Talk:MISSIONS.DAT
Some questions [Zaimoni: now answered empirically]:
- 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
The increase in time to next UFO occurs either (or both) at shootdown, or at the start of the Battlescape mission. Since I used XCOMUtil interceptor with six soldiers for this test, I can't tell which one. No change between the beginning and the end of the Battlescape mission. [But a genuine Terrorship will happen soon enough...that gets a no-crew Interceptor and a full Skyranger.]
--Zaimoni, 23:51 Sept 21 2006 CDT
I don't think I'll be continuing this savegame, but I just had a Feb 1999 that only generated a new Terror Mission. The other mission...not visible. [I may have messed it up — I did edit the Jan 1999 Terror mission from Europe to Southern Africa.]
--Zaimoni, 10:38 Dec 30 2006 CDT