Talk:UFOextender

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

• If you want to suggest a change or addition to 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

• 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

• 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

• 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 track 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

• 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.

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 weapons, since you can't manufacture it until after you research the corresponding craft weapon, it seems logical that the weapons are the same. You didn't normally see this because the Gallops choose to keep manufacturing requirements to only alloy/elerium/ufo parts so usually the weapon is included in the manufacturing costs. I thought it interesting to show it overtly.- 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)

Your right. I think I was remembering their weights in kg but thinking it was pounds.

• 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? This is true for alien weapons, you can manufacture them using Elerium and Alloys, without researching either. Also, the same thing applies to 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 show up and suddenly humans can produce laser weapons with ample, safe, 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.

Funky smoke

In my last few Battlescape sessions (not having researched powered armor yet), I noticed several times that an exploding smoke grenade inflicts some ~20 stun damage to unarmored soldiers in the blast radius, causing them to pass out faster than otherwise due to smoke inhalation.

The setup is this (no one is packing incendiary munitions so it's not the Funky Fire bug): first round, team deploys from 'ranger. One guy tosses smoke grenade to bottom of ramp. End of round, grenade goes off and covers the deployment area with smoke. Next turn, I notice every soldier underneath the smoke having a very prominent stun bar covering almost half of their health bar, far more than it should be from the two rounds of smoke inhalation; rookies start to drop unconscious at around turn 8, with the rest dangerously close to going under as well by the time we finish securing the LZ. Even if they recover, they immediately get stunned again by the smoke and I tend to clean out the map before the cloud dissipates, forcing me to fight at reduced troop strength.

Did the 2048 smoke tiles hack change something it wasn't supposed to or is this behavior normal? Smoke grenades directly dealing stun damage, I mean.--amitakartok 18:05, 19 March 2013 (EDT)

Units always took some stun damage from smoke, but only at the end of Xcom's turn. With the "funky fire" mod enabled, units are taking stun damage from smoke at the end of your turn and the end of the alien turn. Unlike fire, the amount of stun damage inflicted is related to the intensity of the smoke in the square at the end of the turn. You might need to toss the smoke grenade further than right at the base of the ramp. I had to change my tatics slightly for this: Throw the grenade 4-5 squares from the end of the ramp, deploy a few men, and toss another to the front of the ranger. -Tycho 21:12, 19 March 2013 (EDT)

Well, that's the strange thing: they're not taking stun damage from the smoke but from the smoke grenade's explosion, as if it were a weak Stun Bomb.--amitakartok 09:11, 20 March 2013 (EDT)

Suggestions

• 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. --amitakartok 14:50, 16 March 2013 (EDT)

• Editable starting soldiers attributes.
• Editable HWP stats of chassis and their weapons.
• Editable fire/stun damage of equipment that does this type of damage.
• Editable fatal wound system.
• A critical hit chance system.
• 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