Talk:MISSIONS.DAT
Some questions:
- What is going on with the start time for 0/0 on Research missions? The Jan 1999 one is always 2.5h, but I recently saw an Antarctica Research mission at 3d for 0/0.
- How consistently does the time to the next UFO react to a successful Battlescape game? (I just saw a Retaliation 1/1 go from 7Eh to 136h upon successful completion.)
--Zaimoni, 6:50 Sept 21 2006 CDT
I couldn't understand much of your research but it made me wonder about one question: is it possible to determine the amount of UFO missions and their types that you will see during a month (and also the areas?). Or are those set in a total random fashion?
If so this could be considered as spoilers but it could also be used for an article describing alien strategy on the field manual.
--Hobbes 18:39, 21 September 2006 (PDT)
MISSIONS.DAT is a spoiler, definitely. It stores the time (in 30-minute increments) for all non-Supply scheduled UFOs that have not arrived yet. While it won't tell you all of the UFOs arriving in the month, it will positively ID arrival time, mission, physical type, and race of each one in the queue. I'm in the middle of redocumenting it.
My current conjecture is that the 0..3 sequence indexes the "size" of the UFO. The legacy content just listing ufo-c coordinates is misleading (it seems to be enumerating the visible sequence of ufos), but I want to positively observe the entire sequence of ufo-c/ufo-sub-c pairs before updating.
At all times, the current mission types and areas are in MISSIONS.DAT...except for supply missions. You really want a Hyperwave Decoder covering each alien base you're harvesting. So far, Beginner and Superhuman schedule the same at the beginning of the months after Jan 1999: 1 Terror mission, one non-terror mission. I don't know the criteria for scheduling Retaliation missions. (I've never seen them show up except immediately after Battlescape missions, but that obviously isn't exhaustive.]
Particularly interesting: Battlescape messes with the arrival time of the next mission after the one you're cleaning up on. This needs more careful analysis (e.g., is it just mission completion?)
--Zaimoni, 22:35 Sept 21 2006 CDT