Some questions about hardcoding (Over water+Geoscape)

Hi!

Some grandiose ideas I believe.

1. Water Missions:

- Is it possible to add in, in the code somehow, water missions? Downing an aircraft over water, triggering an underwater mission?

2. Geoscape

- Is it possible for the Geoscape to evolve? Let's say I manage to push back the alien forces and win the game, but does the game have to end there? Can I take the battle to... our solar system? (Fight in space and use planets as bases)

Not saying it would be an easy task in any way, or that I have the skill to do it, I am simply curious if it is possible.

I had a dream about a special base defense mission being generated when the base turrets successfully shoot down an alien assault force, and spent a few hours trying to find the scripts that govern that, but I haven't found any way to make the game consider other things than base assault, base defense, and crash site missions.

I think there's quite some flexibility, though most of the flexibility I've seen is with respect to graphics, maps within current categories, and stats, Sadly, only some of the .xml files are actually commented, and none of the .lua files are, so I'm guessing it'll be up to leeter haxors than I to figure out how to implement this stuff.

There aren't any sprites for squaddies in wetsuits, nor are there sprites for underwater themed missions. In fact, you'd need whole new branches of the Xenopedia to account for underwater missions, which would be incompatible with the existing assets. Underwater missions in the existing game would be a la Terror from the Deep. Not underwater really, more a "fishtank" where the whole level is filled with water and your troopers are stuck at the bottom.

Well, the question asks about the possibility, and when it comes to possibility, sprite availability is a non-issue. Besides, I'd say Sentinel-equipped soldiers would qualify for TFTD-style swimming, so you'd only really need to put a blue overlay on the existing desert tileset and possibly change the music track to get the basic TFTD experience.

You're an experienced modder, though, so maybe you know where in the code one would go to cause the game to pick up on an aquatic mask image in assets/earth/continentmasks, or, more generally, where the code that governs which pool a map is chosen from is?

I'm that experienced! (I wish zzz was still here). But as far as I know, you'd have to reverse-engineer the .exe if you wanted to do that. And I believe that water is a special-case mask, a black hole where none dare return.

Having said that, it might be possible to convince the .exe that the water mask is a new continent.

At the moment, my only idea is to straight-up replace the Desert tile set with an Aquatic tile set, merge the current Desert and Middle-Eastern tile sets, and draw the old Deserts onto water in the tile set mask. Then, edit "Desert" to "Aquatic" in strings.xml.

I'm not sure the game still cares about those tile set masks, though. I had a base in Cuba and never saw any Arctic missions there.

There aren't any sprites for squaddies in wetsuits, nor are there sprites for underwater themed missions. In fact, you'd need whole new branches of the Xenopedia to account for underwater missions, which would be incompatible with the existing assets. Underwater missions in the existing game would be a la Terror from the Deep. Not underwater really, more a "fishtank" where the whole level is filled with water and your troopers are stuck at the bottom.

Not underwater really, more a "fishtank" where the whole level is filled with water and your troopers are stuck at the bottom.

Would it be possible to make the entire underwater area to be multi-leveled like some of the buildings? Could each block be a type of invisible staircase that does not effect bullet trajectories? If so, then at least one problem could be solved.

There is a mask that tells the game where the "water" is. If you update that so it is all shaded, the game will consider all the water to be land. Then you can paint the area on the tileset mask in the desert colour and any missions over "water" will use that tileset.

There is a mask that tells the game where the "water" is. If you update that so it is all shaded, the game will consider all the water to be land. Then you can paint the area on the tileset mask in the desert colour and any missions over "water" will use that tileset.

I figured as much.

Which mask is that, though? In /assets/earth/continentmasks filling in tilesetmask1 and tilesetmask2 I successfully made every land-based mission industrial, but water is still considered water - at least, for the purposes of crashing UFOs, event generation, and base placement.

Maybe fill in the sea in one of the region masks too?