Talk:UFOextender

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Using Extender in Steam (seamlessly)

Hello,

Do you know of any way for me to use your XCOM extender through Steam, without using a separate executable? My games are on Steam precisely for ease of use (double-click on game, game loads), and digging through executables is the thing I'd like to avoid. (Nor is "add the extended executable to Steam" acceptable.) Rampancy 00:01, 17 January 2012 (EST)

Steam now gives you the option to run the CE version as an alternative to the DOSBox version. Spike 10:57, 3 September 2012 (EDT)

Even so, won't people will still need to edit this shortcut to run the extender rather than the game executable? I think Rampancy is asking for the executable to be modified in the same way that XcomUtil does. This is counter to what the Extender is attempting to achieve, so it is not going to happen. - Tycho

The easiest way to use TFTD Extender and UFOExtender with the Steam distributions is just to unpack them into the TFD and XCOM folders (respectively) and directly invoke the TFTD Loader or UFO Loader. There is no need to use or run Steam in order to run these games. Steam is only required for installation. You can create normal Windows shortcuts to run the games directly, and/or to run them via their respective Extender Loaders. The installed game folders can usually be found under C:\Program Files\Steam\steamapps\common. Spike 06:33, 5 October 2012 (EDT)

Initial alien bases bug

I have a bit of a problem. I use Steam version of UFO with most recent UFO Extender. Every time I start a new game on superhuman difficulty (I didn't test other difficulties) I get alien base directly on my base (with initial alien bases enabled). So far, I started 5 new games, where first three (1st Europe, 2nd North America, 3rd Island in the middle of Pacific Ocean) all had Alien Base 3 directly on it. 4th game (Madagascar) didn't, while 5th (Europe again) has two alien bases directly on it (I have save from this game for you if you want to check this out). I don't think this was intended?

Music problems

MP3 fails to play or crashes the game

I seem to have an issue with the music patch. When I originally installed the loader months ago, everything worked flawlessly. Now however, the game crashes upon entering the main menu. To track down the problem, I enabled first the intro then the language selector screen; no problems with either. In the process, I discovered that the problem is with the music: if I disable it, the game loads properly. If enabled, the loader exits without an error message upon entering the main menu. I did a full reinstall of the game, didn't work. The only other thing I've changed away from the fully working configuration is an upgrade from WinXP to Win7 (VC++2010 is installed).

All the files exist and all settings here unchanged from the time they worked. I have NO idea what's going on. Additionally, if the patch is disabled, the game only has music in the main menu and nowhere else until Alt-Tabbed out and back at least once.--amitakartok 12:53, 22 September 2012 (EDT)

There is MIDI music but it only starts to play after I Alt-Tab out of the game; it stops again during the next Geoscape/Battlescape transition. Without the loader, I get no graphic output whatsoever and it gives up after a few seconds, producing the generic Windows error message about the executable having stopped working. Also, tried your lines above, didn't work.

One more thing: I read it elsewhere on the net that the patch works with OGG files too, once the INI file is edited with proper filenames; it allegedly fixes some music-related crashes as well. I'm trying it out now.--amitakartok 08:06, 23 September 2012 (EDT)

Alright, tried out the OGGs and the loader now crashes at 0x754CD36F with error 0x406D1388. So much for that.--amitakartok 09:21, 23 September 2012 (EDT)

I wasn't able to find any solution to this. I want to use PSX mp3s but game crashes every time I put apply=1 to music section of the config. I tried converting them to ogg files and it's the same thing. Is there any solution to this? --OpT1mUs 15:21, 26 September 2012 (EDT)

Hello! I've had the same problem, so I dug into the source to try and investigate what's going wrong. The problem is indeed with my machine and NOT with the application, though I believe it might be more stable if the source wasn't using MCI to play MP3's. UFOLoader works fine on two copies of windows I have handy, but not another, bombing out when hitting the main menu when MP3 music is enabled. Yes, you're right, the problem is with some sort of codec setup, as things work fine if I convert the music to wma files. However, this also requires altering the code in music.cpp to change the call to mciSendStringA to omit "type mpegvideo". This works fine on my machine, though it's by no means a sensible solution, just a work around for me. I've only done this because I've no idea where to start debugging MCI codec issues, as this is a really antiquated way of actually playing an MP3 (though easy).

