Chnaging the view/vision distance on soldiers and aliens

Does anybody know how to edit alien and human stats? I've been trying to look for the right file to alter the vision/view distance of Sabellians mainly due to their description:

"They are relatively unintelligent and have weaker eyesight than human beings, giving them slower reactions and poor accuracy."

Unfortunately they spot my soldiers very quickly and are capable of engaging them at longer distances and that doesn't make much sense given the description.

What I would like to do is to:

1) Increase the view distance on all human and alien combatants to something more satisfying like 60 squares.

2) Adjust weapon ranges to create proper long distance combat (I know how to do this one).

3) And finally make the vision range in to a circle so that it would no longer be a cone. After giving the game some thought I came to the conclusion that XCOM and XCOM 2 did this to make combat less tedious and frustrating... you keep turning around all the time and this just wastes a lot of movement and significantly slows down the game. I think some slightly faster pacing would make it far more enjoyable.

Does anyone know how can I implement these changes?

about 3)

im pretty sure you edit the viewcone in the armours_gc.xml file. Theres a point which says conAngle="90".

Edit all armors and u are done.

Btw do u know how to work with the researches.xml file ?

about 3)

im pretty sure you edit the viewcone in the armours_gc.xml file. Theres a point which says conAngle="90".

Edit all armors and u are done.

Ye, I see it:

<VisualParams range="18" coneAngle="90" nightRangeBonus="0" />

Thanks for the help. I had no idea the vision range was so small and... the angle is literally something out of a nightmare. Most people have at least 130 degrees and just by looking around it can go over 190 degrees.

Btw do u know how to work with the researches.xml file ?

Sadly not... but I wanted to add advanced laser research which would improve laser weaponry based on light frequency: RED>GREEN>INDIGO.

I take it I'd have to go through that file in order to actually add the improved laser weapons via research?

You wouldn't happen to know where is the view ranged for aliens would you Charon? Or some general file with all alien stats?

Well from what i get u want to do something very complicated:

If u simply want to add damage than u can make a research like this one:

<Row ss:AutoFitHeight="0" ss:Height="26.55">

<Cell><Data ss:Type="String">Researches.SebillianmedicInterrogation</Data></Cell>

<Cell><Data ss:Type="Number">30</Data></Cell>

<Cell><Data ss:Type="String">ExtraterrestrialTech</Data></Cell>

<Cell><Data ss:Type="String">Items.Sebillianmedic(OR)Items.Sebillianphysician(OR)Items.Sebilliandoctor</Data></Cell>

<Cell ss:Index="6"><Data ss:Type="String">UnlockKnowledge( "Researches.SebillianmedicInterrogation" ); AddDamageBonus( "Sebillian", 5 );</Data></Cell>

<Cell><Data ss:Type="String">Researches.SebillianmedicInterrogation</Data></Cell>

</Row>

But i dont know if the damage bonus isnt hardcoded. So you would need to define AddDamageBonus&quotMachinegun somewher else. I dunno about that.

But if you want to CHANGE THE COLOR, thats something else entirely. There you have to make a new weapon for every laser color you want. So you have to make an entire new weapon or weapons and than give it an appropriate rsearch as well. There is an tutorial about adding weapons stickied on the forums i think. look into that.

Than you have to add it in Strings.xml as well to give it a name. So the game knows what its talking about. than xenopedia entries, etc ... . Very complicated.

Even after searching the files for over an hour i havent seen where the alien units get definded. Like weapon output, grenades, armor values, etc. Ask drages, he added hundreds of new enemies he ought to know.

View range for aliens is in aiprops.xml. You can only set the view range ONCE for each racial type. If you want subclasses of one race to have a different view range, you'd have to make a new racial type for that alien. The angle for LOS is universally set in config.xml. That can't be altered on a per-alien type.

Thanks for your help. All the info is very useful but I'm modding a lot of things right now, even the sprites and it's just so much overwhelming work for one person.

I've also tried editing that file and made something like this:

<Props sightRange="18" nightRangeBonus="-10" suppressionMultiplier="0.5" noSmokeAccuracyPenalty="1" />

which is more like a test for now. After adding nightRangeBonus="-10" to the Sebillian race I haven't seen any crashes or anything like that BUT I have no idea if the chnage works. I've had too many clusters of those guys at night to see if their vision impairment is in effect.

However, before I came up with this change I've noticed something EXTREMELY DISTURBING! What was it? The Aliens never seem to get any penalties for fighting during the night. I was on the farm map and there was a single Sebillian on the road in front of my men. He knelled down 17 squares away from them and opened up with some fairly accurate fire, pinning down one of them. The other had enough movement to run up in to view distance, which was approximately around 8 -10 squares and barely detected the bastard. It's absolutely insane that the player is at such a disadvantage and to make matters worse - all the aliens seems to know exactly where you are, thus easily detecting you as if they could see though walls. Is there some concealment mechanic I'm not aware of? Or some way to make the game more fair in this aspect?

