Talk:UFOextender

Feel free to report any problems or comments you have on the Extender.

• If you want to suggest a change for something in the base game. Please post your suggestion on the Wish List page.
• If you have an error to report, please check the list of already reports problems, and post there if the problem is in the base game (if not already reported). Please only post problems caused by the Extender on this page.

Feedback

Music

Are there any bitrate limitations to what MP3s the game can play?--amitakartok 14:49, 13 March 2013 (EDT)

There shouldn't be any limitations. With the mod enabled, the game has nothing to do with mp3 playback except telling the BASS system which file to play. I checked their website[1] and no limitations are mentioned.- Tycho 23:16, 13 March 2013 (EDT)

Other

• Initial alien bases bug: 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?

• Alien Bleeding: If you have Aliens Bleeding enabled, your soldiers might randomly receive same injuries as aliens. Noticed that when I critically wounded a floater. He went down unconscious, and so did one of my soldiers (without being shot at). When the floater died, my soldier died, too.

The alien bleeding mod doesn't affect how units receive fatal wounds only which units with fatal wounds are damaged at the end of a turn. Originally, wounds only affected the Xcom faction. The mod changes this check to the type of creature and skips the apply- wound-damage routine only for a select few unit types (tanks, cyberdisks, etc). -Tycho

• Clip cursor behavior:I know that there are two different settings of clipping the cursor on screen, but the game Intro sequence and the menu is not clipping yet. Can be possible to force the cursor to clip surely for the whole game at all e.g. as option three?

In my upcoming changes patch I've forced mouse clipping at all times in fullscreen mode. It should probably be ready by the next UFO Extender release. -Tarvis

'v1.30 implements the clip cursor on all screens in Full Screen mode. For Windowed mode, cursor clipping is implemented once a game starts, at the earliest, or whenever the battlescape starts, depending on the option selected, by design. It is still possible to break the cursor clipping, if one intentionally tries. -Tycho 00:25, 23 February 2013 (EST)

I observed that the battlescape can completely lose mouse clipping for that session if the game window loses focus due to things like an overzealous ESET firewall's always-on-top window asking every fucking hour whether Adobe Flash Player's updater is allowed internet access. The game automatically regains clipping at the start of the next battlescape session but it's still very annoying.--amitakartok 17:18, 16 March 2013 (EDT)

With Tarvis' addtions, this should be fixed in a new version. - Tycho

Suggestions

Tarvis

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

The Windows version did change the sound. Check out my user page for a lot of information on how sound EFX play in the game.-Tycho

• 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

Version 1.3 incorporates Tarvis' scaler option.-Tycho

• 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.

I've finished the scaler/resolution features and I want to add them to the most recent version.

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

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

Not sure if you saw this or not, but someone on the forums made a patch to use BASS.dll for music instead of MCI. - Tarvis

Thanks for the information. I played around with it and it works. Niklata, the creator, did a great job. I've already incorporated the changes into the music.cpp file -Tycho 23:25, 29 December 2012 (EST)

