damage levels (the stat used for the damage strength is also the same used for item quantity (used by ammo clips)).

 

Actually, the bash command never went away. They just removed the melee attack option, is all. You can actually get this command back by stacking a stun-rod and a weapon together.

 

Do this, pick up the weapon of your choice. With it on the cursor click on the page button for the floor items. Now, put the gun into your hand slot. It'll vanish. Don't click on the page button again or you'll have to restart. Now pick up the stun rod and put it in the slot you put the gun.

 

It will look like you're carrying the stun-rod, but it will be using the stats of the gun. However, notice that the 'stun' attack will still be there, and notice how the TU costs have increased to 50% (it's really the melee attack, but its text label still says 'stun'). Depending on the type of object used, the melee attacks can be nigh lethal. The heavy laser's pretty powerful. Test it, it's quite a lot of fun.

 

It's best used with lasers, so you don't need to worry about checking the ammo, as the stun-rod image won't display the ammo counter. Nevertheless, ammo will be used.

 

Be absolutely sure that you have enough TUs if you want to move the stacked items about, or else you'll get stuck in an endless loop without any TUs to drop anything.

 

Note, this stacking thing was really for making space on a crowded floor that's too crowded to fit anything, but not crowded enough to flip to an empty page.

 

They've completely removed it in TFTD, but it's still in UFO, so make use of it to install bayonets on your heavy plasmas!

 

- NKF

 

P. S: I don't have the melee damage levels on hand, so I cannot recommend any good ones. They all cost 50% of your TUs to use, but some of them do piddling damage, while other can insta-kill a superhuman sectopod in one or two swipes. With the powerful ones, the 50% cost is rather justified, wouldn't you say?

[Bomb Bloke]

* ponders *

 

I reckon a close range heavy plasma blast would be a lot more painful then just being smacked by one...

 

I saw that in the manual too, there was a thread about it oh so many years ago...

 

* ponders *

 

Maybe there's a pre-release demo or something that uses it.

 

The only demos I every found for the game lacked directory structure and didn't work. Compression programs in ye olde times didn't include the structure by default. No idea why.

[JellyfishGreen]

I guess I agree with BB- the Bash attack is cute, but a three-shot burst at point blank range would do similar damage for not much of an accuracy penalty. (Unless no alien were immune, or the TU cost was much lower.)

 

But along those lines, it would also be funny if you could throw your empty cannon at an alien and do damage if you hit him

[Bomb Bloke]

I think maybe that was supposed to do damage once... I can't see any other reason to throw weapons. Hmm... though I suppose it could help to re-equip a trooper who paniced and ran away from his guns...

[Ki-tat Chung]

it would be useful if you ran out of ammo i suppose...

[Psy Guy]

I would think melee attacks would be 100% accurate, high damage, and of course cost zero ammo. They must of planned to put it in there as a "if you run into alien then melee attack would be a good attack" type action. Guess the chance for such a situation occuring was small enought to warrent the removal of the command. But early on i would like to have the option to pop a sectoid with the back end of a heavy cannon :devil:

 

To NKF

Does stacking a stun rod on a rifle cause accuracy penalty from holding 2 items?

 

To anyone

What would happen if you put 2 stunrods on a chrysalid? Would it ever "infest" a person or just stun them?

[NKF]

No, because the other hand is still free.

 

- NKF

[Rattler]

Guess the chance for such a situation occuring was small enought to warrent the removal of the command

 

Riiiiight. I run into aliens all the time and usually don't have enough TU to fire, so a quick bash would help to at least weaken them abit. This sorta thing usually happens to me once during each mission(depending on mission and terrain on Terror Mission I run into aliens like once a turn)

[EclipseDog]

I've used the stacking thing a time or two just to test it but by and large it just ain't worth doing to me... and that's even if I chose to ignore the feelings of it being a bug abuse.