Anyway, for your info, the code bombs out at line 165 in music.cpp, in the method PlayMP3MusicFile. The call to mciSendStringA (with the command to open a given MP3) fails with an MCI 263 error, which translates to MCIERR_INVALID_DEVICE_NAME.

Unfortunately, this won't help you debug your (or my) codec issue, but it's at least confirmation that it's an issue on your side and not a problem in the source. I suspect a minor rewrite to use DirectX calls to play the music would cause this problem to go away. I'll be happy to do this, is the latest version of the source available (IE for UFOLoader built on 27th Sept 2012)? DaveG

Someone on Steam developed a good method to help isolate and resolve codec conflicts that keep Extender from playing MP3s. See TFTDextender FAQs

I looked into that article but didn't help: neither of the splitters are present on my system. Also, I tentatively added UFODefense.exe to ffdshow's list of programs not to load for; now it loads into the main menu but there's no music whatsoever and the game crashes if I leave the menu and try to enter the game itself.--amitakartok 18:21, 4 November 2012 (EST)

The only suggestion I have now is for you to remove the current version of UFOextender. Download the last version the Seb posted and try that. If the game works, try the next release, until the problem reoccurs. If not, your probably going to have to "shotgun" troubleshoot this by uninstalling anything and everything that deals with sound or video (aside from drivers) from your system and then try the game. I had the crash problem on my system and after uninstalling about 10 different programs (converters, codec paks, alternate sound players, etc), MP3s play fine now. -Tycho

I've been using Seb's version to begin with.--amitakartok 08:57, 16 November 2012 (EST)

Video Problems

"XCOM Crashed at 0x45E6A5 with error 0xC0000005 trying to access 0x000000"

Usually this occurs with the split exe that you get after installing XcomUtil. One part that gets altered conflicts with the Extender's option to skip the intro. Disabling this option will stop the error.

Adjusting animation speed

Is it possible to adjust or change the animation speed of other objects such as internal objects and alien numbering marks in bottom-right side of screen?--Xcomplayer

I have the same issue, I'm quite fond of arctic bases but the water animation speed is hilarious. -- Splicer

Try adjusting the MaxFPS in the INI to something like 60~75. I found that this fixes a lot of the speed issues without the need for the other patches. -- Tycho May 2012

Fire Damage

Not sure if the bug is already posted. And Not sure if I should post the bug here or in Talk:Incendiary. Problem is if you use extender to fix funky fire bug. Incendiary no long does any damage at all. Units only take the small amount of damage after ending turn because they're on fire. Using 1.28.3 extender

To test this. I stripped a soldier of armour. And pounded four incendiary rockets into the soldier in the same turn. No damage. And then next turn, his health drops a little because he's standing in fire. This may not be a problem for most players. But it is still a major bug. I understand the funky fire problem is already difficult to fix, and I say thanks to all who will try to help solve this bug. Hellblade 14:44, 28 September 2012 (EDT)

That's not a bug, that's the fix. Incendiary damage is only applied at the end of the turn. Think about it... does fire kill faster than a bullet? Faster than a grenade? Can you kill someone with fire faster than they can get a shot off back at you? No, to all these things. To compensate for fixing the bug, fire damage is doubled compared to the previous end-of-turn fire damage (that always existed). It is no longer applied per shot or per impact. All you get "per impact" is another chance to set the target unit itself on fire. Incendiary is a weak attack. It has the benefit of a wide area effect, no HE block, and ignores armour. There are situations when IN is the only effective weapon XCOM possesses. But, like everything, it has strengths and weaknesses. Spike 15:51, 28 September 2012 (EDT)

I see your point but let me elaborate. Heat, not fire, do kill as fast as bullets. The original game mechanics separated heat from fire just as in real life. It intended to have the big heat blast damage first and then the small fire damage per turn.

