User:Seb76

Hi guys, I've been posting here for quite some time now so I guess it's time to make this page. For now it's just a stub, I'll try to update it when time is available.

I was a teenager when the game came out. I had no computer back then but I remember playing it on the computer of a friend's father, it was simply awesome. Years passed, and 3D completely changed the face of videogames. The main focus was turned to polygon counts and frames per second. Duke Nukem, Quake, Unreal, -you name any FPS-; I totally forgot about the "old-era" games. Later my interest in emulation brought me to the dosbox project; a real wayback machine... After all this 3D orgy, I decided to give it a shot and restarted the old X-COM just for fun. But then all memories came back at once; the music, the huge pixels, the tension of the first terror mission... The feeling was still the same after all the years. Still unmatched. IMHO the "best game ever" award it got is really deserved. I since tried the "UFO after-xxx" spinoffs, but I think their pseudo-realtime aspect removes what make X-COM unique to me, this feeling you get when you press the end of turn button. Everything can happen then...

Nowaday, most of my occupation with XCom is analysis of its code, and trying to explain the odd behaviors and see how the game can be exploited (with the help of a few patches). I'll try to gather here the most interesting pieces that I can find (most of my findings are scattered across the talk pages for the moment). Feel free to use the talk page if you have questions/suggestions. Seb76 13:25, 4 June 2008 (PDT)

UFO Extender

Equipment Screen

File:UFOLoader.zip contains a loader that changes the equipment screen. It effectively renders statstrings obsolete ;-)

Just unpack in your XCOM directory and start the UFOLoader.exe file. It looks for a file named "UFO Defense.exe".

Before battle, it changes the screen like this (in the final version, the psi stats are only shown when the psi skill has been trained):

and during the mission, it looks like this:

The "Weight>" at the bottom is only because I use a modified english.dat, you should not see it in your version. Have fun and report any problem. It works fine here on XP SP2, dunno about Vista...

Edit: also the language selection screen may look funky, it's a quick way to know if the process has been patched, don't freak out! Seb76 14:01, 7 July 2008 (PDT)

PSX Music

I'm working on having the loader play music from the PSX CD version. I'm almost done. The only thing left is the mapping of the tracks themselves (which ones are geoscape musics, tactical musics, base missions, etc.). For now the idea is as follow for tracks mapping:

• 1,2,3,4: geoscape music
• 5: gmdefend
• 6: gmenbase
• 7: gmmars
• 8: gminter
• 9: gmstory
• 10,11: battlescape music
• 12: gmnewmar

gmwin and gmlose are not available. Because of similarity, gmlose will be replaced with gmstory and gmwin with gminter. Also the old MIDI files could still be used for these two. Any remark before I make the package? Seb76 15:28, 8 July 2008 (PDT)

I'm just wondering if it would be an idea to providing a selectable option that allows you to mix up the tactical music to include some of the other tracks as well, like the Geoscape tracks or gmstory. Breaks up the monotony a bit and can sometimes change the mood of the battle. But leave that until after you've achieved what you're setting out to achieve.

The intro should stick with the midi music, or you could use the interception music since that is a remix of the intro. On second though, scrap that - it lacks the slow buildup that is a major part of the intro.

P. S. Oh, and don't forget that the PSX music tracks start from track 02. -NKF

Hehe, you should have posted this yesterday. I lost one hour banging my head in a why-the-hell-does-it-play-interception-music-in-the-menu way before I realised that ;-) The intro music does not use the same mecanism as ingame music so it is not impacted by the modification. As for your suggestion, well the patch is written in C and mciSendString is flexible enough to allow stuff like that I think. The most difficult part is to define what we want... I'll however update with the current version and keep that improvement for later.

Edit: new version uploaded. Edit the ini file to suit your needs. And don't forget to report, this is still alpha quality ;-) Seb76 12:25, 9 July 2008 (PDT)