YES - aliens dont get a night malus. Thats the point of the night mission - its bad for you.

Thats the reason why in over 400 hours of gameplay i only ever played 2 night missions. In general its better to aircrash that thing if you cant reach it during the day. Same goes for the X-Division mod - no night missions for me. its just not worth it.

YES - I always have the feeling that the aliens know more than you can imagine. But thats nothing hidden there as far as i know, its the way the aliens share information and deduct your position from gunfire/last seen position/places where u are not. As a simple rule: the closer u are to an alien the better it knows where you are - no matter of sight/LOS or anything else thats between you if its not a concrete "wall". The aliens REALLY make smart decisions based on the position they believe you are in.

But the ai was tuned down by A LOT. The AI Developer said that the ai was so good at the beginningof the development (without every cheating - just using all available information) that the players simply got outplayed by the aliens efficently ganking up on the Xenonauts in "groups" at the starting position. Thus leading to 2 phases:

1. Survive the onslaught in the beginning

2. Seize the UFO if you survived

And that wasnt really what the developers had in mind or the players wanted.

If you want to test things out use the Xenonauts_gc_editor.exe in the main or the xce folder. press "u" than you can test out different situations.

On 3/7/2016 at 11:01 AM, Charon said:

But the ai was tuned down by A LOT. The AI Developer said that the ai was so good at the beginningof the development (without every cheating - just using all available information) that the players simply got outplayed by the aliens efficently ganking up on the Xenonauts in "groups" at the starting position.

Hey @Charon, was the AI really tuned down? If so, then there would be no need to give aliens bonus/advantages and I've read somewher that under some settings they have (at least) some HP bonus. But does that mean that on the hardest difficulty setting, aliens have no bonus/advantage whatsoever? That'd be quite impressive...

FGV

35 minutes ago, krolyn said:

 

Hey @Charon, was the AI really tuned down? If so, then there would be no need to give aliens bonus/advantages and I've read somewher that under some settings they have (at least) some HP bonus. But does that mean that on the hardest difficulty setting, aliens have no bonus/advantage whatsoever? That'd be quite impressive...

FGV

No, aliens do get bonuses the hp/accuracy/increased stats on higher difficulties like in any other game to give the illusion of an increase in difficulty, but that wasnt my point.

Let me give you an example:

The downtuning was in "teamwork" and "swarm intelligence" rather than it stats gain.

At least thats what i think, i could be wrong. I dont have that much insight into the development of X1.

@krolyn X-Division unlocks a lot of this potential again, where aliens, melee and ranged are effectively working together to destroy you in the most efficient manner possible, thats why some people say its hard.

Most X-Com games revolve around that individualistic alien overpowered units and weak humans who have to work "intelligently" in a  team to overcome the odds. In X-Division they are overpowered AND work together as good as they can. But this concept wasnt received well during X1 development, because people thought this wasnt fun, thuse the downtuning.

Hummm, ok.... but then you are saying aliens with 100% AI are quite effective at hunting down the soldiers EVEN without all those bonuses to HP/accuracy/...!?!? Cause then, why downtune the AI? Why not make the several difficulty levels dependent solely on AI efficiency?

PS - nice drawings...

23 minutes ago, krolyn said:

Hummm, ok.... but then you are saying aliens with 100% AI are quite effective at hunting down the soldiers EVEN without all those bonuses to HP/accuracy/...!?!? Cause then, why downtune the AI? Why not make the several difficulty levels dependent solely on AI efficiency?

Because people didnt like to be outsmarted by an AI, they wanted to win, easy and straightforward.

EDIT: Challenge - yes, but only in moderation and only as big as the average player is smart enough to handle it.

On 3/12/2017 at 10:12 PM, Charon said:

Because people didnt like to be outsmarted by an AI, they wanted to win, easy and straightforward.

EDIT: Challenge - yes, but only in moderation and only as big as the average player is smart enough to handle it.

Yes, but tweaking down the AI will benefit the player, while all those random bonuses benefit the AI, no!?!? So, why not just tweak one of them for each difficulty level.

Oh well, I'm just wondering cause on all these games I always had the feeling that the AI was not very good and the only way to balance it out was to give it bonuses on all kinds of things. And I'd REALLY like to play against an AI with no weird bonuses or penalties.

1 minute ago, krolyn said:

 

Yes, but tweaking down the AI will benefit the player, while all those random bonuses benefit the AI, no!?!? So, why not just tweak one of them for each difficulty level.

Oh well, I'm just wondering cause on all these games I always had the feeling that the AI was not very good and the only way to balance it out was to give it bonuses on all kinds of things. And I'd REALLY like to play against an AI with no weird bonuses or penalties.

play X-Division.

And no, making an individual AI for every difficulty aint gonna happen, that would be like troubleshooting 4 different games.

Yeah, I tried X-Division but I felt it too heavily moded for me. Is AI on any particular files? Maybe I can get those from X-Division and put them on another mod...