Take the most extreme case, napalm or volcanic lava, you get fully cooked in less than a second - just by heat alone, and you may/may not catch fire later on. And heat blasts travel as fast as bullets, in some cases as fast as light. I believe the game has different Incendiary damage values to do different damage according to how strong the heat is, not the fire afterwards. The damage by fire later on makes sense because natural burning fires aren't that hot comparatively.

I understand the difficulty in trying to fix this. But before this fix you could kill a reaper by a few AC-I shots (which is their weakness) and now you can empty the two clips at it and it'll never die. Hellblade 03:11, 4 October 2012 (EDT)

General Store Capacity

I have an odd issue where a new base I just built (second base of the game) has 1 total storage capacity when I have the "General Store Capacity" mod on (set to 1). The main base can only transfer a total of 1 storage space's worth of items before it says I must build more stores. However I can transfer goods back just fine (with the main based having over 50 total storage used).

Both bases show "1:1" storage capacity used (when I have 1 storage in base 2 anyways). I'm reporting this as a glitch because base 1 behaves like it has the 187 capacity (but doesn't show it as that much) and base 2 does not behave like that at all.

When I remove the mod the capacities show "X:50" (50:50 for base 1) and work normally.

I'm using all the latest files for the extender and the other patches detailed in the "Enemy Unknown Extended" extended page, and the steam version of the game.

Where is UFOLoader.exe?

I tried downloading the Zip in the link, but it only had a file called Patcher.dll. Where is the rest of it?

Thanks, Herbert West.

The minor versions / patches only include an update to the patcher.dll. For the other files you need to download the most recent major version. So right now you would get major version 1.28, and then get patch/minor version 1.28p3. Spike 14:43, 19 October 2012 (EDT)

Ok cool, but where do I get the major version? I can't find a link anywhere. Cheers, Herbert West.

If you look at the page for the zip file, you will see the current version, which (at the time of writing) is 1.28p3, and then beneath that you will see a table that has links to all the previous versions, with the version number listed in the comments field. Spike 14:59, 19 October 2012 (EDT)

Ah there we go! Got it working. Thanks ^^

No DosBox?

The only executable file in the download is an .exe file. .exe files don't work with dosbox and with X-com being a 16-bit program it doesn't work on 64-bit system either. Is there any way of getting this mod running on a 64-bit windows? Is there a workaround or am I just being stupid?

The first paragraph of the main page of the article does say:

This program only works with the Windows version and will not work through DOSbox. 
Furthermore, a version compatible with DOS will not be created due to difference in memory management used.

Workaround - can you boot under a 32 bit Windows instead? Spike 18:27, 19 October 2012 (EDT)

Suggestions

Hi there, i hope to be posting in the right section for this.. otherwise excuse me, please.

Here are some features UFOextender currently lacks that I would love to see integrated in a future version:

1)editable starting soldiers attributes (cuttently UFOextender only allows you to set the maximum caps of those STATs, yet for those that, like me, don't like the idea of soldier's health raising much through experience, this could be useful).

2) editable HWP stats of chassis and their weapons (currently possible with XcomED only for the first part, yet is not possible to change the damage dished out by HWP weapons)

3) editable fire/stun damage of equipment that does this type of damage(currently the stun damage of things like smoke bombs is so low that it's almost of no strategic consideration.. it would be cooler if stun bombs had an higher stun per turn value, in order to make them more complicated to use and also extend the value of equipment that gives soldiers stun immunity. I've tried increasing the stun damage of granades with Xcom ED, but this only makes a wider smoke cloud with stun damage per turn remaining the same.. tweaking with fire damage maybe could allow thins like flamethrowers to be moddable!).

4) editable fatal wound system (current system basically gives you 3 fatal wounds anytime a soldier is damaged by 10+ hits.. I would love that to be tweakable to something like 1 fatal wound for every 10 hp lost, maybe with some added random factor). It would also be cool if part of those fatal wounds could be in stun damage, making the need to rescue with a medikit collapsed soldiers even more frequent (something which however already happens due to the fact that frequently weapon damage gives also a bit of stun damage if I recall right).