 

Ever stacked another weapon with a blaster launcher? Don't. It makes it so your Blaster can't be launched and shots from the other weapon go buggy.

 

Ever stacked any weapon with a stun gun and then tried to stun something? I got more corpses out of that than stunned aliens.

 

Ever stacked a weapon on top of a psi-amp? Psi-amp stops working.

 

Etc.

 

The worst thing however is when you've double stacked something and accidently click on the weapon area for some reason. Once even lightly clicked on, a double-stacked area forces you to move one of the two items regardless of whether you want to or not and the double-stacking ability will not be able to be reapplied to the area you got the item from.

 

Note: This can be really, really, really bad when your trooper has either 0 or 1 TU left max since you can't drop the weap, can't put it back, and can't put it in any of your pouches and the game won't allow you to enter another troopers supply screen while the item is on-key and you can't escape from the supply screen while an item is on-key. At that point your only option is to ctrl+alt+del your game application and after it is closed rerun it... minus whatever data you ran after your last save state.

 

Basically I can't see any reason at all that would make it worthwhile to abuse that bug but a whole lot of reasons not to.

[NKF]

That last bit you mention is actually quite common for those who use the psi-amp to mind control aliens and then use the inventory trick to get to their equipment. For aliens, all equipment defaults to slot 0, or their left (well, right) leg, and thus you can have multiple items stacked. Very bad, as you can get caught in an infinite loop with no way of getting out the moment you spend all your TUs.

 

The melee attacks are actually quite expensive. 50% of your base TUs. That's very expensive - though for some objects, their melee attack capabilies can be very powerful and worth spending the TUs on. (like killing a superhuman sectopod with one bash...)

 

I would highly advise against using and stacking combinations besides the stun-rod and a weapon. The effects can be highly unpredictable and could cause the game to crash.

 

You can also stack items in your inventory... but, personally, I've never had any reason to stack more equipment beyond what you can carry (particularly with soldiers maxed at 70 strength). Oh, you can stack rockets and blaster bombs, but I feel it would be a lot better to have team mates carry spares rather than unnecessarily weigh down a soldier. Well, I suppose there's also the argument where you can stack items in the shoulder slots so that you can rapidly deploy your equipment to your hand slots ... but that's a mere 1 TU saving.

 

- NKF

[Cpl. Facehugger]

I think that the melee ability for rifles and the like should be similar to TFTD's drills. Really low TUs required, high (but way less than a vibroblade, perhaps 50?) damage, and you obviously have to be right next to an alien to use it.

[Ki-tat Chung]

anybody know where we can edit the stats? perhaps we can make a patch

[NKF]

Editing the stats is the easiest part (they're all in obdata.dat). Enabling the melee attacks for the guns themselves, now there's a real challenge.

 

- NKF

[EclipseDog]

Now pardon me if I'm misreading the problem here but... If the code uses java or something similar a simple patch could be added I'd think. Just add a 'hidden' / 'invisible' component layer that lies on top of the layer we all see and make it key to a spot nothing else is keyed into and then give that spot the bash code... of course that would probably have to be recoded since in all likelihood it has either already been yanked by the origs and even if it hasn't would still have a different trigger zone.

[Ki-tat Chung]

nah. this ain't java. this is a ms-dos game. well, i guess we could just edit the stats to make it a quicker attack and just to the gun/stun-rod thing.

[EclipseDog]

*shrugs* I believe the MS-Dos games are coded using various assembly languages such as C. Java is basically an evolved form of that simplistic coding which allows for more integrity. Since the game uses a clicking interface it is very probable that my suggestion would work if any of us have all of the requirred skills to make the process work.

 

Clicking interfaces infer that there are triggers coded behind the scenes, whenever that is the case it is extremely easy to add in a simple patch that includes a trigger where the original layout theme had no triggers previously set. Once that is done all you'd need to do is add a small image file to fill the trigger space which tells the user what the trigger does. Oh, and if it occupies a space held by other things such as map screen (such as what happens when you click on a weapon and prepare to use it in the battlefield) then you'd also need to add the triggers to make the field screen become visible once you've made a selection (by hiding the trigger, and thus its image, again) and of course another to pull up the bash trigger in the first place.