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

Amitakok

• An INI option for modifying how many times can the medkit's various features be used. According to the site, it's not stored in OBDATA but inside the executable.
• Rudimentary IFF recognition in proximity grenades, ie. it checks the unit ownership variable (the same one that gets flipped during mind control and used to cause the Hostile Civilians bug) of everyone who wanders into its sensor range and only explodes if it doesn't match the ownership of the unit that threw it. Naturally, it would be fooled by mind control and would also blow up civilians but it would minimize mine-related friendly fire...
  • ...which makes me wonder: if a proxy kills a friendly unit, does it count as friendly fire caused by the guy who planted the proxy? If not, would you make it so, just for the hell of it?
• After buying the first cannon or rocket tank, that particular HWP becomes available for manufacture. Accordingly, either must be available for manufacture before laser tanks can be built (the chassis design has to come from somewhere).
• Depending on the aliens' intelligence stat, they can deliberately blast away cover with autofire if they saw any of your soldiers taking cover behind it. They already sort-of do this with grenades but not with other weapons.
• Aliens actively using sniper-spotter tactics, taking the high ground whenever possible.
• X-Com bases only being able to be built within the borders of the Funding Nations.
• Invasion Mod
  • If any UFO passes within a certain distance to a base without a Mind Shield, the base is immediately discovered. It doesn't matter what mission it is on, not having a Mind Shield means instant detection. Accordingly, later retaliation missions do NOT send scouts but go for the battleship immediately. The outcome depends on what kind of defenses the base has:
    • No Grav Shield - Battleship gets through defensive fire: Base Defense mission. If the attack is repulsed, the aliens send another battleship next month.
    • No Grav Shield - Battleship shot down by defensive fire: the aliens send another battleship next month.
    • Grav Shield - Battleship gets through defensive fire: the battleship finds itself unable to land so it simply blasts the base into ashes. Entire base and all its contents are lost, no Base Defense mission possible.
    • Grav Shield - Battleship shot down by defensive fire: aliens decide the base is too heavily fortified and back down. Retaliation mission ends (until X-Com provokes another one, that is).
  • Countries with an alien base sitting on their soil for more than a month are automatically infiltrated.
  • Aliens deliberately targeting the country with the lowest X-Com activity with infiltration instead of choosing randomly.
  • More severe consequences for alien infiltration: if a country signs a pact, X-Com is banned from that country.
    • All X-Com assets (bases, craft, personnel, items in storage) within the country's borders are automatically and permanently confiscated at the turn of the month the pact is made.
    • X-Com operations inside that country suffer a massive score penalty as they're technically violating the country's borders and airspace, causing international tension between the country (who feel the Council does not respect the charter that allows countries to withdraw from the project) and the Council (who never agreed to withdrawing X-Com's services from quitter countries in the first place).
  • No matter how well the player actually performs, funding WILL keep dropping in the long-term as the sponsors become dissatisfied with X-Com. In fact, funding from all nations will eventually drop into the negative as the sponsors try to pressure X-Com into disbanding (well, that and ongoing rumors of X-Com self-financing through arms dealing causing them to try and get their share of the profits).

Hope this sounds interesting.--amitakartok 14:50, 16 March 2013 (EDT)

Other

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

• 1)editable starting soldiers attributes.
• 2) editable HWP stats of chassis and their weapons.
• 3) editable fire/stun damage of equipment that does this type of damage.
• 4) editable fatal wound system.
• 5) a critical hit chance system.
• 6) option to chose % chance of aliens having a weapon over another.

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.

Thanks for the suggestions. Most of these suggestion essentially are to incorporate mods that allow players to edit the various databases (like Seb did for OBDATA). This can be done but would require a lot of coding and since OpenXcom is nearly complete and seems to allow this level of control (and more!) over the game, I don't feel it's necessary to reinvent that wheel. -- Tycho

Hidden Movement speed

Could you please slow down the battlescape Hidden Movement speed as well? It looses the magic of the hidden movement. Nowadays computers compute very fast and the inteligence of the game is now very fast too and you could not see or hear what is happenning e.g. if somewhere in the battlescape - in the dark where you couldn´t see - aliens kill two civilians, you will hear two screams together, not one after one. It is very fast and not readable yet and loosing the main meaning of the hidden movement part. ElfKaa

This is a lot more difficult than you would imagine and would require a lot more time than I'm able to invest right now: The alien turn routine doesn't follow an easy to understand path and the code has no capacity for time management as the Geoscape and the human tactical routines do. Tycho 10:24, 15 February 2013 (EST)

Tycho's right, the problem is that there are no animations at all during Hidden Movement, so there isn't really a good or consistent place to inject delays into. It's not something as simple as 'turning on the FPS limiter,' since all that really does is add a delay every time the screen updates.-Tarvis

If it's just the time for units dying is too fast, I could write a time delay to occur after a unit's death scream on the alien turn. This wouldn't affect the alien turn code but rather the code that handles a unit taking damage and being killed. - Tycho