5)a critical hit chance system (without this - unless you want to bring soldier HP to something like 100 and retweak all the weapons around that value - it's hard to regulate weapon power against armor and HP since, unless you plan that some weaker guns like plasma pistols CAN'T oneshot a soldier in heavy armor, you'll later have to give more powerfull weapons even more punch, risking to make them having a very high oneshot rate, especially if you have original HP values ffor your soldiers. If a crit chance could be added like a % random factor that allows a bigger multiplier than usual to be applied to te base damage, even a low damage weapon could happen to oneshot or cause severe wounds albeith that wouldn't be possible - and thus, rare - due to it's base damage).

6)option to chose % chance of aliens having a weapon over another (currently, later on in the game it seems alien only carry heavy plasma and, occasionally, blaster bombs.. that's quite boring. I would love instead to be able to choose which weapon they use and mod those weapons, in order to differentiate more the various aliens: e.g. by making the light plasma some sort of sniper rifle with low snap shot accuracy but high on aimed, and maybe making some sort of heavy plasma cannon with good autofire rate but not of great accuracy)

Thanks for the attention, and the great job done with UFOextender to keep alive a game that, even with the release of a fun 2012 XCOM, still shines as the best of the series IMHO.

Tarvis' Suggestions

12/24/12

I have to say, the UFO Extender is a great leg up from the DOS version! The stats on loadout screen is my favorite feature. I only have a couple minor gripes/observations, and some of them don't necessarily apply to UFO Extender:

• XCOM CE's Sound effect volume is excruciatingly high (about 5x) compared to DOS version. This means that, at least for me, music is relatively quiet. At least it is so on Windows 7. I'm using modified SAMPLE/SAMPLE2.CAT files to compensate for it, but it would be great if there was an option to adjust this. Maybe this isn't an issue on Windows XP.

There problem here is that there is nothing in the program to manage aspects of sounds/music. The game selects the music entry or SFX and then dumps the data string directly into the OS's sound mixer. - Tycho

• • After some investigating, the DOS version's 1.4 SAMPLE/SAMPLE2.CAT audio is the same volume as the CE .CATs, yet is played in-game at a much lower volume than the CE version. Perhaps there is some sort of volume adjustment going on in-game, which isn't being performed in the CE version, or not on Windows 7 at least. The fact that the audio data in the DOS 1.0/1.2 SOUND1/SOUND2.CAT files is a lower volume than the 1.4 sounds (yet still played at the same volume in-game) seems to suggest this.
  • This is also another minor gripe, but it seems some weapons (namely the Heavy Cannon) use the wrong sounds (for example the Heavy Cannon HE rounds firing and hit sounds both use the explosion sound ,and it definitely isn't this way in DOS. Is this a SAMPLE2.CAT problem or is this defined elsewhere in the game files?

The music is playing as a MIDI channel (usually via the OS's built-in SW Synth), whereas the SFX is all handled as standard wave channel. In anything earlier then Vista, Windows let you change the volume on those two channels separately (along with whatever other output channels your system had). From Vista on, you can now adjust volume on a per-program level (which is good), but you lose the ability to do so on a per-output-device level (which is bad). I'm not aware of any workarounds. -Bomb Bloke

• Geoscape dialog animation speed (window opening animation) is very slow compared to the rest of the game. If I lock the game to 30FPS then the Geoscape and Battlescape animations are perfect, but windows in Geoscape take about a second each to open. Perhaps an option could be added to change the window animation speed?

This is a direct result of having the FPS too low.

• It would be great if a fullscreen resolution option was added instead of forcing the desktop resolution. This would be useful because I think XCOM looks best when scaled partly by nearest neighbor, and partly bilinearly. If I could set the game resolution to 640x400, I could get the exact same effect I want, but right now the only way to do that is to disable D3D which does not sit well with Win7.
  • Another alternative is to add more scaling methods: nearest (current), bilinear, Half n' Half (First pixel-doubled to 640x400 and then scaled from there with bilinear), HQ4X and more

It will be a long while before something like this might be possible, unless someone with experience in this were to help.-Tycho