[usmarox]

Excellent! So all I have to do is reverse-engineer the whole of TACTICAL.EXE? Damn, if I'd know that was *all* that was involved, then I'd have done it years ago!

 

*shakes head and sniggers*

[EclipseDog]

Umm when exactly did I say that..? The orig prog doesn't need to be disassembled then resembled... all that needs to be done is create a trigger entity, create the source code for it (popping up, selecting, hiding again), and then patch it into the existing prog's trigger codeset making it slightly larger. Since the bash code obviously still exists in the orig coding somewhere you wouldn't even have to recreate that. You wouldn't even really have to create a picture for your bash trigger as long as you don't mind it being a 'hidden' feature ala Mario and the mysterious invisible floating boxes to smack his head on.

[usmarox]

So you can miraculously create new attack classes without the docs? And without reverse-engineering anything? Not only are you one hot goddamned programmer, you're psychic, too.

 

Ok, let's assume the bash code is still extant. Fine. How do you instantiate an attack? What arguments do you pass to it? From where? What does it return? In fact, for that matter, how'd you define a new button for the attack menu? What's the spec for that? And patching it into the existing code? Well, nothing wrong with that, but, errrmmmm....where does it go?

 

Unless you happen to have the design doc for UFO under your bed, you're going to have to reverse engineer something.

[EclipseDog]

Not really. First off you wouldn't have to redefine the attack menu, only bring up a second menu with the new button in it. This is what I meant by 'popping up'. Once you create the trigger (since we're only adding one thing we don't need an entire array/menu a single entity will work fine) all you need to do is to trigger it to come alive at the same time as the existing attack menu does, this will make 2 things open but if you line it up right it'll appear to only be one. If you code it right (item self-closes on left mouse click regardless of where the click is) you wouldn't have any problem with hanging menus since I know from experience that the item usage menus in the battlefield also self-close on clicks.

 

As for creating new classes... this whole subject would never have gotten started if the bash attack wasn't already coded into the game.

 

As for your question regarding how would you limit the attack to only working from 1 square away... that's where the stun gun code comes into effect since it's already been given that limitation.

[NKF]

The bash attack actually recycles the stun rod's melee attack code. The text label for the attack will still say 'stun'. (they gave it a new label in TFTD).

 

I'm hoping that there'll be a weapon table somewhere in tactical.exe that defines how each of the objects in obdata.dat behave, and that all you need to do is tweak one byte (per object) and you'll have your bash command back. I mean, there's something in there that defines unique abilities for specific items in obdata.dat. For example, the electro flare is actually an object that does nothing, but when on the ground, it emits light (you could convert it into a gun, but it'll still emit light when thrown to the ground). The stun rod is actually a gun with no firing stats, but its 'melee attack' command is enabled. The mind probe is the same, only its given the 'probe' command - otherwise it could probably be converted into a gun. However, none of these commands are stored in obdata.dat. So one would have to assume that they're stored as constants in the executable.

 

What I'm afraid of is that some of these flags are stored in bitfields. For example, the 'under mind control' and 'visible in battlescape' flags are stored in the same byte. Kneeling, flight ability and the in-flight flags (for flying suits when you're in the air - it just changes which leg sprites to display) are all stored in a single byte (plus a few garbage bits, which tends to make the value look unpredictable from time to time). It would be a nightmare to locate a bitfield in an executable without some other point of reference.

 

What I'm also really interested in finding is what determines the bullet sprite when the gun is fired. You can turn any object into a gun (even corpses), but the bullets default to cannon rounds. It would be nice if you could choose the image. But if you can find this, you can probably find the command flags as well.

 

- NKF