Tank issues

While using the loader, I intermittently had problems regarding berserk HWPs. Most of the time, it behaves like a normal unit (randomly fires off everything and loses all TUs); just after switching to 1.30 however, I had a floater chuck a grenade into the middle of a four-man fireteam without armor, killing them all. My turn starts, I receive "Tank/Laser Cannon has gone berserk" and BANG! XCOM crashed at 0x41F7D8 with error 0xC0000005 trying to access 0x00000000 AKA an access violation error. My guess is, the loader broke something regarding HWPs being immune to morale and 1.30 made the problem even worse: older versions never crashed on me.--amitakartok 16:31, 16 March 2013 (EDT)

Not long after writing the above, I had a tank panic (not berserk)... and the game didn't crash. Weird.--amitakartok 19:59, 16 March 2013 (EDT)

Known_Bugs#Berserk_HWP_crashes_the_game. I may have a fix for this: change the code to prevent the Berzerk option from being assigned to units with a turret weapon (Probably a little more relevant to TFTD). - Tycho 23:02, 16 March 2013 (EDT)

I know about the bug; the problem here is that this site states they only lose morale from friendly fire (which itself is probably a programming oversight, as they aren't supposed to be affected by morale whatsoever). While the suggested solution sounds good, a better one would be a hack that makes large units always pass morale checks and thus not panic.

But not all large units in the game are robotic (especially in TFTD). I'll see about an exclusion for the tank/cyberdisc/Sectoid.

Other stuff:

• Nowhere does the Improved Laser Tank's readme description states that the tank's cannon has to be manufactured separately. Also, doesn't really make sense: the same weapon can pierce UFO hulls when mounted on aircraft but cannot when mounted on a tank? I know the aircraft is bigger but I don't think it has a bigger power source; it'd be too heavy.

In the Battlescape, if a HE pack can't breach a UFO hull, how does the Stingray/Avalanche? The missiles wouldn't have a subtantially larger explosive charge in them than a HE pack (if not a smaller charge). I think this is the #1 inconsistancy in XCOM. The Gallops spent a lot longer tweaking the Battlescape (for which they had all the experience and code from the Rebelstar games to utilize) than they did for the Geoscape, which was pretty much thrown together at the demand of Microprose/Spectrum Holobyte so in comparing weapons between Geoscape and Battlescape, I'm inclined to view the ones in the Battlescape as the rule and consider the aircraft weapons to have some quasi-mystical damage increase that allows XCOM to shoot down UFOs (which provides the answer to another mystery of XCOM: why is the first human-made plasma weapon so superior to the alien's?).

As for the tank/laser (or hovercraft/plasma,) since you can't manufacture it until after you research the corresponding craft weapon, it seems logical that the weapons are the same. You don't see it with the hovertank/plasma because the Gallops choose to keep manufacturing requirements to only alloy/elerium/ufo parts and the cost of the weapon is included in the manufacturing requirements. - Tycho

Uh, Tycho, you may want to read up on the warhead weight of some common air-to-air missiles. Many of the larger ones are to heavy to carry, let alone throw around like the HE pack can be. AMX 05:21, 18 March 2013 (EDT)

• The improved tank needs alien alloys, yet it does not need alien alloys to be researched first. Was that intentional or did you forget to set the research prerequisite?

Intentional: The idea is that the base frame is the same but that alien alloys are cut and attached, which doesn't require knowledge of their manufacture. The process is probably very wasteful but since there is usually a huge surplus by the time one can make the tanks, who cares? Also, the same thing occurs with XComUtil's heavy laser mod, and no one seemed have a problem with it so I followed the same idea. If you want inconsistancy, the Craft Laser Cannon flavor text mentions that it runs on an antimatter reactor but E-115, Alloys, nor UFO Power Source are prerequisites for it. Further inconsitancy: Aliens just show up and suddenly humans can produce laser weapons with ample, portable power sources that aren't based on alien technology??

• Are tanks supposed to lose firing accuracy if they take severe damage (as in, laser tank's accuracy dropping from 60 to 17 after losing 79 out of 90 health)? Shouldn't they lose, I don't know, TU regeneration rate instead?

--amitakartok 13:01, 17 March 2013 (EDT) In regards to health and accuracy, they follow the same rules as other units.

Using Extender in Steam (seamlessly)

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. 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)