I don't know about the scaler options, but I'll see if I can get a resolution option added. It looks simple enough; the code for using a different resolution is already there, but it's simply fed the current width & height from the primary display. I'll make it read from an INI option instead. Of course, I'll use 0x0 to represent the current resolution, just like DOSBOX, and that can be the default. -Tarvis

• On Windows 7 it seems that the D3D Window Position width and height options correspond to the entire window with borders and not the actual game screen area. Is this an oversight or is this the intended behavior?
• Sometimes when firing or moving soldiers, you can notice that a bit of the background moves with them. This only seems to happen some of the time, so I can't seem replicate it exactly. If I do though, I'll post a save file. It's most evident when firing shots through smoke tiles.
• It seems that you can click during soldier moving or shooting, and then the soldier will execute that command as soon as the action is completed. Has it always been this way? I remember that if you did this in the DOS version then nothing happens. This has resulted in a lot of mis-commanding and I'm not too keen on using double-click (too used to single-clicking!)

I'm not sure of the specifics but I think Windows is buffering the input and allowing it to be executed it at the next opportunity. I think DOSbox eliminates this in some way directly or indirectly. The only solution is to use the double-click mod.

• The mouse can leave the screen in full-screen mode in dual-monitor setups, but only if D3D is enabled. Also, turning off mouse scaling (providing the best mouse speed) means the mouse can also go lower and to the right of the game. Perhaps the mouse-clipping modes used in the windowed mode could be applied to fix this?

Scale mouse was created to fix the issue that mouse-clipping can't be used in full-screen mode.

This does fix the mouse going too far down & right in-game, but even with mouse-clipping on it still leaves the game and still goes to the other monitor. -Tarvis

Oops! My mistake (I've been working with TFTD for so long I just defaulted to that program). Try this string: 68 CC F2 02 10 6A 00 68 04 F3 02 10 68 14 F3 02 10 FF 15 10 F0 02 10 85 C0 0F 84 90 00 00 00. Use a hex editor. Search the Patcher.dll file for the string and change all the bytes to 90. - Tycho

Works great, in battlescape and geoscape! Thanks a bunch. Just for the record, it doesn't work in Geoscape with mouse scaling off, but that should be turned on when the game is fullscreen anyhow.

Great! That tells me enough that I know what to change to resolve that problem. Thanks for your feedback!-Tycho

I tested it in the new patch, and just realize it can still leave the window in the main menu.

That is intentional. Last chance to resize the window or access the sound mixer to adjust volume before starting a game.- Tycho

I see. When is the source going up for 1.29? I've finished the scaler/resolution features and I want to add them to the most recent version.

I'll have it up right away. Are you about finished with the new resolution? That was fast! I'm not sure how Seb managed other people's contributions. Looking at his talk page, it seems Seb had contributers upload or email him the new files: I guess you could zip up the new cpp files, upload them to the site, and then add a link to it on your user page. I'll then be able to put them into an offical release. Does that sound OK?- Tycho

The following is definitely wishful thinking, but would be wonderful if it could be done

• Replace MCI MP3 handling with DirectX calls. This would make codec issues that cause crashes much less unpredictable.

It may be a long time before this, too, could be implemented, unless someone experienced with modding in Direct-X were to help.- Tycho

• • I would like this mainly because MP3 playing works fine on my Windows 7 64 bit machine but not at all on my Windows 7 32 bit machine, and I can't figure out why. Both are configured to use the Windows default MPEG splitter and MP3 DMO Decoder, yet using MP3s crashes on the 32 bit machine every time.

Check out the reference on the TFTD Extender page about problem with playing MP3s.

I've tried all that and couldn't get it to work, but I'm able to use AbraM's FMOD patch for UFO Defense.exe with UFO Extender just fine so that'll work. I wonder though, if I wanted the game to play GMMARS instead of GMSTORY during debriefings, what should I change? CE by default seems to use GMSTORY instead, and Abram's Fmod patch uses the game's default music mapping instead of letting you define one.

check my user page. At the bottom, I've listed the addresses for all the events that call a sound. You'll need a disassembler like IDA. The list will help you locate the hex address that you'll need to change to call a different sound entry.-Tycho